This paper contributes to a growing scholarship examining the ways in which dispossession in neoliberal India is reinforcing and reconfiguring agrarian social hierarchies. Existing studies have focussed on the differential successes of villagers in Special Economic Zone (SEZ)-generated real estate markets, incorporation of land losers into stratified labour markets and the caste-based politics of dispossession. Few studies, however, have systematically explored the long-term implications of state-orchestrated dispossession on agrarian credit and debt relations. Based on longterm fieldwork on a village partially expropriated for a SEZ in the South Indian state of Telangana, this study shows how dispossession has led to a sharp rise of overindebtedness within the land losing population. Dispossession deprived villagers of land and livestock; low compensation was inadequate to obtain replacement assets; and labour inside the SEZ was insufficient to ensure
Press. 2019. 272 pp. £70 (hb); £29 (pb). ISBN: 9780520300637 Zlolniski's book analyses the ecological, social and human consequences of export agriculture in the San Quintin Valley of the Mexican state of Baja California. Based on 10 years of ethnographic fieldwork, he examines the impacts of transnational agricultural production on growers and farmworkers, in particular, how the production regime of export agriculture has externalized many of the major ecological, labour and social costs onto indigenous workers and their families in San Quintin. The book, organized as seven chapters, offers rich ethnographic insights and is well-written and engaging throughout. The author contributes to a range of debates, in particular, the relations of contract farming, the political ecology of industrial agriculture and the production and labour dynamics of contemporary agro-export production. For readers of the journal, however, the book's major theoretical contribution lies in its analysis of how the settlement of (previously migrant) workers at the site of production shapes processes of class formation and labour resistance. Moving beyond Scott's (1985) formulation of everyday forms of resistance, Zlolniski
A recent trend has confounded observers of India's political system. Dalits—a population that has historically been deprived of vital resources and socially ostracized by upper-caste Hindus—have increasingly given their vote to the Hindu nationalist movement led by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP). Why have some members of India's most marginalized caste come to support a party that has preserved caste hierarchies and catered to the socially dominant sections of society? This article explores this question through the case of Kerala, where Dalit support for the BJP is additionally perplexing given the state's history of left-led governments that have implemented far-reaching redistributive reforms that greatly benefited Dalits. Nevertheless, in recent years the Hindu nationalists have made significant inroads among Kerala's Dalit population. Drawing on two hundred interviews and eight months of ethnography, this article identifies two major factors driving Dalits’ defection to the BJP. The first is linked to the communist parties' (CPs’) agricultural land redistribution program which, despite being the most ambitious of its kind in modern India, excluded the majority of Dalits and reinscribed caste hierarchies. The second factor is the cultural discrimination Dalits face while working in the CPs, including being grossly underrepresented in the party leadership. The BJP exploits these grievances by providing representation to Dalit cadres who are embedded in strategic majority-Dalit neighborhoods. These cadres win popular support through welfare brokering and also by constructing a new narrative that portrays the CPs as casteist and the BJP as a more socially just alternative for Kerala's Dalits. This article makes sense of these findings by drawing on Nancy Fraser's concept of bivalent oppression to advance a novel Gramscian theory of “bivalent hegemony.”
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.