Ranajit Guha and the Global South
CALL FOR PAPERS
Ranajit Guha and the Global South
Kairos Special Issue 8 (2) 2024
Ranajit Guha, the figure behind the Subaltern Studies Collective completed hundred
years last year. This commemorative issue of Kairos proposes to critically engage
with his ideas and seminal contribution as a thinker from the Global South.
Although Guha started off as an academic saboteur within the field of Indian
historiography, his radical questioning of elitism characteristic of political, cultural
and sociological understanding of Indian society radically redirected us to ‘the small
voices of history’. His works such as Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial
India, and Dominance without Hegemony not only challenged the prevalent notions
about subaltern/ popular politics but also provided some of the lexicons and
conceptual categories that informed the postcolonial critique of universalist history
of capital and thereby helped de-teleologise and decolonise the understanding of
dissent and resistance. His contribution thus went beyond the formation of an
academic group premised on studying Indian society, but has a deep resonance for
decolonial thinking in previously colonised countries. Academic engagements with
Guha’s work, whether commemorative or critical, so far engaged with his writings
in English. But Guha has produced a significant corpus of writings in his native
Bengali language. The special issue therefore invites contributions that read Ranajit
Guha as a significant thinker from the Global South with continuing relevance for
vernacular traditions both within and outside of India.
We invite papers that engage with, both restricted to, to the following
subthemes:
Ranajit Guha and Susovan Sarkar: Bringing Gramsci to India
Ranajit Guha and the Radical Intellectual Tradition in India
Ranajit Guha and the Global South Thinking Tradition
Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies Collective
In Comparison: Ranajit Guha and Fanon/ Aime Cesaire/ Cabral / Du-Bois
Ranajit Guha and His Vernacular Bengali Writings
Ranajit Guha Today: Aporias and Openings
Please send 300-500 word proposals to editorskairos@gmail.com by 7 June 2023