Ranabir Samaddar

Drawing on Indian experiences, Ranabir Samaddar explores biopolitics from below within governments caught in crises, particularly in the neoliberal era. The presentation will revolve around two themes: (a) the specific context of multiple crises––recent epidemiological, financial, and political crises culminating in a crisis of life; and (b) the emergence of “biopolitics from below” as a response to this conjuncture. It demonstrates how biopolitics from below manifests as a phenomenon specifically during moments of crisis and conjuncture. Biopolitics from below reconfigures our notions of care, protection, responsibility and solidarity. Traces of such politics momentarily appearing in the wake of a crisis may appear as utopias, but they are, to use an odd phrase, “necessary utopias.” Samaddar started working on a manuscript around this theme as a visiting fellow at IMERA (Marseilles) early this year and intends to revise the manuscript during his fellowship at the IWM.

Interpretation of ideas and events towards tracing the path to alternatives of the present reality is the broad theme of this research project. During this fellowship, Ranabir Samaddar finishes a book chapter provisionally titled "Layers of Solidarity". The chapter begins with a reference to events of solidarity with the victims of the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular the migrant population, and then traces the histories of various practices of solidarity in our time to examine the theoretical question: how do events of solidarity present for this world an alternative to the contemporary time of individualism and neo-liberalism? And, thus the poser: what is the role of interpretation here – as a social practice? 

In the same vein, Samaddar spends this time studying the theme of the "universalism of the specific" through a perusal of the writings of B.R. Ambedkar and Frantz Fanon.

During his Fellowship, Ranabir Samaddar is working on the interpretation of select thinkers, texts, and events - an interpretative act as a way to imagine a different future. The work will suggest that interpretation is not simply an act of reading as an intellectual vocation, but an activity that is organic to our task of coping with our present, more importantly working for a transformative future. In this exercise the work will stay on two axes: (a) The interpretative act is a contextual act. The postcolonial condition overwhelming the globe is the context in which the work will seek to understand some of the seminal thinkers, texts, and events of our time. (b) Yet if our interpretative act has to be transformative, it must think with our contemporary history - of nationalism, social contentions, caste, race, religion, population politics, popular interventions from below including biopolitical interventions by the lower orders of the society, migrant labor flows, solidarity, and various associated insurgent ideas - that offers thoughts and has produced events, which call for such radical interpretation. This work will be a small effort towards such an exercise. Re-reading some of the critical thinkers and texts of contemporary time takes place in this work in a postcolonial context. The methodological problematic the work will address is, namely, how does one bring the heterogeneity of contexts to bear upon the singularity of a transformative exercise of interpretation?

I am finalizing my book, provisionally titled “The Postcolonial Age of Migration”. The book’s sub-themes are (i) postcolonial histories of immigration, (ii) the refugee and migrant economy, (iii) statelessness, (iv) the dissociation of power and responsibility in the refugee care regime, (v) promises and paradoxes of a global humanitarian compact, (vi) the sociological significance of the keywords in the literature on refugee care, (vii) the refugee “crisis” in European history, and (viii) revisiting Stephen Castles’ classic “The Age of Migration”, plus an introductory chapter. I will be revising and binding them together into a book.

Ranabir Samaddar spent two months at the IWM during 2018 as a Visiting Fellow.