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Individual Paper

8. Negotiating Margins: Power, Agencies, Representations, Resistances

Relocating Agencies and Contestations in the Everyday Resistance in the Global South

Volatile Objects & Unstable Images: Re-articulations of Power Across the Northern Subcontinent & Caribbean

Friday, June 13, 2025
14:00 - 15:45 GMT
Location: LBD-Conseil

    Presenter(s)

  • AS

    Anamika Singh

    University of Wisconsin - Madison, United States

Paper Abstract: In early December of 1992, filmmaker Anant Patwardhan would capture the infamous rally of Kar Sevaks — Hindu nationalists as they moved through the Awadh Plains towards Ayodhya, India, to demolish the Babri Mosque, the desecration of which forever shifted the axis of Subcontinental politics and unleashed immense violence. Nearly a century earlier, as the British Empire faced the abolition of slavery and transitioned to indentured labor, colonial recruiters would traverse the very same route in the Awadh in search of migrants to the new colonies in the Caribbean, recalling the centuries of violent expeditions into the African interior that produced the Middle Passage. Volatile Objects & Unstable Images contends with the re-articulations of power that are formed through a matrix of colonial regimes, contested histories and resistance as it revisits the historic migration route that departed from the Awadh Plains and flowed through Africa and the Caribbean. Focusing on sites of knowledge and modes of testimony across the cities of Faizabad, India—which is situated in the heart of the plains—and Paramaribo, Suriname, nested against the great Atlantic, this research examines the genesis of new identities and political claims that emerge through volatile transfers and redistributions of power and the unsettled processes that underlie the repurposing of extractive architecture and infrastructure. Moving across interviews, testimony and video from the field, this paper answers this question: What does it mean for symbols of power to be forged from the debris of violence? While foregrounding the liberatory possibilities of these new formations.