SACW - 19 Jan 2017 | Bangladesh: Marriage Law Regression / Pakistan: Disappearances of Activists / India: Jobs crisis; Agasthyamala Ban; low wages in space programme / Europe: right-wing populism

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 19 Jan 2017 - No. 2924 
[via South Asia Citizens Web - sacw.net since 1996]

Contents:
1. Bangladesh: Controversial Draft Law Allowing Child Marriage in "special cases" is The Road to Regression
2. Universal Basic Income For India Suddenly Trendy. Look Out | Jean Drèze
3. India: Agasthyamala Ban On Women Entry - Unconstitutional And A Breach Of Conservation Treaties
4. India-Kashmir: Sexism and Moral Policing - Intimidation of actress Zaira Wasim
5. Parvez Mahmood Depicts His Family Rebuilding their Lives After 1947 Migration
6. Concocted Stories Gather Weight by Being Repeated: The Myth of Lawrence of Arabia
7.  Recent On Communalism Watch:
 - India: An Appeal by PADS to Voters of UP to Protect Democracy and Defeat the BJP in 2017 UP assembly elections
 - Taking hate crimes seriously - A Bombay High Court order on a Muslim man's murder could just embolden fringe groups
 - Rethinking “National Culture” of India (Razak Khan)
 - India: The real problem with Jaipur Lit Fest is not the participation of RSS ideologues – it's the sponsor (Apoorvanand)
 - India: Is the Bombay High Court Saying a Hate Crime Isn’t Heinous? (Alok Prasanna Kumar)
 - Indian Academics Peddling Multi-culturalism as secularism: Selling India's Failed Model to European States
 - Bangladesh: Mob of 300 sets fire to the Ustad Allauddin Khan Sangitangan [Museum] at Brahmanbaria
 - Video: Link to Lecture by Christophe Jaffrelot on Ambedkar and Democracy
 - Europe: Who is drawn to right-wing populism and why is it so dangerous? (Marc Saxer)
 - USA: Report by National Intelligence council points at Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism connected to young men and violence
 - Call For Applications: Secular Politics and the 'Idea of India' 17 to 19 February 2017
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
8. Pakistan: Abducting social activists | Pervez Hoodbhoy
 + Disappearances spark fears of crackdown on leftwing dissent in Pakistan 
 9. Pakistan’s missing: Activists disappear overnight, India must come to the aid of independent voices in Pakistan (Editorial, The Times of India)
10. Inside the life of Pakistan’s first female string theorist | Mahrukh Sarwar
11. India: Amartya Sen Interview - ‘Serious job losses are taking place’ | Suvojit Bagchi
12. Would ISRO Launches Be So Cheap If Indian Labour Were Not Underpaid? | Vasudevan Mukunth	
13. Yakovenko on Hall, 'Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History'


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1. BANGLADESH: CONTROVERSIAL DRAFT LAW ALLOWING CHILD MARRIAGE IN "SPECIAL CASES" IS THE ROAD TO REGRESSION
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In December 2016 the Bangladeshi Parliament discussed the Child Marriage Restraint Act 2016, a bill which reportedly includes a special provision allowing child marriage at any age in “special cases”, such as “accidental” or “illegal” pregnancy, or where a marriage would protect a girl’s “honour”. The current legal minimum age of marriage in Bangladesh is 18 for women and 21 for men. The exception reportedly provides no minimum age. There are fears that such a provision would legitimise statutory rape and encourage the practice of child marriage in a country with one of the highest child marriage rates in the world.
http://www.sacw.net/article13088.html

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2. UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME FOR INDIA SUDDENLY TRENDY. LOOK OUT
by Jean Drèze
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Universal basic income is a nice idea in principle, but as far as India today is concerned, it sounds like premature articulation. Further, this idea could easily become a Trojan horse for the dismantling of hard-won entitlements of the underprivileged...
http://www.sacw.net/article13085.html

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3. INDIA: AGASTHYAMALA BAN ON WOMEN ENTRY - UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND A BREACH OF CONSERVATION TREATIES
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Denying entry of women to the Agasthyamala, a breach of gender justice - letter to the Kerala forest minister by S Faizi
http://www.sacw.net/article13087.html

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4. INDIA - KASHMIR: SEXISM AND MORAL POLICING BEHIND ONLINE INTIMIDATION OF ACTRESS ZAIRA WASIM
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Kashmiri actress Zaira Wasim for whom the film Dangal was a dream of opportunity responded to the adulation initially with a big smile . . . she has had to change her stance, under pressure and to offer an apology saying that her achievement is a ‘disgrace.’
http://www.sacw.net/article13089.html

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5. PARVEZ MAHMOOD DEPICTS HIS FAMILY REBUILDING THEIR LIVES AFTER THEIR 1947 MIGRATION FROM AMRITSAR
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My father was serving as a draftsman in the Railways Workshop Amritsar when the Partition of Punjab forced him and his family to migrate to Pakistan.
http://www.sacw.net/article13084.html

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6. CONCOCTED STORIES GATHER WEIGHT BY BEING REPEATED: THE MYTH OF LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
by Nyla Ali Khan
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The quickest and easiest way, even in the 21st century, to alleviate the angst caused by a politically influential woman is to slander her. One such libelous story was of my maternal grandmother Akbar Jehan’s betrothal or marriage to Lawrence of Arabia.
http://www.sacw.net/article13083.html

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7. RECENT ON COMMUNALISM WATCH:
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 - Publication Announcement: The Quotidian Revolution - Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India (Christian Lee Novetzke)
 - India: An Appeal by PADS to Voters of UP to Protect Democracy and Defeat the BJP in 2017 UP assembly elections
 - Taking hate crimes seriously - A Bombay High Court order on a Muslim man's murder could just embolden fringe groups
 - Rethinking “National Culture” of India (Razak Khan)
 - India: The real problem with Jaipur Lit Fest is not the participation of RSS ideologues – it's the sponsor (Apoorvanand)
 - India: Is the Bombay High Court Saying a Hate Crime Isn’t Heinous? (Alok Prasanna Kumar)
 - Late Announcement: Religious Intolerance and its Impact on Democracy - 2017 Amartya Sen Lecture Series (17 Indian Academics Peddling  - Multi-culturalism as secularism: Selling India's Failed Model to European States
 - Bangladesh: Mob of 300 sets fire to the Ustad Allauddin Khan Sangitangan [Museum] at Brahmanbaria
 - Video: Link to Lecture by Christophe Jaffrelot on Ambedkar and Democracy
 - Europe: Who is drawn to right-wing populism and why is it so dangerous? (Marc Saxer)
 - USA: Report by National Intelligence council points at Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism connected to young men and violence
 - Russian Yoga Instructor Becomes Unlikely Spiritual Warrior As He Fights Counterterrorism Law (RFE / RL)
 - India: Impilcations of Bombay high court ruling granting bail to men who said they were provoked to kill in name of religion
 - Call For Applications: Secular Politics and the 'Idea of India' 17 to 19 February 2017

 -> available via: http://communalism.blogspot.com/
 
::: URLs & FULL TEXT :::
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8. PAKISTAN: ABDUCTING SOCIAL ACTIVISTS
by Pervez Hoodbhoy
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(Dawn - 14 January 2017)

The writer teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.

