Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: This essay makes a case for reconceptualizing South Asia by refiguring postcolonial territory. It does this by bringing together the broad political history of a series of enclaves along the India-Bangladesh border with an ethnographic discussion of the contemporary political economy of Dahagram, the largest of these enclaves. The essay argues for a need to bring nationalist framings of space and more textured explorations of everyday forms of territory-making into a single analytic frame. Doing so provides a way to understand and think beyond the territorial impasses posed by nationalist framings of space—the inability to disentangle lived realities from affectively charged conceptualizations of the nation and its borders. The essay, instead, reframes territory as the relationality between broad spatial imaginaries and lived realities at the margins. Such a view allows for a conceptualization of the region that builds upwards from quotidian negotiations to challenge nationalist and communal geographies.
DOI: 10.4000/samaj.3791
Author: Jason Cons
Institution: The University of Texas at Austin
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1658789181