New Subaltern Politics Reconceptualizing Hegemony and Resistance in Contemporary India

New Subaltern Politics presents a critical dialogue between the conceptual and analytical legacies of Subaltern Studies and the evolving forms of hegemony and resistance in contemporary India. From the struggles of the urban poor in Gujarat to the activism of sexual subalterns in eastern India and the mobilization of artisanal fishing communities in Tamil Nadu, the essays in this volume cover a diverse range of ongoing struggles against dispossession, disenfranchisement, and stigma that are unfolding in neoliberal India. The volume analyses the forms of collective agency that subaltern groups develop to negotiate with the workings of power from above. Foregrounding the imaginative, affective, and secular dimensions of subaltern agency, New Subaltern Politics interrogates the current relevance of Gramscian concepts of hegemony, subalternity, and the integral state in the contemporary Indian context. Bringing together path-breaking methodological and conceptual interventions in the study of subaltern politics, this volume will be invaluable to all those engaged as academics or as activists?in the struggle against unjust societies and unequal developmental trajectories.

Alf Gunvald Nilsen teaches at the Department of Sociology, University of Bergen, Norway. Srila Roy teaches at the Department of Sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.