Editorial
Volume 3 of Issues marks another step in our flourishing, experimental and multilingual journal, and brings together five essays on protest and architecture, metaphors of place, agriculture and identity, conflict and community, and state violence and human rights discourse. In addition to English, there are essays in Bengali, Bodo, Italian, Karen and Malay. Our contributors are Layli Uddin (King’s College London), Andrea Pollio (Politecnico di Torino), Elizabeth Gimbad (Western Sydney University), Rishav Kumar Thakur (Columbia University) and Rachel Sharples (Western Sydney University). Despite their varied sites and topics, these essays share common themes: the importance of place-making, strategies for struggle against economic and political displacement, and the enduring influence of language and metaphor, shaping how both place and struggle are perceived.
Layli situates rooftops as spaces through which South Asian politics and protest are frequently enacted. In her analysis, the flat city roofs not only supply residents with outdoor spaces where romance, gossip, gardening, gyms and kite-flying can flourish. Neither wholly private nor public, during times of protest and upheaval such spaces become tactical vantage points from which political movements can gather, spread, and resist. Under threat today due to the vertical rise and horizontal span of urban form, Layli argues rooftops can serve as reminders of the value of everyday infrastructure that can offer “the visibility and invisibility needed in struggles.”
Andrea begins his article with a reminder of how, in an otherwise condemning account of monopolies in the 18th century, economist Adam Smith grants certain locations special exemption. Situated then as now as a mid-point between flows of trade, Cape Town was one such site, and Andrea discusses how the city is today marketed as a hub for cloud computing. Anchored in earth-bound data centres and undersea cables funded by companies like Amazon and Microsoft, Cape Town is repositioning itself as a gateway into Africa’s burgeoning technology start-up sector. Extending Dematteis’ critical geographical work on terrestrial metaphor, Andrea argues rhetoric of the “cloud” risks repeating the kind of obfuscation Smith’s analysis indulged in two centuries earlier – disguising the violence of expropriation undertaken to forge new lines of economic and political control.
Elizabeth examines traditions of rice cultivation and identity building in Sabah, Malaysia. Despite geographical difficulties, competition from Australian and peninsular Malaysian rice, and contestation over land use from palm oil cropping, she shows the continuing importance of locally-grown rice to Kadazandusun communities. First-hand accounts by rice farmers, restaurateurs and patrons testify to the power of Kadazandusun rice to bind people to family, history, land and local identity. Despite the impacts of global trade, urbanisation and mechanisation, Elizabeth suggests locally-grown rice keeps alive alternative economic practices of reciprocity and community-making.
Rishav draws upon fieldwork in Bodoland, India, situated close to the borders of Burma and Bangladesh, to discuss local strategies for de-escalating violence between Bodo and Adavasi communities. He presents a detailed ethnographic account of a Bodo woman who, when threatened by a drunk Adivasi man, carefully negotiated the reporting of the incident to the men of her village and to local authorities. In Rishav’s analysis, this example – negating the threat while avoiding conflict between the groups or violent state intervention – points to the possibility of an alternative ‘imaginary’, however precarious, of a shared social life that subverts current dominant, and intensely agonistic, discourses about and within the region.
Rachel discusses the struggles of the Karen people in Myanmar-Thailand border. Sceptical of the endless reiteration of human rights language in the context of ethnic violence committed by the Burmese Army, she instead focuses on the work conducted by activist groups to train local Karen communities. Rachel’s interview with one of the trainers, a local journalist, brings out aspirations for revolution and freedom, as well as the complications inherent in such aspirations: not all members of the Karen political movement agree, and the pattern of hostility punctuated by temporary ceasefires seem destined to continue. Yet, Rachel contends, the very presence of a committed, organised and long-lived resistance movement should re-shape global narratives that frame such struggles solely in terms of human rights and victimhood.
Malini Sur, Liam Magee & Oznur Sahin
Editorial team
Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
*Featured image by Elizabeth Gimbad
