The Delhi Historical Materialism Conference Programme (New Cultures of the Left, Convention Centre, JNU, 3-5 April

2013)
Day 1, 3rd April, 2013 A 8.45 9.30 am Land, Forest Rights & the Care Economy Chair: Meera Velayudhan Chair: Mary John Sirisha Naidu, The forest question & social reproduction; 9. 30 am 11.15 am Lyn Ossome, Womens land rights and the (im)possibilities of gender justice within capitalism; Salimah Valiani, Examining 3 instances of the rise & fall of worker empowerment in the caring sector, 1950 2000 Chair: Mukul Mangalik Dilip Simeon, Understanding Indian fascism; Subhash Gatade, Communal fascism in action; Jairus Banaji, Arthur Rosenbergs essay Fascism as a Mass Movement and its relevance to us in India Trina Banerjee, Utpal Dutt: labour, revolutionary organization and the question of love; Albeena Shakil, Honour killings in contemporary rural and urban India; Rohini Raman, Resisting violence against choice marriages: Will it establish an alternate family in India? Marxist Philosophy: ontology, dialectics, materialism Chair: Alberto Toscano Giovanni Zanotti, Dialectics, materialism and objectivity: On Adornos Marxism; Rory Dufficy, It Is Not: Guy Debord & the materialist avant-garde; Maria Escurra & Mario Duayer, Lukacs ontology & the restoration of the ontological critique in Marx Ten Years After the Genocide: Lessons from Gujarat (Session organised by Communalism Combat) Chair: Manoj Mitta Teesta Setalvad Harsh Mander Chitra Joshi, Charting the terrain: New frontiers of labour history in India; Dilip Simeon, Politics in the mirror of labour history; Prabhu Mohapatra, The centre and the margin: The shifting focus of labour history Lunch Break B Registration Authoritarian Politics in South Asia, 1st panel: The Question of Fascism Love and Oppression: Socialist/Feminist perspectives Concurrent Sessions C D

None

The Other Crisis: Capitalism as a Logic of Destruction Chair: Praful Bidwai John Neelsen, Systemic self-destruction: Late capitalisms war against man and nature; 11.30 am 1.15 pm Vidyadhar Date, Human mobility in a Marxist perspective: capitalism & the traffic jam; Ananth Aiyer, Water is life: Marx, nature and responses to the environmental crisis

Coffee Break Plebeian History/Labour History: Reframing Working Class Histories in India [Session organised by the Association of Indian Labour Historians (AILH)] Chair: Neeladri Bhattacharya

The National Question Revisited Chair: Subhash Gatade

Red & Green: An Integration of Perspectives? Chair: Praful Bidwai

Book Launch Vivek Chibbers Postcolonial Theory & the Specter of Capital Chair: Vijay Prashad Vivek Chibber; Achin Vanaik; Kamal Chenoy; Jairus Banaji

Radical Countercultures: Sufism, Queer Dissent, Music Chair: Brinda Bose Amen Jaffer, Subaltern Sufism; Tara Atluri, Marxisms a drag: Hijras, performance and embodied solidarities of dissent; Sumangala Damodaran, The Radical Impulse: Explorations between music & politics

Tanveer Fazal, Conflict resolution through Ethnic Homelands: Lessons from Bodoland; 2 pm 3.45 pm Nirmala Rajasingam, Revisiting national selfdetermination: Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka; Nagesh Rao, In defence of Azaadi: Kashmiri selfdetermination as a lever of Left renewal

Daniel Taghioff, Red & Green: An integration of perspectives; Pritam Singh, An Ecosocialist perspective on the global crisis; Ishay Landa, Prometheus Insulted: A re-examination of Red-Green politics