HAD last week’s kidnappings of bloggers and social media activists happened in Balochistan, it would have been a non-event. But all five abductions happened in Punjab — and now the authorities are feeling some heat.

Salman Haider — a lecturer at the Fatima Jinnah Women’s University in Rawalpindi — was intercepted while driving on Islamabad Expressway on his way home. Others were picked up from Lahore and near about. They include social activist Samar Abbas, social media bloggers Aasim Saeed, Ahmad Waqas Goraya, and Ahmed Raza Naseer — who suffers from polio. Their whereabouts are unknown as of the time of this writing. Still others are said to be missing with families too fearful to register formal complaints.

These near-simultaneous abductions required complex operations, suggesting involvement of some secret state agency. Apparently, there were no prior direct threats, no demand for ransom, and no evidence of the grisly violence used by jihadist groups. And, as the phone calls made to the families showed, the abductors were dismissive of their identities being traced.

Just a little thought shows the level of resources and planning that such actions demand.

First, tracking mobile internet users is not for novices. Only specialised cyber tools can uncover the identities of those anonymously operating a Facebook page or website. This requires skills, equipment, and persistence. Since IP numbers — which identify a particular device — are alterable and wireless networks can be accessed from anywhere, tracking records are needed. Only the authorities have such data acquisition facilities.
The kidnappings are designed to eliminate the tiny sliver of cyberspace activists currently have.

Second, anticipating that certain materials could be deleted, selective screen shots of the pre-takeover content of Facebook pages were taken. These were later released for circulation with the goal of arousing public anger. Tellingly, after the user accounts were hacked into and taken over, the earlier content was deleted and replaced with pro-military and pro-extremist rants.

Third, extensive tracking of individual movements was needed. In addition to physical shadowing, this requires tapping of telephones and email. The case of Goraya, a former Quaid-e-Azam University student currently studying in the Netherlands, is particularly significant. He had briefly returned to attend his sister’s wedding and was nabbed shortly thereafter. The deep state had bided its time, watching and waiting for him to return to Pakistan.

Suspicions of official involvement were not allayed when Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan declared that he had been in touch with the intelligence agencies. Subsequently he was “hopeful that Dr Salman Haider would soon be recovered safe and sound”, but made no mention of the others.

How bad are the materials which right-wing and pro-establishment sites are deeming blasphemous and anti-Pakistan? Having glanced at a few pages from FB accounts under the names of ‘Roshni’ and ‘Mochi’, in my opinion some remarks by their visitors placed here and there were clearly stupid and irresponsible. Another called ‘Bhensa’ was outrageous and offensive. Nevertheless, to abduct its alleged operators is a travesty of justice.

Intemperate and irresponsible web behaviour of young people is induced by the apparent security provided by cyber anonymity. But, disagree as one might with parts of the web content, the fact is that none call for violence — or even hint at its desirability. I could not see any demand for mosques to be closed down, mullahs to be hanged, or calls for violence. An overwhelming majority of posts call for peace, tolerance, freedom of worship, rule of law, an end to repression in Balochistan, action against corruption, etc.

While I have never met Goraya — one of the abductees — I discovered a single email from him addressed to me from four years ago. Writing in his capacity as the international coordinator of the Rationalist Society of Pakistan, his email reads, “We are a group of people who are striving to bring rational thought into Pakistani society. We, like you, do not like the current Talibanisation of our country and are trying to combat that in our own way on the social media by running a forum that is 10,000 strong.”

Salman Haider, a poet of considerable merit, has a large following on social media networks. He writes passionately in Urdu about the need to reclaim space lost to extremism, the brutal targeting of ethnic Hazaras, and the missing persons in Balochistan. Ironically, he too has now joined the ranks of the missing.

Demonised, persecuted, denied space on TV channels and in the Urdu print media, the voices asking for a modern Pakistan and peace with neighboring countries are being increasingly stifled. The recent kidnappings are designed to eliminate the tiny sliver of cyberspace they currently have.

On the other side of the spectrum, full internet freedom is enjoyed by sectarian religious organisations, militant jihadist outfits, and even so-called officially banned organisations. Those representing such mindsets also fill TV channels on political talk shows, and their Urdu newspaper columns accuse all and sundry of being foreign agents and blasphemers. Even those arguing for the release of the abducted activists are being called blasphemers.

Although intelligence agencies are empowered to act where national security is jeopardised, no one has alleged that the abducted activists are dangerous people. Nevertheless, there is a strong feeling that elements within Pakistan’s deep state felt sufficiently outraged to take the law into their own hands and order the disappearances.

But why this anger? Do Pakistanis not know who their true enemy is? Liberal fascists — as they are called in the Urdu media — did not orchestrate the suicide truck bombings that levelled ISI headquarters in Peshawar and Sukkur, the attacks against police academies in Lahore and Quetta, the grisly games played by the Pakistani Taliban with the severed heads of Pakistan Army soldiers, or the horrific massacre of APS students.

The army, police, and Pakistan’s security agencies have paid a terrible price in lives and material at the hands of religious fanatics. Extremist organisations and individuals have declared bloody war upon the state. Against the culture of intolerance, corruption, and militancy that is ruining Pakistan, only a few brave souls have dared to speak out. It is insane to crack down on them.

