Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony

Capitalism seems to have conquered the world. Historians and social scientists increasingly elaborate on the ever-subtler forms of hegemony that control our lives. Resistance appears naIve, elusive or futile. Within this vexed context, this interdisciplinary volume represents an unusual attempt to think throught the meaning of resistance and give new theoretical content to the oft-cited but underspecified concept of counterhegemony. Rather than proceeding in a Eurocentric manner from some principle of resistance at work in the world of 'advanced capitalism', and then generalizing to the so-called developing world, this work is grounded in theoretically informed but fine-grained studies of important but little-known cases of resistance in the global South. With contributions from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East and Latin America, and reaching back to the Eighteenth-century, Counterhegemony in the Colony and Postcolony works through issues of colonialism, nationalism, statism, postcolonialism and neoliberalism. Attention is paid to politics and the state, intellectual formations, counterculture, and popular struggle. In doing so this volume goes beyond unexamined and naIve notions of resistance and gives a firmer conceptual basis for thinking counterhegemony.

Table of Contents:
Introduction; J.Chalcraft & Y.Noorani PART I: THE STATE AND POLITICS: NATIONALISM AND REVOLUTION Hegemony, Counterhegemony and the Mexican Revolution; A.Knight The Fetishism of Identity: Empire, Nation, and the Politics of Subjectivity in Algeria; J.McDougall PART II: INTELLECTUAL FORMATIONS: AUTHORITY AND OPPOSITION Redefining Resistance: Counterhegemony, the Repressive Hypothesis and the Case of Arabic Modernism; Y.Noorani Hegemony and Liberation: Mao Zedong and Zou Taofen in Early Twentieth-Century China; R.Mitter The Road through Africa: Imperial Nationalism and Diasporic Racial Consciousness in Postslavery Barbados; M.Newton PART III: COUNTERCULTURE: NORMATIVE TENSION AND AMBIGUITY Reading, Hegemony and Counterhegemony in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic; B.C. Fortna Celebratory Ramadan and Hyperpiety in a Mexican Standoff: Counterhegemony in the Crossfire; W.Armbrust PART IV: POPULAR STRUGGLE: MANOEUVRE AND CONTESTATION Counterhegemonic Effects: Weighing, Measuring, Petitions, and Bureaucracy in Nineteenth Century Egypt; J.Chalcraft Hegemony from Below: Print Workers, the State, and the Communist Party in Peru, 1920-1940; P.Drinot The Politics of Institutional Subversion: Organized Labour and Resistance in Zambia; A.LeBas How do Activists Act? Conceiving Counterhegemony in Durban; S.Chari

About the Author :
JOHN CHALCRAFT is Lecturer in Imperialism at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK. Previous posts include a Research Fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Striking Cabbies of Cairo and Other Stories (2004). YASEEN NOORANI is Assistant Professor in Near Eastern Studies at the University of Arizona, USA. Previous posts include a visiting professorship at the University of Michigan and a lectureship at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of the article 'Heterotopia and the Wine Poem in Early Islamic Culture' which appeared in International Journal of Middle East Studies