Tea Break New Perspectives on Marxian Theories of Crisis and Wages Chair: Gautam Mody Ajit Zacharias, Domestic labor, value of labor-power and poverty; Scott Carter, On Marxs theory of wages and the rehabilitation of the Cambridge-Marxist interpretation of the value of labor-power; Ignacio Perrotini, Towards a Marxian theory of the present crisis of finance capital; Communist Histories (A LeftWord Books Panel) Chair: Sudhanva Deshpande Vijay Prashad (discussant); Elisabeth Armstrong, Communist internationalism & the anti-imperialist womens movement in Asia; Suchetana Chattopadhyay, The myth of the outsider: colonial surveillance, racial stereotyping & early Communism in colonial Calcutta; Archana Prasad, Autobiographies of Communist-led struggles: Godavari Parulekar, Sundarayya and Abini Lahiris construction of agrarian struggles, 1940 1955 The Dynamics of Global Capitalism Today Chair: Jayati Ghosh Tom Bramble, China, the US and Rising Imperialist Competition in the Asia-Pacific Region; Thomas Barnes, Can uneven and combined development explain global capitalism?; Wendy Matsumura, Post-war agrarian land reform, the symbolic emperor system and the case of Okinawa Gilbert Achcar, The dialectics of Arab & Palestinian collective consciousness; Ahilan Kadirgamar, Rethinking the National Question in Sri Lanka; Satya Sivaraman, Reimagining the nation-state in South Asia Nationalisms & the Nation State Chair: Nagesh Rao

4 pm 5.45 pm

6.15 pm 8.15 pm

Plenary
The Arab Uprising & its Aftermath Chair: Kamal Chenoy; Gilbert Achcar and Marieme Helie Lucas

Day 2, 4rd April, 2013 Urban and Rural Dispossession and the Struggle for Land Chair: Usman Javed; Chair: Gautam Mody Janaki Srinivasan, Resisting acquisition, redefining development: Land rights in contemporary India; P.K.Anand, Illegal land acquisitions & forced evictions in China Javed Iqbal, Accumulation by dispossession: from Bastar to the streets of Bombay Ezgi Pinar, What to see in the Tekel workers resistance?; N. Vasudevan, New unionism in India; Maruti Sukuzi Workers Union, The struggle for an independent union at the Maruti plants Working-Class Radicalism in the Contemporary World: Decline or Resurgence?

Concurrent Sessions Caste and Class: Identities and Struggle Chair: Gopal Guru Chair: Alex Callinicos Ravi Vaitheespara, Beyond identity politics: the Left and the politics of caste and language in South India; G. Chandraiah, The debate on caste-class praxis: Dalits and Communists in Andhra Pradesh Anand Teltumbde, The political economy of caste in contemporary times Within & Against the Global University Chair: Matteo Mandarini Stefano Harney, Liberal management education: just liberalism?; Amitabh Rai, Study as event, threshold & everyday practice; or why the global university has no time for study Martyn Hudson, Rethinking the Congress of the Peoples of the East; Soma Marik, Rosa Luxemburg and the party: past debates & present-day lessons; Dhruv Jain, From Althusser to Badiou: an aleatory account of the party Bolshevik Models: the Party and the International

9.30 am 11.15 am

Coffee Break The Crisis of the Indian Left Chair: Kamal Chenoy Kumar Rana, The Left in Bihar and Bengal; Ishwar Singh Dost, Rituals, rhetoric and obsessions of the Indian Left; Apoorvanand, Violence and revolution Postcolonial Theory Chair: A.K. Ramakrishnan Pranav Jani, The materialist turn: Marxism & new directions in postcolonial studies; Nivedita Majumdar, Whats left of postcolonial theory?; Aruna Krishnamurthy, Literary modernism in the era of the progressive writers The New Capitalist Reality of Adivasi Lives Chair: M.J.Pandey Jan Breman, The proletarianisation of adivasi identity; Uday Chandra, The state, popular resistance and democracy in the forests of Eastern India; Judith Whitehead, Fields, forests and property in Khandesh district, Maharashtra, 1800-1940 Alf Nilsen & Luisa Steur may skype into this session Lunch Break

11.15 am 1.15 pm

Whither Nepals Revolution? Capitalist Development or a New Movement against Capitalism? Chair: Manoranjan Mohanty 2 pm 3.45 pm Saroj Giri, The soft power of bourgeois democracy:Maoists in Nepal; Feyzi Ismail, A revolution half-made: Mainstreaming the Nepali Maoists; Shyam Shrestha, Nepali Revolution at a risky crossroad