The writer teaches physics in Lahore and Islamabad.

o o o

(The Guardian - 10 January 2017)

DISAPPEARANCES SPARK FEARS OF CRACKDOWN ON LEFTWING DISSENT IN PAKISTAN
by Jon Boone

Four prominent online campaigners with anti-military views believed abducted since Friday
Activists in Karachi hold a rally calling for the release of Salman Haider, editor of the online magazine Tanqeed. Photograph: Fareed Khan/Associated Press

Jon Boone in Islamabad

Four social media activists with outspoken, secular and anti-military views have gone missing in Pakistan in recent days, sparking fears of a crackdown on leftwing dissenters.

Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have a history of illegal detentions and of not notifying relatives about where they are or why they are being held. However, such “forced disappearances” are usually directed against those suspected of involvement in terrorism or violent separatism.

One of the four men, Asim Saeed, was abducted from his home in Lahore on Friday after he had returned from working in Singapore. Ahmad Waqas Goraya, another online activist who is usually based in Holland, was detained on the same day, his friends say.

According to a statement given by Saeed’s father to the police, four men arrived at the house in a pickup truck and “forcefully took him away”.

“I made all efforts to locate my son but I have been unable to trace him,” his statement said.

At the time of Saeed’s abduction, the IT worker was carrying his laptop and two mobile phones.

Both Saeed and Goraya help run the Mochi Facebook page critical of Pakistan’s powerful military. The page has recently criticised the army’s heavy-handed crackdown on political groups in Karachi, alleged corruption amongst senior officers and accused the military of interfering in national politics.

“We respect Armed Forces of Pakistan as much as they respect the constitution of Pakistan,” runs the text on the Facebook page’s banner.

Salman Haider, a lecturer at Fatima Jinnah Women University, failed to come home on Friday. His wife received a mysterious message from his phone saying he was abandoning his car on the Islamabad-Rawalpindi motorway. The car was later recovered by police.

On Saturday the interior minister said he had urged police to find Haider, a playwright, poet and editor of Tanqeed. The online magazinehas criticised army counter-insurgency operations in the southern state of Balochistan.

Relatives of the fourth man, Ahmed Raza Naseer, say he was taken from his family’s shop in the Punjab district of Sheikhupra on Saturday.

Human Rights Watch asked authorities to investigate the apparent abductions as a matter of urgency.

“The Pakistani government has an immediate obligation to locate the four missing human rights activists and act to ensure their safety,” said Brad Adams, HRW’s Asia director.

“The nature of these apparent abductions puts the … government on notice that it can either be part of the solution or it will be held responsible for its role in the problem.”

Shahzad Ahmad, director of Bytes for All, a human rights group focused on online security, said the disappearances had spooked social media activists, and several had deactivating their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

“We are concerned over the recent roundup of social media activists, which we see as a threat to freedom of expression, association and assembly in online spaces,” he said.

The arrests were designed to “silence and smear” those who challenge the establishment and speak against human rights violations in the country, he said.

Security sources have denied any involvement, while a group of MPs have called the disappearances “highly concerning”.

“The pattern of these disappearances suggests that it is a planned and coordinated action, undertaken to silence voices which are critical of prevalent socio-political issues in Pakistan,” they wrote in a parliamentary resolution.

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9. EDITORIAL, THE TIMES OF INDIA - JANUARY 16, 2017
PAKISTAN’S MISSING: ACTIVISTS DISAPPEAR OVERNIGHT, INDIA MUST COME TO THE AID OF INDEPENDENT VOICES IN PAKISTAN
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Pakistan appears to be lurching towards totalitarianism, with at least five bloggers and independent civil society activists having mysteriously ‘disappeared’ over the last fortnight. The evidence points towards state involvement in their disappearances. All of them questioned state policies; their families have reported men in plain clothes taking them away in unmarked cars in similar fashion; they have been targeted through orchestrated online smear campaigns; and the assumption within Pakistan is that they have been kidnapped by the government to silence independent voices.

This used to be a common fate of Balochi activists before, but now such practices have reached deep into the Pakistani mainstream with the current abductions being reported from Islamabad and Punjab. Major cities have witnessed protests demanding their immediate release; nevertheless bloggers and activists are even more vulnerable than journalists in Pakistan. Human Rights Watch, the UN and US state department have all expressed concern at the fate of the disappeared. India should not remain a silent spectator.

As one of South Asia’s most stable democracies, India should speak out in defence of human rights in the region. New Delhi recently made human rights in Balochistan an area of concern following Pakistan’s all-out intervention in Indian Kashmir. This concern should extend, logically, to the persecuted in other parts of Pakistan – keeping in mind that the democratic constituency intersects largely with the peace constituency as well. Given the shrinking space for freedom in Pakistan New Delhi should not only call for the activists’ release but also offer asylum to persecuted dissidents, who may want a safe space to pursue their activism within Pakistan. That’s how the West trumped the Soviet Union during the Cold War; today’s instantaneous means of communication make it even easier to amplify voices across borders.

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10. INSIDE THE LIFE OF PAKISTAN’S FIRST FEMALE STRING THEORIST
by Mahrukh Sarwar
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http://www.dawn.com/news/1300054
Dawn - 5 Dec 2016

Tasneem Zehra Husain, Pakistan’s first female string theorist at the mere age of 26, recently published her new book Only the Longest Threads, which fictionalises major breakthroughs in physics through the minds of the people who lived in those periods of discovery, reports the MIT Technology Review Pakistan.

Husain is an eminent scientist, writer and educator who obtained her bachelor of science in mathematics and physics from Kinnaird College and a masters degree in physics from the Quaid-i-Azam University.

She was awarded a scholarship by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) to study in the field of High-Energy Physics in Trieste, Italy. Husain obtained her PhD in theoretical physics from Stockholm University, and then went on to do her post-doctoral research at Harvard University. While still a post-doc, she helped found the Lahore University of Managment Sciences (LUMS) School of Science and Engineering in Lahore, where she later taught as a faculty member.

Husain has represented Pakistan at the meeting of nobel laureates in Lindau, Germany. She has written extensively for several magazines and newspapers, including the award winning blog.

Tasneem Zehra Husain sat down with MIT Technology Review Pakistan to talk about her life, research and her aspirations for the field of theoretical Physics in the country, here is what she had to say.
A childhood surrounded by love, laughter and books

My parents were very supportive and involved in their children’s upbringing. My father is very hands-on so he would get involved in projects with us. My mother read to us since before we could even speak.

