A Wavering Wager “Modern India” has always been a gambit. Not because modernity in this part of the world remains hobbled by obdurate traditions, as some would have it, but because such a project has to navigate logistical as well … Continue reading “Introduction: National Life in the Wake of the Pandemic”
“How dare you?” These are almost the last words my friend Surekha said to me, in a text message. I had LOL’d. She said, “I’ll see you soon dude.” She had just moved to Bombay, from Delhi. That was on … Continue reading “How Dare You?”
When the coronavirus pandemic hit India around March 2020, it began a great urban unravelling. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in characteristic style, imposed a draconian nation-wide lockdown at four hours’ notice on the evening of March 24th. With the announcement, … Continue reading “The Coronavirus and the Great Indian Unravelling”
One of the indirect impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic across the world was the sudden emergence of clean air. The India Gate photographs featuring air sans pollution was a reminder of its ferocious twin—air transformed by industrial metabolism, heavy with … Continue reading “In Search of Om: Speculations on India’s Epidemic Intensities”
Signal and Noise, or the Balcony Scene 5 p.m. on March 22, 2020. The clamor starts near the end of a one-day “Janata Curfew” (People’s Curfew) declared across India by the central government a few days prior to what would … Continue reading “Superimposition: App-Based Contact Tracing in the Indian Pandemic and Its Unexpected Intimacies”
Civil solidarity, a necessary precondition for democratic systems, remains a governing mode for political formations seeking a hegemonic position within democracies. Civil solidarity is marked by claims to an inclusive, normative-universal idea of “we-ness.” As cultural sociologist Jeffrey C. Alexander … Continue reading “Covid and Civil Solidarity”
Image: Leela Venugopal, We All Wait for the Rain Drip, drip, drip. This is life now. The eerie stillness. The bottomless sorrow. The paralyzing numbness. The quiet acceptance. Time stills, life slows. This is how it is playing out. … Continue reading “The Memory Keepers”
Women across the world have borne the brunt of the pandemic. Care responsibilities, which now include teaching children, top off the long-standing problem of unpaid labor such as housework. During the lockdown, women have also been more vulnerable to domestic … Continue reading “The Art of Women’s Struggles Is the Art of Building Community and Making Alternative History”
In a sea of colorful placards, the blanket-stitched banners of Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women seem comforting. It personally reminds me of what Alexandra Kollontai calls “our grandmother’s time”–what family looked like before capitalism: “The woman did everything that … Continue reading “Defend Peasant Women: Stitching to Resist”
Writing—through poetry, essays, and stories—has become a medium for Lumad students to remember their communities: the mountains and rivers, their farms, the vast lands of their ancestral domains that they could have inherited and enriched had militarization stopped. As … Continue reading “Writing to Resist, Writing to Remember: Lumad Youths’ Narratives in the Time of Duterte”
With the violence of the patriarchy becoming more prominent and exacerbating worsening socioeconomic conditions around COVID-19, circumventions and confrontations have been necessary as strategies for survival. Art, with its tradition of disestablishing flawed systems and infrastructure as well as exposing … Continue reading “Music as Counterviolence in the Time of Duterte and COVID-19”
Before community lockdowns were enforced in the Philippines in March 2020, Gantala Press, a feminist small press and literary collective, had plans to participate in an exhibition at the Cultural Center of the Philippines Library that was to publicly launch … Continue reading “Sewing Dissent: Making Cloth Books During COVID-19”
The urban poor women’s gardens at Pandi and San Roque and the three-decade land struggle of the farmers at Lupang Ramos transcend “arts and crafts.” Their organized resistance, in the form of gardening, belongs to a long-running struggle that defies … Continue reading “Urban and Rural Women at the Forefront of Reclaiming Their Land”
Women account for 39 percent of employment worldwide but constitute 54 percent of job losses during the pandemic (as McKinsey and Company reports). In the US, this phenomenon has been termed she-cession. The same thing is arguably happening in the … Continue reading “The Pandemic and the (Non)Working Filipina”
The day before Mother’s Day, the Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women launched the #DefendPeasantWomen campaign, responding to intensifying state-inflicted violence against peasant women in the Philippines. The campaign highlights rampant human rights violations suffered by peasant women community organizers … Continue reading “On Stitching Land and Peasant Women: An Interview with Yllang Montenegro”