Workers and Unions in India Today Chair: Gautam Mody Vaskar Nandy, Caste & ethnicity in tea plantations in Northeast India ; Saumyajit Bhattacharya, Is labour still a relevant category for praxis? Some contemporary discourses on work & labour in capitalism; Mohan Mani, The global supply chain & the labour process

What is to be undone? On Political Art in India Prasanta Chakravarty, Poesis and politics: the materialist sense of Binoy Majumdar; Moinak Biswas, The political film in crisis: Is there a future for the alternative?; Rajarshi Dasgupta, A taste for haunting: Two ways of looking at political art

Revolutionary Thinkers: Tagore, Ambedkar & Alvaro Cunhal Chair: Anand Teltumbde Himani Banerjee, Marx, Tagore & the problem of alienation; Joo Arsnio Nunes, The revolutionary thought of Alvaro Cunhal; M. J. K. Nachiket, Ethical aspects of the socialist project in India: Dr Ambedkars interpretation of Buddhas Dhamma State, Censorship and Sedition: Curbs on freedom of expression in India Chair: Geeta Seshu Seema Azad, Sedition & the right to dissent; Sukumar Muralidharan, The right to publish: Impunity, offence and the limitations of free speech; Shivam Vij, Internet censorship in India: We dont even know what we dont know

Tea Break Authoritarian Politics in South Asia, 2nd panel: Communal Notions of Nationhood Chair: Dilip Simeon Javed Anand, The Muslim Right in India and Pakistan; B. Skanthakumar, Authoritarianism and militarism in postwar Sri Lanka; Shapan Adnan, Communal notions of nationhood in Bangladesh The Making of Property: Techniques of Ownership/ Inscribing Property Brenna Bhandar, Property, race, repetition; Dwijen Rangnekar, Simplifying geographical indications: an audit account; Rajshree Ahuja Chandra, Rethinking ownership of biological property Crisis and Change in Higher Education: Universities under Current Capitalism [Panel Organized by New Socialist Initiative (NSI)] Chair: Naveen Chander Mukul Mangalik, Delhi University under siege, or why everything is at stake; Sanjay Kumar, Death of the university: The education industry under neoliberalism; Satish Deshpande, Credential, capital and the Indian university in the 21st century Plenary 6.15 pm 8.15 pm The Global Crisis, Austerity and Responses from the Left Chair: Himani Banerjee; Speakers: Lutz Achenbach; Praful Bidwai; Gautam Mody

4 pm 5.45 pm

Day 3, 5th April, 2013 Capitalism & Marginalised Forms of Labour Chair: Meena Gopal Chair: Kamal Chenoy Apoorva Kaiwar & Sujata Gothoskar, Who Says We Dont Work?; Meera Velayudhan, Craft labour and contending development dialogues in Kutch; 9.30 am 11.15 am Leena Kumarappan, Rights of migrant workers: Exploring illegal/irregular/undocumented migration Apoorvanand, Reading Urfascism in our times; Ishwar Singh Dost, New urban activism, civil society and the state in India; Hazare, Ramdev & the Anticorruption Mass Mobilisations

Concurrent Sessions A Revolutionary Marxist Party & Programme for the 21st Century: For a South Asian & Internationalist Perspective Chair: Soma Marik Sushovan Dhar, The Leninist party today; Kunal Chattopadhyay, The legacy of Popular Frontism & Indian Left politics; Rohit Prajapati, Environment & climate change as class struggle issues Neo-Liberalism, the Mass Media and the Reshaping of Urban Space Chair: Bharat Bhushan M. J. Pandey, The Indian mass media & capitalist control: notes on ownership, content & profitability; Asefeh Esfahlani, Farsi neoliberal media and the illusion of radicalism; Saayan Chattopadhyay, Lifestyle journalism and the economy of desire in India; Harini Narayanan, Sites of middle-class retreat: the vacuumsealed worlds of Indias new shopping malls Coffee Break