Growing up in the 80’s in Pakistan, there weren’t a lot of bookstores. There were maybe three or four like Anees book store or Iqbal book corner. They didn’t have a range of interesting things to read; only textbooks or classics were available. However, my parent’s had an extensive personal library of books at home and later my mother started the Alif Laila lending library when my brother and I were only one or two years old, so we grew up with books all around us.

Our parents would have to frequently bring home books to catalogue, so we saw them all the time and everywhere. We were encouraged to read voraciously and I think that was the main turning point for all of us.

An Unconventional Education

I really liked school and I was perfectly happy there but it got to the point where I felt like the curriculum was dragging a little. I didn’t feel challenged by the pace. I could also give you an example of how unconventional my parents were comfortable being. When I was in class 7, I sat my father down and told him that I was being bored in school and it just wasn’t interesting any more. So my father says,”Why don’t you give your O-levels then? Speed it up and give it on your own.

I did exactly that. I took a year to prepare and sat for the exams privately. I worked through the syllabus at home by myself. I did have the occasional help. Once in awhile, one of my parent’s friends would offer to answer any questions I had, but that was it.

I ended up giving my O-Levels at the age of 13 and my A-level examinations at the age of 15.

The whole experience taught me a few skills that were very useful later on in graduate school, and in establishing my career. It taught me to do things at my own pace, set my own goals, have the discipline of working on my own and not depend so much on a formal structure at a very early age. You generally don’t learn these things so young, so it turned out pretty well for me.

Looking back, I’m not sure what I would have done in my parent’s place.

A Budding Interest in Science

My parents weren’t involved in the sciences. They both had a humanities background. My father was an economist and my mother got her degrees in Literature and History, and then she worked in education with children from low-income households. But all of their children went on to have degrees or careers in the sciences. So I didn’t really have any mentor at home. It’s just that my parents were open minded and encouraged us to follow our own curiosity and see wherever it takes us.

I became interested in science at a early age. When I was seven or eight years old, I was always curious about how things work and liked the logic of math because of the way it flows. Later on, when I had the words to express my interests, I could frame it better and say that I like theoretical Physics more. And the more I read about the theory, I realised that these were the fundamental questions that interested me.

I like gadgets and technology but my curiosity was never that I wanted to take something apart and find out what happens under the hood. I always wanted to know more about the fundamental questions of nature: why does something work a certain way, why does a theory work, what are the mathematical mechanics of the theory.

It’s similar to being interested in brainteasers or crossword puzzles. If I come across something like that half done, I want to stop in my track and figure out why or what? That same kind of instinct dragged me towards theoretical physics. I thought it was beautiful the way all of these puzzles in Physics fit together. The more I discovered about it, the more I realised that this is what I wanted to do.

Diving into String Theory

My interest in string theory seems inevitable in hindsight. I have always been curious about fundamental questions, underlying structures, basic constituents. At every stage of my education, I was drawn to the same aesthetic – revealing the hidden similarities between apparently different objects. If I were to extrapolate my intellectual and aesthetic preferences to draw a curve, string theory would be one of the points that lie furthest along.

The string of string theory is the smallest building block of reality. There is nothing more basic than this. Everything else we see, is built up in terms of strings. You understand this one fundamental thing and all else can be formulated in terms of it. In that sense, string theory is the ultimate unification.

Unification in physics – as in life – is considered both beautiful and powerful. It’s just a very compelling idea, and one that has always grabbed my attention.

The Gravitational Waves that Einstein Predicted a Century Ago

Every physical theory starts with a certain set of assumptions, and then you depend on mathematics to explore all that can happen in the framework of the theory. Inevitably, you find that logic leads you to places you had not even dreamed of. This is why physicists often say things like “the theory knows more than we do”.

That, in fact, is the most interesting thing about science. You start out with some assumptions and you probably know their immediate implications. But then you use mathematics to mine these statements, and you keep digging, keep unearthing truths you had no idea existed. The logic of the theory compels you to say that if everything so far is correct, then this must also be correct.

For example, you might have heard about the discovery of the gravitational waves earlier this year. Einstein wrote down the theory of general relativity a hundred years ago, and gravitational waves were one of the outputs of his equations. We had no other reason to suspect something like this existed. But now we’ve seen them.
Researching the classification of supersymmetric flux backgrounds in 11 dimensions

In my research, I’ve dealt a fair bit with classifying supersymmetric backgrounds in 11-dimensional supergravity. The technical details aren’t really important here, and for our present purposes, you can think of supergravity as an extension of general relativity, and we can fall back on the oft-quoted analogy of space-time as a rubber sheet which deforms in response to the presence of matter.

One of the things that you can find in the equation of supergravity is an object called the M-brane. Since in the scope of this story, space-time has 11 dimensions (rather than the familiar 4), it can accommodate objects of more dimensions than we are used to seeing. The M-brane, for instance, can span either 2 or 5 spatial dimensions. The latter is impossible to visualise, but it has a precise mathematical description.

Leaving the numerology of dimensions aside, the basic point is that these M-branes are heavy objects, which deform space-time, just like stars and planets and houses and apples do, and one of the problems I tackled in my research, was the classification of these deformed backgrounds, for a particular type of optimal (supersymmetric) M-brane configuration.

The Future of Research in Pakistan

Unfortunately, we don’t figure anywhere on the world stage in terms of research in science at the moment.

The first step to promote science in Pakistan is to have a culture that values research. If you don’t inculcate in your PhD’s the value of research, they will never be able to produce new knowledge.

Ten years ago, there were only four string theorists from Pakistan. None of them are in Pakistan anymore.

Initially, the idea was that we would start doing theoretical physics out from here because it required next to no financial input. You didn’t need labs. All you required was a laptop and that was it. However, that didn’t work out for a number of reasons. Some were political, some environmental or maybe we were too ambitious too early.

There are a lot of examples of countries closer to home that have limited resources and yet they have made their culture much more conducive to scientific research than ours. Look at India and the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs); they have phenomenal educational institutes and good centres for research, especially in the field of string theory.

When I was doing my post-doc in Harvard, there were a lot of Indian Assistant Professors who were on the prestigious tenure track. Some of them left to go back to their home environment and a decade later, they’re still in India. They are publishing their research and their careers and reputations haven’t suffered because India gives them enough of a research atmosphere.

When I moved back to Pakistan, one of my main goals was to try to build more of a regional nexus. You want people to have international exposure but it’s not very practical to send all your students to the US or UK.

It’s much more convenient to send them to places that are more culturally accessible, financially feasible and closer to home. My dream was that since there were so many string theorists in India that we could work more closely with them.

