Contested Indigeneities: “Adivasi” Politics Historically and in Contemporary Times

This article focuses on the development and transformations of adivasi political identity and its articulations with indigenous consciousness in India since the advent of colonial capitalism. The apogee of adivasi politics and the “politics of indigeneity” since the 1970s has coincided with the networking among indigenous groups within the United Nations. The history of such politics will be traced in order to illustrate the forms in which social identities appear over a long historical process. In other words, the changing character of the antagonistic contradictions between the hegemon and different sections of the oppressed will be illustrated, including the articulation of “indigeneity” and “ adivasi” consciousness. Methodologically, the article promotes a dialectical interpretation of the phenomenon and counters a metaphysical analysis of identity politics.

Land and the US Agrarian South

This review essay summarizes and synthesizes three books on Black and Indigenous agrarian struggles in the modern-day territories of the USA. It discusses how they recount the centrality of land, national liberation, self-reliant development, food sovereignty and sustainable forms of agriculture and land management to Black and Indigenous radical struggle. It then suggests parallels and divergences between those struggles and those in the Third World’s agrarian south. It focusses on the anti-systemic dimensions of national liberation struggles in the core, especially those carried out historically by Black and Indigenous movements, and details how those movements historically looked out beyond the US landmass for solidarity and to build internationalist fronts. Finally, it reflects on their role in destabilizing settler-capitalism in the USA.

Land and Contestations over Autochthony and Local Citizenship in Agrarian Ghana

This article examines the reimagination of communities in an industrial cassava frontier of Ghana in the wake of a contested land grab supported by state and community institutions. Qualitative and survey data were used to construct the existing social relations in the communities through the lens of earlier processes of agrarian change that have transformed the social base of the communities. It is argued that the expansion of capitalist production systems into agrarian areas results in local citizenship contestations centered on land, and redefinition and reclassification of people and their access to land. The multiple claims and contestations that arose from the land grab and the political reactions from below are highlighted. It is further argued that differentiated dispossession and class differences determine the strategies used by affected people. While some farmers demonstrated agency by holding on to a “little pie” to enjoy greater community social cohesion, others, drawing from their local citizenship status, although contested, fought the land grab.

Agrarian Studies and the Caste Conundrum

The article calls for a recognition of caste as a structuring reality of agrarian life in South Asia. Such a recognition may also have a larger and comparative bearing beyond India. The article also argues for a simultaneous recognition of the serious problems with the almost universally accepted “idealistic” conceptualizations of caste. Further, approaching caste as an aspect of land relations and the realities of economic processes would significantly enhance our understanding of its obvious materiality, which makes it persist in contemporary times. A widespread “blindness” towards caste in the agrarian studies and, likewise, the imaginations of caste primarily as a “religious” phenomenon have broader academic and political implications. Bringing them together would thus require a recognition and opening-up of this academic conundrum. A critical engagement with the disciplinary framings of agrarian studies and, perhaps more importantly, of caste studies is thus called for.

Book review: Vikas Bajpai and Anoop Saraya (2018). Food Security in India: Myth and Reality

Vikas Bajpai and Anoop Saraya (2018). Food Security in India: Myth and Reality, New Delhi: Aakar Books. ISBN 9350025132 (Hardback), 456 pp., ₹1295.

Heterogeneity and Instability: Theoretical–Methodological Outcomes of Three Investigations on Land and Agrarian Movements and the State

The article presents a theoretical–methodological proposal to research movements and its connections based on the associations they establish. The first investigation focuses on the transformations of the South African Landless People’s Movement, the second on interactions between Brazilian rural movements and the National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, the third focuses on the transnational ties of the Brazilian National Confederation of Agricultural Workers. We produce an ontological definition of movements and the state as collectives whose existence is defined by continuous assemblages of heterogeneous and unstable elements. Those collectives are not enclosed analytical units, but contingent and contextual. Methodologically, we suggest the observation of the processes in the long term to grasp the continuous constructions of those collectives, even before they reach public expression. Controversies are analytical categories for understanding which elements allow things to take the course we analyze.

Joan Robinson on Environment and Ecology

The last works of Joan Robinson showed increasing preoccupation with ecological and environmental issues. Some of these preoccupations were already present in some of her main earlier works, but as she approached old age, the discussion of these questions became more frequent, as well as of other issues such as the arms race and the nuclear threat to the human race. However, Robinson had not dealt with ecological and environmental questions by means of a systematic approach. This article evaluates Robinson’s views on ecology and environment not only because this is a gap in the literature on her work, but mainly because some of Robinson’s insights on these questions are yet to be fully developed. Therefore, this article mixes the history of economic thought with political economy, Robinson’s perspectives being summarized and then analyzed in light of the ecological critique as established by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. The article shows that despite the fact that Robinson could have developed more profoundly the logical consequences of some of her core contributions to economic theory to a broader ecological critique, many of her theoretical perspectives overlap with Georgescu-Roegen’s ecological economics, being able to contribute to a heterodox critique of the neoclassical approach.

Caribbean Economic Thought: Advances, Retreat, Current Challenges

The reflections provided in this article were presented in the 4th Sam Moyo Memorial Lecture, delivered at the SMAIAS/ASN Summer School in January 2021. The article focuses on the critical tradition of economic knowledge and thought about the socio-economic development of the Caribbean, which began in the last decades of the colonial era. The advances made through the early Independence period were concerned with the problems of individual countries and the region as a whole. The objective was to improve the material economic welfare of the broad masses of Caribbean people while generating the requisite economic growth to sustain an improvement in the general conditions of life. From the thought of W. Arthur Lewis to the Plantation Economy theorists and subsequent critiques, a rich critical tradition emerged, only to be displaced by the onset of the debt crisis and neoliberalism. This article reviews the main elements of this critical tradition, its advances, and retreats, as well as the new challenges presented to it today.

Book review: Praveen Jha, Avinash Kumar, and Yamini Mishra (Eds.) (2020). Labouring Women: Issues and Challenges in Contemporary India

Praveen Jha, Avinash Kumar, and Yamini Mishra (Eds.) (2020). Labouring Women: Issues and Challenges in Contemporary India. Hyderabad: Orient BlackSwan. ISBN 9789390122073, 343 pp., ₹775