Event details

Recently, we have seen renewed efforts to “decolonize.” From the toppling of statues to the revision of disciplinary canons, much of this effort has focused on overturning colonial residues in our cultural and epistemological landscapes. This talk offers a radically different vision of decolonization — one driven not by bureaucrats, professors or social media activists, but by subaltern actors, a vision that was at once global and local, dedicated equally to dismantling the less visible structures of political economy as it was to fighting epistemic battles. Gyan Prakash, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, will focus on how landless peasants in Pakistan — participating in a global communist movement stretching from Oakland to Saigon, from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean — reinvented revolutionary theory in their struggles against imperialist political economies. Joining a Mao-inspired party in the 1970s, these peasants not only occupied colonially-established estates, but also acquired a meta-recognition that “theory” — now an emic category — was essential to global revolution. I conceptualize these subaltern experiments in theory-making as trench theory, with the trench metaphor flagging a mode of subterranean theorizing born from the exigencies of political combat. Ultimately, this talk shows how subaltern actors drew on ideas spanning intellectual traditions, borders, and oceans to generate trench concepts aimed at heralding nothing short of a worldly, even other-worldly, liberation.