That was basically the plan but it didn’t end up happening. There are ways of making these things work only if there is an institutional or political will. It’s also a question of attitude. The most common question that I used to get was “What are you going to do with string theory?” It is disheartening when you are constantly getting questions like that and you have to keep on explaining and justifying yourself.

Politicians only focus on these immediate short term measures because they are only thinking about the next five years. Look at what 40 years of this short term thinking has done for the country. The major structural issues in the health and education sectors are still where they were decades ago.

The same kind of thinking is passed on to the sciences. People tend you ask you “I don’t have clean water. Why are you doing string theory? What will we get from that?” That’s like saying that there are so many problems in the country, you shouldn’t write literature, poetry or prose.

Right now, Pakistan is in a much better position than it was a few years ago. The resources that are available now, including Fulbright scholarships, collaborations with CERN and other liaisons with the international world are incredible. It’s time for people to really start utilising these opportunities.
Only the Longest Threads

There are a lot of science books in the genre field at the moment – some written by experts and some not. I decided to write this book in fiction because I wanted it to appeal to people who would not have picked up a popular science book.

The title of the book comes from a quotation by Richard P. Feynman, a physicist and a nobel laureate. He said, “Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so each small piece of her fabric reveals the organisation of the entire tapestry.”

This book is my attempt to go back and explain everything that I need people to know in order to explain string theory to them at the end.

This article originally appeared in MIT Tech Review Pakistan and has been reproduced with permission.

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11. INDIA: AMARTYA SEN INTERVIEW - ‘SERIOUS JOB LOSSES ARE TAKING PLACE’
by Suvojit Bagchi
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(The Hindu - 17 January 2017)

 The truth may ultimately prevail about demonetisation, but the government might be able to maintain the loyalty of a large part of the public for a long time, says Amartya Sen

More than two months after the demonetisation, Nobel Laureate and economist Amartya Sen says that any proper “economic reasoning could not have sensibly led to such a ham-handed policy.” He predicts that the demonetisation will hit the economy quite drastically. In an interview with Suvojit Bagchi at his home in Santiniketan, which he visits every winter, Professor Sen spoke about the motives and impact of the move.
We’ve seen the primary impact of the demonetisation: long queues outside banks and shortage of cash. Now we are seeing the secondary impact, which is on the informal sector. Potato sowing in West Bengal is affected and some other businesses are collapsing. What could be the impact of all this?

What you are calling “the secondary impact” shouldn’t at all be surprising since the availability of money plays a very big part in facilitating business and trade. Particularly for small businesses (farming, for example), money is often used in the form of cash. In the long run, cashless transactions can perhaps be made into routine practice, through organisation and training, but that would take time. To act on the presumption of instant learning and institutionalisation is to place the hard-earned interests of many people without any connection to ‘black money’ in serious risk.

Most of what we now call cash is actually promissory notes, the emergence of which reflected a big advance over relying only on precious metals (like gold and silver). Promissory notes played a significant part in building up the financial backbone of industrial Europe. If in the 18th or 19th century, Britain had been demonetised suddenly, it would have devastated British industrial progress.

Given the underdevelopment of electronic accounts and transactions, big parts of the economy are similarly vulnerable. For many, especially among the poor, making efficient and correct use of electronic payments and receipts would remain difficult to master and the possibility of losing one’s money would be hard to avoid, especially given the shortage of infrastructure and the slowness of learning in using cashless transactions. The perplexing question is why some people — those who gave us demonetisation — did not foresee that this would happen and even more perplexing is how the promoters of demonetisation can be so blind even now to the overwhelming evidence of a crisis.
Why has over 85 per cent of cash suddenly been taken out of circulation?

The Government of India seems to have been caught in a confusion of purposes. Demonetisation has been seen both as a way of catching and eliminating ‘black money’, and as a way of moving towards a ‘cashless economy’. The former has gradually been replaced in the rhetoric of the government by the latter, which is not surprising as demonetisation can make only a very small contribution — at a huge social cost — to the ‘black money problem’. This is because only a very small proportion of black money (it is estimated to be 6 per cent or so, certainly less than 10 per cent) is in cash. Most black money is in the form of precious metals and other assets in foreign accounts. The inconvenience and loss imposed with no black money (workers earning wages; small businesses doing trade or production; people, even housewives, keeping small savings) are much more acute than any benefit from catching relatively small amounts of black money. There are going to be huge job losses too, and the recent reports by All India Manufacturers’ Organisation are beginning to show that serious job losses are already happening as a result of what London’s Financial Times has called “a dramatic drop in business in the 34 days since Narendra Modi… announced his plan to scrap 86 per cent of its banknotes.”

The unrealistic governmental expectation that the ‘black money problem’ can be solved, or largely removed, by demonetisation soon became clear even to the government. Then the initially trumpeted objective of getting rid of black money through demonetisation was suddenly changed into a very different objective — to leap rapidly into a cashless society. However, for such a structural change, much more time is needed, and the draconian measures — penalties installed in the hope of catching black money — are particularly ill-suited. The result has been a combination of chaos and widespread suffering rather than an orderly transition to a cashless society.
Do you think there are political reasons behind the demonetisation move? The elections are coming up, so that may have been one?

I don’t really know. Since economic reasoning could not have sensibly led to such a ham-handed policy, it is natural for people to suspect an explanation in terms of political advantages that the ruling parties were expecting to get. It has certainly given, at least for the time being, a great political image to the Prime Minister of being a huge fighter against corruption, even though the policy has done very little to achieve anything on that front.
These 50 days of hardship will not take black assets out of the economy?

How could it? Only a very small proportion of black money (around 6 per cent, certainly less than 10 per cent) is in cash. How can cleaning up of 10 per cent, at most, of black money clean it all up? Even that 10 per cent is a huge overestimate, since the ‘black money dealers’ are much more skilled in overcoming official barriers than are normal honest people who are simply harassed — or made to lose their money — because of their lack of specialised skill in avoiding transaction barriers.
If it is a bad policy, why do you think there haven’t been protests against demonetisation yet?

The government’s publicity surrounding this inept move has been very strong. People have been told again and again that if you are against demonetisation, you must be in favour of black money. This is a ridiculous analysis, but a readily exploitable political slogan. The persistent crisis created by demonetisation is only slowly becoming clear in terms of hard statistics as well as in public perception.

