Incomplete Autonomy at the Limits of (Neo)Liberalism: Mapping Indigenous Ungovernability within the Global Uncommons in Jharkhand, India, and Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

As the crises of neoliberal capitalist globalization come to a head, long-standing liberal fictions are coming apart at the seams. From India to Mexico and beyond, the liberal democratic state is increasingly an instrument of extreme repression to defend its ruling class clientele rather than any semblance of a representative or redistributive mechanism. The nation is increasingly an incubator for nativism, religious fundamentalism, and proto-fascism rather than an imagined community of plural subjects. And the much-vaunted domain of civil society, which was supposed to guarantee stability with its rationality and openness, is increasingly incapable of confronting these mounting threats. The alternative globalization movement that once underpinned “global civil society” now seems like a distant echo. Is another world, then, still possible? And, if it is, where can we find its building blocks?

My dissertation addresses these imperative questions by analyzing Indigenous mobilizations against neoliberal dispossession and state violence in Jharkhand, India and Oaxaca, Mexico. As historic centers of Indigenous politics subjected to intensive and violent neoliberalization over the past three decades, Jharkhand and Oaxaca are ideal sites for understanding ubiquitous patterns of neoliberal dislocation and the complex modalities of insubordination that they can generate, wherein entanglements with the state and capital do not inhibit the cultivation of autonomous political horizons. I propose the interlinking analytical frames of quasi, pseudo, and anti-political society to explain the strategies of dis/simulation and minimal, strategic engagement with the state, capital, and civil society through which the Pathalgadi Movement of Jharkhand has created openings for communal autonomy. Similarly, I propose the concept of inverted civil society to illuminate how Oaxacan Indigenous communities have striven to protect their already existing autonomy from various forms of extractivism underwritten by state and paramilitary violence. Quasi, pseudo, and anti-political society and inverted civil society constitute repertoires of ungovernability, which I understand as collective maneuvers to reject, elide, and escape regimes of sovereignty, governmentality, and coercion. These inevitably partial and contradictory repertoires nonetheless retain the potential to renew, reimagine, and realize “another world” by subverting the ontological discontinuity between human and other-than-human beings and forging alliances based on mutually constitutive heterogeneity, thereby contributing to the proliferation of the global “uncommons.”

My dissertation draws upon twenty-four in-depth semi-structured interviews and five participant observation sessions conducted with organizers, intellectuals, journalists, and non-profit professionals working among Indigenous communities in Jharkhand and Oaxaca between 2018 and 2021. It is also grounded in an extensive literature review focusing on the past and present dynamics of colonial and postcolonial state-building; capitalist dispossession, displacement, and accumulation; and Indigenous collectivities and mobilizations across these overlapping time periods. My project is theoretically situated in the wake of postcolonial and subaltern studies and at the interstices of Indigenous, decolonial, and alter-globalization studies, reconfiguring key conceptual instruments and subverting romanticizing tendencies from these fields to understand the multifaceted dynamics of ungovernability among many Indigenous communities.