Land Rights and Women’s Rights in Morocco

Over the last two decades, women leaders known as sulāliyāt from various parts of rural and semiurban Morocco, have been in the vanguard of local contestations over the privatization of communally held land. The stand taken by these rural women against neoliberal privatization policies sometimes puts them in direct confrontation with urban women reformers, whose claims in favor of a universal feminism reveal a value system outside local customary understandings of morality, gender, and land. This article aims to account for the emerging female leadership of the sulāliyāt that operates outside urban centers, but also beyond the universalist language of feminism related to abstract notions of female autonomy and gender equality. Deeply rooted in socioeconomic issues, including land expropriation and the displacement of local peasant populations in the name of reform, development, and a public common good, sulāliyāt tie gender dynamics to the intersectional structural inequalities produced and reproduced by land privatization and by the alliance between the open-market economy and patriarchal political authoritarianism. This article explores the subaltern agency of the sulāliyāt through an interdisciplinary examination of their leadership. The sulāliyāt challenge to official narratives of development and universalist human rights signals their capacity to formulate alternative local meanings of land ownership.

Political Opinion Formation as Epistemic Practice: The Hashtag Assemblage of #metwo

The article contributes to the literature on the political use of hashtags. We argue that hashtag assemblages could be understood in the tradition of representing public opinion through datafication in the context of democratic politics. While traditional data-based epistemic practices like polls lead to the ‘passivation’ of citizens, in the digital constellation this tendency is currently challenged. In media like Twitter, hashtags serve as a technical operator to order the discursive fabrication of diverse publicly articulated opinions that manifest in the assemblage of tweets, algorithms and criticisms. We conceptualize such a critical public as an epistemic sensorium for dislocations based on the expression of experienced social imbalances and its political amplification. On the level of opinion formation, this constitutes a process of democratization, allowing for the expression of diverse opinions and issues even under singular hashtags. Despite this diversity, we see a strong tendency of publicly relevant actors such as news outlets to represent digital forms of opinion expression as unified movements. We argue that this tendency can partly be explained by the affordances of networked media, relating the process of objectification to the network position of the observer. We make this argument empirically plausible by applying methods of network analysis and topic modelling to a dataset of 196,987 tweets sampled via the hashtag #metwo that emerged in the German Twittersphere in the summer of 2018 and united a discourse concerned with racism and identity. In light of this data, we not only demonstrate the hashtag assemblage’s heterogeneity and potential for subaltern agency; we also make visible how hashtag assemblages as epistemic practices are inherently dynamic, distinguishing it from opinion polling through the limited observational capacities and active participation of the actors representing its claims within the hybrid media system.

Reorienting Film History Spatially

This chapter applies Singapore’s postcolonial spatial epistemology to rethink local film historiography, national identity, and film style. First, the framework bridges Singapore’s bifurcated film history, namely its “golden age” of the 50s and 60s, and the post-90s production revival. Second, in mulling the relationship that bodies have with the inhabited environment, it highlights the oeuvre of documentarian Tan Pin Pin, and finds a spatially attuned artist who fashions affective poetics of ambivalence, uncertainty, and hiraeth. A subsequent examination of unintended ironies created by “new wave” films that appropriate the language of alienation popularized by Western art cinemas, discovers a postcolonial style less reliant on tropes such as mimicry, cultural authenticity, and subaltern agency. These films conscript Deleuzean time-images and “any-space-whatevers” into a postcolonial paradox, in which new wave-inspired films try unsuccessfully to wrench individuals from the inextricable landscape.

Postcolonial sociology as a remedy for global diffusion theory

The dominant theoretical approaches that aim to explain the origins and subsequent global diffusion of modern norms, practices, and institutions have reached an impasse. World polity theory and ‘coercion’ perspectives describe a process in which norms originate in the Global North and spread to the rest of the world. For the former, diffusion occurs via the willful imitation of shared values; for the latter, it occurs due to economic/political pressure and/or force. However, both approaches are unable to account for norms that emerge in the Global South and get adopted globally. This article argues that postcolonial sociology can help overcome the common pitfalls of the existing theories and provide a theoretical framework for analyzing global diffusion through its analytical focus on subaltern agency, ‘relationalism,’ and colonial contours of power. The utility of postcolonial sociology is demonstrated using archival data and an historical analysis of the 1938 Trade Disputes (Arbitration and Inquiry) Ordinance, which emerged in Trinidad and Tobago and was subsequently adopted by a number of colonies across the British empire.

Resisting subalternity: Palestinian mimicry and passing in the Israeli cultural industries

This article explores the complexity of minority creative workers in the media industry. It challenges the common notion in the literature that minority creative workers are fully submissive to the dominant power structure and examines whether such workers could still be conceived as active agents by resisting submission and marginalization even when they cannot influence their own representation in hegemonic media texts. To answer this question, it explores the performances of minority creative workers in a hegemonic cultural industry. To determine whether one can speak of subaltern agency and, if possible, examine how it manifests itself in reality, it addresses the daily performances of Palestinian creative workers during the production of the second season of the Israeli television series, Fauda. Observations conducted during production demonstrate that since in such contexts minority creative workers cannot avoid being projected in negative roles in the media text, they adopt creative subversive practices of passing and transgressive mimicry, resisting full compliance with the production, without endangering their own position. By doing so, the article contributes not only to the emerging field of creative entrepreneurship in cultural production, but also enables determination of common practices of creative subversion in the cultural industries.

Introduction: Margins and the State—Caste, ‘Tribe’ and Criminality in South Asia

This introduction outlines some of the key historiographical debates concerning caste, ‘tribe’ and criminality, and their relationship to the modern state, in South Asia. Although these social categories have long, complex and often inter-related histories rooted in indigenous and precolonial ideas and institutions, they emerged most forcefully as categories of governance in the legal-political system of the colonial and postcolonial states. These categories remained highly unstable, however. There was a clear disjuncture between forms of ‘colonial’ knowledge which structured legal categorization and everyday negotiations and contestations of the same. Using the example of India’s so-called ‘criminal tribes’ - the 200 or so communities declared as criminals ‘by birth’ under the Criminal Tribes Act (1871) during the colonial regime - we consider broader debates over the governing of ‘colonial’ categories, and subaltern agency and resistance in their making, as a way of interrogating the complex relationship between the ‘margins’ and the state.

Politics of neutrality: Urban knowledge practices and everyday formalisation in Karachi’s waterscape

Formalisation in cities is commonly associated with top-down processes like slum demolition, land titling and economic regulation. By contrast, this article explores processes of everyday formalisation by considering how locally grounded understandings of formality and informality are reproduced. It thus theorises everyday formalisation as a process distinct from state-led formalisation in terms of both the scale (local) and mechanisms (everyday) through which formal/informal dichotomisation occurs. To explore the effects of such everyday formalisation, this article draws on a case study of water access in a low-income settlement of Karachi, Pakistan. Turning attention to everyday practices of water access in the settlement, this article highlights how residents and water board officials understand and enact distinctions between formality and informality through daily knowledge practices and meanings of neutrality. By focusing on everyday formalisation, this article makes two wider contributions to urban theory. First, it demonstrates that urban informality gives rise to diverse lived experiences, not all of which may be characterised as examples of subaltern agency. Secondly, it demonstrates that urban learning and local knowledge generation can be conceptualised not only as tools for urban ‘navigation’, but as distinctive practices that reproduce urban space according to hegemonic categories like formal and informal.