The false perception of nobility and success can be held up through endless repetition of distorted ‘facts’ and propaganda. The truth may ultimately prevail, but the government might be able to maintain the loyalty of a large part of the public for a long time, certainly until after the U.P. elections.

It is worth remembering that the notorious Irish famines in the 1840s did not immediately cause serious public agitation against the government run from London. That happened only later — much later — but when it did happen, the understanding of blame had a huge long-run impact, making the Irish people deeply suspicious of everything that the government in London did.

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12. WOULD ISRO LAUNCHES BE SO CHEAP IF INDIAN LABOUR WERE NOT UNDERPAID?
by Vasudevan Mukunth	
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(The Wire - 16 January 2017)
We know India’s ineffective legislation protects the cheapness of labour – but how do we know ISRO isn’t inadvertently profiting from it?

When the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched its Mars Orbiter Mission in November 2013, its cost was a matter of much, and well deserved, pride: proximate to a puny Rs 500 crore. However, fixating on the price-tag often drew admirers’ attention away from the fact that the probe was a technology-demonstrator, put together by scientists and engineers to show more than anything else that it could be manoeuvred into orbit around Mars. It succeeded on September 24, 2014. At that moment, the primary mission was immediately completed. What’s been happening since then is the secondary mission. Loftier ambitions, such as those rivalling the NASA Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission (MAVEN) probe that launched at the same time, would’ve commanded a heftier investment.

Then again, how much heftier? Would we ever build something at the cutting edge of space exploration or research whose costs we wouldn’t be able to keep down? Further yet, how sustainable are our attempts at keeping costs down?

Shankkar Aiyar, a journalist and analyst, wrote in the New Indian Express (edited for brevity) on January 16:

    It cost ISRO roughly $74 million to put Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) in orbit, while it cost Hollywood producers around $100 million to produce Gravity. NASA spent $671 million the very same week for its Mars mission, MAVEN. ISRO works with a fraction of the budget available to NASA. In 2016-17 it was around Rs 7,500 crore or around $1.1 billion, while the 2016 budget for NASA was $18.5 billion. The drum rolls and applause are well deserved. The question is, can India leverage this and other illustrative successes in frugal engineering and innovation for greater good. How does India and how do Indians benefit from the spectacular capabilities of ISRO exhibited year after year? A critical experiment underway may have some answers.

    In late 2015, Roads and Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari asked why India cannot shift to electric buses and vehicles [to mitigate air pollution]. The answer: high cost of batteries. Although India does not lag in technological prowess to suffer high costs. Remember the Mars Orbiter, which travelled 622 million km in its heliocentric trajectory towards Mars, was powered by batteries developed by ISRO. … Gadkari approached ISRO and asked if the technology that powered the MOM can be made available. The result: ISRO made available the technology to produce step-down versions of lithium ion batteries for automobiles. The cost of producing these batteries is expected to be a 10th of what it would cost to import these batteries.

For Aiyar, frugal engineering is a legitimate aspiration to work towards and which he’s calling ISRO a leader in. This is indisputable; like the author says, the accolade is well-deserved. However, we must be wary of frugality because from there to ‘making do’ is just a hop. Frugal engineering is a brand of engineering targeted at markets where there is a marked preference for function over form, for “getting the job done” over “making it look good while it’s doing it”. In such cases, optimising for performance has to compete with optimising for cost, and an outcome that is the product of this process won’t be able to do better than it can afford. So while frugal engineering may be a good thing in many environments, it shouldn’t be so for space. Launch vehicles always need to meet a safety threshold; if they can’t afford to, then that’s a deal-breaker. #SpaceIsHard

And #SpaceIsHard no matter where

However, it is undeniable that there is another kind of frugality that ISRO embodies: low cost to space – which brings us to a bigger-picture conflict that has been lurking behind our braggadocio. A friend of mine, who lives in Ottawa, recently remarked that most things cost more or less the same to make in India as they do in the West, and that the difference only really kicks in when human labour becomes involved. In the West, labour is valued more highly than it is in India. As a result, products whose development has benefited by human skill and work have to recover more value through their exchange than do products that have involved no human efforts. In India, human labour costs much less, so human-made things cost not much at all.

This author has received anecdotal information on multiple occasions that ISRO seldom pays for overtime while freely asking it – and particularly so ahead of MOM’s launch. Overtime for the sake of helping your employer out is sweet but it shouldn’t come at the expense of allowing your employer to make a habit of it. And if an employee doesn’t want to do it, she should be able to opt out. A well-structured pay-scale that clearly defines what counts as overtime work, and how much an employee will be paid for it, is essential to feeling like one’s work and time are being valued and are not being taken for granted. Further, as a UN Development Programme report put it in 2015,

    While work is generally beneficial for people, the quality of work can be affected by doing too much work. A culture of overwork is increasingly common, facilitated by all kinds of mobile devices that enable constant access to work. The pressure of a round-the-clock work culture is particularly acute in highly skilled, highly paid professional service jobs such as law, finance, consulting and accounting. The overwork culture can lock gender inequality in place, because work–family balance is made more difficult for women, who bear a disproportionate share of care work.

It is true that a fledgling space organisation in a developing nation with a puny budget is trying to do amazing and “world class” things. At the same time, how do we know that such practices aren’t privileging us to delay a reevaluation of human labour, and to formulate and impose fairer wages? Because every employee who agrees to work for cheap is also cheapening labour as such; it is incumbent on all of us to insist on being paid fairly.

This is undeniably a leading reason ISRO, or any successful public-sector organisation in India, is able to keep costs down. Imagine paying a domestic worker Rs 10,000 a month instead of Rs 1,500; now imagine what other costs would go up as a result.

In this exercise, all of it might seem arbitrary, that the price of commodity X rises with income Y, and that X might as well be x (<X) because we’ve been able to keep Y at y (<Y). This is wrong: we’ve not been able to keep Y at y as much as your household help’s salary, and her economic class, down. If onions cost, say, Rs 200 a kilo, even a technology-demonstrator of a mission to Mars could cost Rs 4,800 crore instead of the Rs 480 crore it did. Should this make us cheer harder for how much we and our country value human labour or quieter for no longer being able to claim our interplanetary mission cost less than a Hollywood movie?

Public-sector undertakings (PSUs) are a high-wage island in India, which is why people are eager to join them. But it doesn’t mean the wages are great in absolute terms. This is a reflection of low living standards across the board that even higher PSU wages alone may not remedy.

