Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury

Paradoxes of the Popular

Crowd Politics in Bangladesh

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

The author presents an anthropological study of protest and popular sovereignty in Bangladesh.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 264
• Erscheinungstermin: 27. August 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 226mm x 152mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 431g
• ISBN-13: 9781503609471
• ISBN-10: 1503609472
• Artikelnr.: 53535390

Autorenporträt

Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
This chapter introduces the idea of "paradox" to make sense of the
contingencies that make up Bangladesh's political modernity as well as the
constitutive paradoxes of popular sovereignty. I introduce the Bangla term
janata as a vernacular iteration of the concept of the crowd of social and
political theory. Drawing on literary representations and scholarly work,
the chapter shows why the crowd is the ethnographic object and analytical
locus of the book. It sets the theoretical and conceptual stage for
locating in the crowd the energy, agency, and indeterminacy of mass
politics.
1Picture-Thinking
chapter abstract
In chapter 1, I analyze a set of public texts in circulation during a state
of emergency-letters published in newspapers, a national identification
card, a controversial photograph. Doing so has two ends: First, the chapter
expands on the impasse that South Asian democracies often experience when
confronting the relationship between sovereignty and citizenship. In this
logic, a repressive and undemocratic governmental apparatus is blamed for
the underdeveloped political rationality of its citizens. For the same
reason, sovereignty as domination is justified as a way to protect the
masses from their own nature. Second, the chapter expounds on the presumed
distinctions between a reading public versus unruly crowds. The letters
written by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Prize-winning "guru of micro credit,"
remind us how the distinction between the stranger/citizen and an embodied
crowd was mobilized at this time so as to usher in a novel era in politics.
2Seeing Like a Crowd
chapter abstract
Against the backdrop of the transparency fetish of the emergency,
Phulbari's protest culture presents an alternative politics of seeing-what
I describe as "seeing like a crowd." By identifying the significance of
money in aesthetic productions and political acts, I show how the
preoccupation with money differed from the nationwide drive against
corruption. The chapter focuses first on a painting by a Phulbari artist. I
argue that its message contrasts with the viciously apolitical desire for
efficiency and good governance in a globally recognized language of
neoliberal transparency. I then present the recollections of a socially
marginalized woman who became the face of grassroots mobilization. I
situate the looting and burning of money by the crowds within the larger
context of the national political crisis. These popular strategies were a
form of a transparency-making enterprise, if only with different political
effect than the anticorruption agenda of the state.
3Accidental Politics
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 is an ethnographic account of the accidental, the contingent, and
the imperceptible nature of crowd politics. To understand the political
possibilities of accidents and to assess their ethnographic significance,
in this chapter I approach accidents both literally and conceptually. Can
accidents be political? What kinds of politics take shape in the wake of an
accident? And what are the ethico-political possibilities that are made
available, or are foreclosed, within various discourses of the accidental?
Anthropological perspectives on accidents, I argue in this chapter, rescue
the concept from its usual modernist and technicist moorings while opening
up spaces of radical contingencies that are enframed in local logics of
culture and politics.
4Crowds and Collaborators
chapter abstract
Collaboration, in the sense of working for the enemy and benefiting from
it, has given rise to a particular kind of crowd politics. From the vantage
point of most protesters, a collaborator (dalal) was a figure that
straddled the boundaries of the community and whatever stood beyond it. A
dalal was by definition a local, though his ties to the foreign were
exposed through suspicion, gossip, jokes, and assaults. Chapter 4 examines
this culture of accusation of collaboration in order to illuminate the
entangled effects of aggressive resource extraction, collective
sovereignty, and popular and state-initiated attempts at settling the score
with the nation's past. Following Walter Benjamin's writing on the
"intriguer" and scholarly interest in the "neighbor," I submit that the
dalal is a third type that disturbs the duality of friend and enemy. This
ambivalence produces a culture of doubt and suspicion that demands
certainty, often through violence.
5The Body of the Crowd
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 is located in post-emergency Bangladesh. Its primary sites are
spaces of politics and activism that are both emergent and historically
poignant. I explore a particular fascination with the body and its
relationship to crowd politics in the context of protests against the
International Crimes Tribunal. The chapter comments on the proliferation of
technologies that has impacted social and political communication.
Increased surveillance in public spaces indicates more rigorous efforts to
control spaces and bodies, illustrated by two events I analyze: an exposé
of public sexual harassment and a viral video of a public lynching. On the
one hand, I argue, secular and religious crowds, in their desires to be
seen and heard, often end up mirroring each other. On the other hand,
individual social media users often act collectively, performing the excess
and volatility associated with crowds.
Conclusion
chapter abstract
In August 2017, the Supreme Court's Appellate Division released the text of
a verdict that scrapped the sixteenth constitutional amendment. Passed in
2014, the amendment gave Parliament the power to remove Supreme Court
judges for misconduct or incapacity. After it went public, Chief Justice
Surendra Kumar Sinha faced the wrath of politicians and party loyalists.
"No nation, no country is made of or by one person," Sinha wrote in a
judgment partly aimed at salvaging the collectivity that played a formative
role in achieving national independence. This single line was excerpted and
disparate meanings were tagged onto it in order to cast Sinha as disloyal.
The fact that his relatively straightforward commitment to a normative
assumption of liberal democracy was enough to cost him his job reveals a
heightened role of paranoia in Bangladeshi politics. Indeed, it has raised
anew the paradoxes of popular sovereignty and political representation in
Bangladesh.