The Global Economic Crisis & the Response of the Global South Chair: Mritiunjoy Mohanty; Sushil Khanna, The global financial crisis: the view from the South; Stephanie Blankenburg, The global economic crisis & Latin America: different paths out of the crisis; Chirashree Dasgupta, The response of the Indian bourgeoisie to the global economic crisis

The Communist Intellectual: Lessons from some Italian Debates Chair: Jairus Banaji Alberto Toscano, In & against workerism: Franco Fortini on industry, poetics & the third world; Matteo Mandarini, Reflections on the place of the people in Italian workerism; Andreas Merkens, Who educates the educator? Counter-hegemony, political education and pedagogy in Antonio Gramsci; Lunch Break

The Arab Uprising & its Background Chair: Gilbert Achcar Jeff Goodwin, How kings survived the Arab Spring; Raza Naeem, Arab Jacobins? Rebirth of hope in ArabiaFelix; Marieme Helie-Lucas, New forms of resistance of youth and women in Tunisia and Egypt

The Left in India: Feminism, Memory & Social Determination Chair: Rohini Hensman Vahida Nainar, Feminism and the Indian Left; Nalini Taneja,Erasure of Left memory and the idea of India; Aaron Schneider, Determinants of Left politics in Brazil and India

11.15 am 1.15 pm

Sexy Capital Chair: Tara Atluri Shankar Ramaswami, Chakravyuh: accumulation anxieties, discord and intimacy in proletarian Delhi; Brinda Bose, Queer matriarchies: hijra intimacies and inheritances; Sanjay Srivastava, Sudden selves: Personality development, tupperware and the chain of confidence

Rural Impoverishment, Displacement and Political Responses [Panel Organized by New Socialist Initiative (NSI)] Chair: Ramesh Dadhich Manoranjan Mohanty, Resistance in contemporary India: Insights from land struggles; Sudha Vasan, Chained to Developments cross: Livelihood crises and displacement in India; Jaya Mehta, The feminine face of Indian agriculture Tea Break The Cunning of the State: The Law and Social Movements Chair: Brenna Bhandar

The Relevance of Marxs Capital Today Chair: C P. Chandrashekhar Alex Callinicos, Deciphering Capital; Lucia Pradella, Crisis and impoverishment: The current relevance of Marxs Capital; Ramaa Vasudevan, Accumulation, crisis and the empire of finance

Communalism & the Struggle Against It Chair: Javed Anand Manisha Sethi, Anatomy of the terrorism trials; Ram Puniyani, The struggle against communalism: experiences of an activist; Bhumika Rajan, Cultures of fascism: the story of a coastal town in Karnataka

2 pm 3.45 pm

Socialism & Anarchism in the 21st Century Chair: Alberto Toscano

Capital Accumulation & Informal Labour: Studies from India Chair: Lucia Pradella Meena Gopal, Political economy of the beedi industry in South Tamilnadu; Matilde Adduci, Neoliberal politics in the mining sector and labour in Orissa; Rahul Menon, Reconceptualising the reserve army of labour

The State, Militarism, Class Formation and Gender Chair: Elisabeth Armstrong Axel Gehring, Military guardianship under pressure? Analyzing leftist interpretations of class formation & state genesis in Turkey since the 1980 military coup; Sartaj Khan, The role of remittances in the rise of the middle classes & its implications for war & violence in Pashtun society; Savita Singh, Indispensability of peace: issues of gender and militarism

Jean Dreze, Anarchist thought and the future of the Left; Rohini Hensman, Reimagining socialist revolution; Subhanil Chowdhury & Srinivasan Ramani, Towards 21st century socialism in India: a perspective

Dwijen Rangnekar, The cunning state of farmers rights in India: an epistemic lock-in with corporate agriculture; T.K.Naveen, Cunning rationalities in transgenic regulation: epistemic challenges in green lawfare; Syed Azeem, The rights movement & the courts in Pakistan: A critique of Upendra Baxi

4 pm 5.45 pm

Plenary 6.15 pm 8.15 pm Should Democracy and Human Rights Matter to Socialists? Chair: Dilip Simeon; Nirmala Rajasingam; Vrinda Grover; Arundhati Roy