Opportunities in disparity

This isn’t to decry all forms of disparity as much as to highlight an impending conflict we are faced with. For example, a major part of ISRO’s recent success has been attributable to the fact that launch costs in Europe and the US are very high, and have been kept down in some cases by feats of managerial, engineering and administrative excellence. But by and large, the costs are sky-high and frequently unaffordable for payload makers and operators from developing nations. ISRO has used this disparity to build low-cost launchers. And by exploiting this disparity, India – through ISRO – has reduced the disparity between itself and developed nations in some other sector, for example by reinvesting profits. Clearly, being able to do things on the cheap results in an economy of opportunities that evaporates the longer it is sustained, with good effect.

However, there needs to be a line such that this ‘exploitation of disparity’ doesn’t go all the way, such that individuals are not bled for the sake of broader sectoral gains that may or may not reach them. For example, workers who clean open drains in urban India are paid a pittance and not given any safety equipment worthy of the name. This allows municipal authorities to keep drain-cleaning costs low. This is wrong, concretising as it does an ethic that is antithetical to the idea of ‘exploiting to gain’.

Similarly, launching a PSLV rocket at $15 million apiece shouldn’t ever be squared off against cleaning drains for a couple hundred rupees. Yes, should this person have to be paid, say, Rs 1,000 for every 100 metres of drain cleaned while wearing protective clothing, the difference between a PSLV and, say, a Ukrainian Dnepr would fall from the already-thin $9 million (Rs 61.3 crore) that it currently is. Even the lithium-ion batteries that Gadkari wants to power electric buses are liable to have profited from cheap labour, from the ineffective legislation that protects the cheapness of labour.

In June 2016, in the Anna University, Chennai, campus, two labourers died while trying to seal a tank (part of an experimental setup to see if pressurised air could store energy). But despite there being no less than sixteen laws claiming to protect their lives, not even one was contravened in their deaths. Thomas Manuel wrote in The Wire at the time:

    The International Labour Organisation (ILO) statistics from 2003 claimed that 403,000 people die from work-related problems in India. This translates to about 46 people dying per hour. No updated statistic seems to be available. Per the ILO website, India has only ratified five conventions on occupational health and safety; more than 12 are pending. This includes convention 155 that discusses the fundamental tenets of an occupational health and safety policy that a country must implement. There is even an economic angle for improving working conditions. The loss of productivity and subsequently revenue, directly and indirectly, due to injuries and accidents in the workplace has been quantified in countries like China to be to the tune of $38 billion.

The noted architect A. Srivathsan once defined beauty in a way that has seemed conceptually relevant in a variety of fields (this author took his classes at the Asian College of Journalism). He said, “Ugliness is marked by erasure and beauty is that which is marked by permanence.” So by repeating and repeatedly celebrating ISRO’s frugality, we are beautifying it – and uglifying that which stands in opposition to it. At times like these, we should be careful to not uglify the dignity and value of human labour itself in pursuit of what happen to be circumstantial gains. Or, in the name of this or another frugality, we will soon seek to erase them. 

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13. YAKOVENKO ON HALL, 'CULTURAL STUDIES 1983: A THEORETICAL HISTORY'
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 Stuart Hall. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Ed. Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2016. 232 pp. $23.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8223-6263-0.

Reviewed by Sergiy Yakovenko (MacEwan University)
Published on H-Russia (January, 2017)
Commissioned by Hanna Chuchvaha

Marx between Structure and Culture

Today’s undergrads who take courses in cultural studies might be surprised to learn what their discipline was primarily about thirty-five years back. Moreover, leaving alone today’s ever more diversified field of cultural studies’ inquiry, even such areas as postmodernism, ethnic studies, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, new historicism, psychoanalysis, communication, and gender, which attracted so many scholars at the discipline’s very beginning in the United States, are barely touched if ever in Stuart Hall’s Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History (2016), edited and with an introduction by Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg. Marxism and Cultural Studies 1983 would be a much more candid, although, admittedly, less commercially viable, title for the book. Hence both the editors’ introduction and the author’s preface are full of disclaimers regarding the seemingly comprehensive and universal character of the title—the disclaimers that are necessary to appreciate Hall’s volume for what it is and is declared to be: a theoretical history. Hall (1932-2014), who was at the foundations of British cultural studies from its inception in the 1960s, has undoubtedly earned his place in history as the most influential theorist in the field. Considering the fact that most of his pioneering work, done both at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and at the Open University, was primarily collaborative research published in edited volumes, this edition is unique in bringing to the public one of Hall's full-authored contributions.

The provenance of the totalizing Marxist inflection of Hall’s Cultural Studies becomes clear when we learn about the occasion for the collected texts to appear: the eight essays comprising the volume were initially lectures delivered by the author in the summer of 1983 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as part of the teaching institute “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture: Limits, Frontiers, Boundaries.” As Hall had some reservations with regard to the publication of his lectures as a book (having written, nevertheless, a preface to the projected volume in 1988), this posthumous edition can be viewed as a tribute to the great scholar by the collection’s editors Grossberg and Slack—Hall’s disciples and colleagues, who applied minimal editing in order to preserve “the characteristic rhythms of Hall’s oral delivery” (p. xiii). In their introduction, the editors make it clear that they want us to perceive of the volume as a record of the event rather than as a closed theoretical position: being primarily “Marxism’s contribution to the interpretation of culture” (p. ix) due to its necessary compliance with the topic of the teaching institute, the volume’s obvious lacunae with respect to a comprehensive account of cultural studies as a discipline were later partially fixed by Hall himself in his widely anthologized essay, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies” (1992), presented initially as a lecture at the 1988 conference “Cultural Studies Now and in the Future” (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), where he extended his survey to the questions of race, subjectivity, poststructuralism, and feminism.

Marxism as a centerpiece of Cultural Studies 1983 is not only a tribute to the institute’s topic. As Hall elucidates in his preface and in the first lecture, “The Formation of Cultural Studies,” his outlook reflects his own personal experience of cultural studies, which has its undisguised political and institutional underpinning specific to the intellectual situation in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. Emerging “as a response to a very concrete political problem”—how the British working class evolved “under conditions of economic affluence” (p. 5)—the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, of which Hall was a director from 1969 to 1979, succeeding its founding director Richard Hoggart, cultural studies became a platform for the New Left to wrestle with a vulgar Marxism of class struggle and economic determinism. As Hall himself admits, “it was partially fortuitous that the field was organized around the concept of culture, which is exceedingly slippery, vague, and amorphous, with multifarious and diverse meanings” (p. 4). In spite of its strong sociological implications, cultural studies from the very beginning was taken up by professors and graduates of departments of English as well as Hoggart and Hall himself, both of whom shaped their theoretical perspectives in a respectful opposition to a very influential figure in British literary criticism—F. R. Leavis. Having paid homage to literary criticism, especially to Leavis’s close reading methodology, as an important resource for the constitution of cultural studies, Hall notes that it was crucial for Hoggart in his The Uses of Literacy (1957) to overcome Matthew Arnold’s traditional take on culture, championed by Leavis, as the highest achievement of human thought, and to turn to the reading of “the front living room” of the prewar British industrial working class as if it were “a piece of prose” (pp. 9-10). Among other influential sources of cultural studies, Hall mentions anthropology (practiced mainly by Raymond Williams), admitting its relative weakness in Britain, and sociology, with its important discussion of mass society and mass culture, initiated by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s. According to Hall, mass culture and late capitalism are exactly the subjects where Hoggart’s mere refocusing of Leavis’s methodology proved utterly insufficient and where cultural studies wended its way to what Hall considers its most effective direction—the so-called Western Marxist tradition, represented by Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, György Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci. That is why Hoggart’s departure from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to join UNESCO is underlined as a milestone for “the Marxist alternative [to] become … a significant reference point and resource for developing Cultural Studies” (p. 24).

Williams’s contribution to cultural studies, which is the focus of the second lecture, “Culturalism,” vividly exemplifies that passage from Marxism as literary criticism to Marxism as critique of ideology. Williams’s early Culture and Society: 1780-1950 (1958), being just a rereading of the literary, Arnold-Leavis tradition from a broader cultural perspective, was later offset by E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), where the court documents, pamphlets, and newspapers represent precisely those popular voices that Williams could not find in the literary canon. Williams’s The Long Revolution (1961) brings a different and, for Hall, a much more interesting perspective on what he calls “the totality” (p. 38), or a conception of narrowly understood social practices in their relations with the rest of the social formation. Williams’s “culturalism” stems from his newly acquired philosophical and anthropological concept of Promethean Man, “who does not exist apart from the activity” (p. 39), which confirms Williams’s inclination to Hegel and early Marx’s abandonment of economic determination in favor of human energy that constitutes the material social practices. Williams’s turn to “the structure of feeling” points to the balance of Marxist realization that people are subjects of the imposed economic relationships and a greater attention to the field of culture and consciousness, as well as signifies, in Hall’s view, Williams’s passage from being a covert Marxist to a covert structuralist. Hall’s next lecture, “Structuralism,” is both a tribute to and a refutation of Émile Durkheim and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism understood not so much as a particular method as rather “a mode of thought” (p. 54). Like Williams, Lévi-Strauss shows an evolution from a Marxist-culturalist perspective to a structuralist one; yet, unlike Williams, his structuralism is not “covert,” and by the time Lévi-Strauss writes his four volumes of Mythologiques (1969-81), he parts company from cultural studies as he moves “away from the interface between the symbolic and the social and into the internal organisation of the symbolic forms themselves” (pp. 67-68). In accord with his decisive repudiation of Lévi-Strauss’s treatment of myth as “a self-sufficient system of logic” (p. 67) outside of historical specificity, Hall dedicates two subsequent lectures, “Rethinking the Base and Superstructure” and “Marxist Structuralism,” to a constructive argument with Louis Althusser’s constant attempts to impose a structuralist stigma on such key Marx’s concepts as the metaphor of the base and superstructure, the theory of determination, the problem of the subject, and the nature of the social formation. Hall explains Althusser’s fallacy in distinguishing between the “false,” early, Hegelian, pre-structuralist Marx and the “true,” post-Hegelian Marx by a misreading of “different levels of abstraction” (p. 103), on which Marx operates approaching his various concepts. Despite his disagreement with Althusser, what Hall calls “Althusser’s break with classical Marxism” (p. 127) helped him to hone his position on ideology (Lecture 6, “Ideology and Ideological Struggle”). Contrary to Althusser, Hall insists that ideology does not only reproduce the social relations of production but also sets limits to the self-reproduction of society by means of an unending process of “the shifts of accentuation,” which constantly occur in ideology understood as language. This conceptualization of ideology as language with its shifts of accentuation, akin to Derridian différance, makes perfect sense when projected on Hall’s conceptualization of hegemony, understood in terms of Gramsci, with whom Hall seems to have an unreserved propinquity (Lecture 7, “Domination and Hegemony”). Refuting the vulgar economic determinism, Hall posits the concept of hegemony as fluctuating and ongoing mastery of a historical situation where power with its ideological discourses is negotiated in a wide cultural field rather than imposed upon passive social subjects in a pre-existing class distribution of power. The same “noneconomic and non-class-reductionist way” (p. 180) of thinking the Marxist cultural theory is characteristic of Hall’s approach to the concepts of resistance, opposition, and struggle (Lecture 8, “Culture, Resistance, and Struggle”). Drawing on several vivid examples, including his own collection Resistance through Rituals (1976), Hall demonstrates how marginalized yet emerging hegemonic groups and individuals build their ideological discourses into the residual languages of dominant culture. The circuits of these fluctuating re-accentuations in ideological languages, “in which residual cultural forms are constantly appropriated, expropriated, and reworked” (p. 206), seem to be, according to Hall, the real subject of cultural studies.

Hall’s lectures from 1983 appear to be a peculiar event of appropriation—a fundamental attempt to retain Marx as a nondisposable basis for cultural studies by means of a meticulous, well-informed, and earnest guarding of his heritage from vulgar and reductive misreadings. The volume itself is a praiseworthy enterprise of retaining this hallmark of theoretical history and making accessible at least some of Hall’s works, otherwise scattered across less-known collections and anthologies. As the front page of the book reads, “Stuart Hall: Selected Writings. A series edited by Catherine Hall and Bill Schwarz,” I personally look forward to reading the subsequent—apparently projected—posthumous volumes of this interesting and independent thinker.


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South Asia Citizens Wire
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DISCLAIMER: Opinions expressed in materials carried in the posts do not necessarily reflect the views of SACW compilers.
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