CFP: Ranajit Guha and the Global South

Kairos Special Issue 8 (2) 2024 

As we write this call, Ranajit Guha, the figure behind the Subaltern Studies Collective has passed away. This commemorative issue of Kairos proposes to critically engage with his ideas and seminal contribution as a thinker from the Global South. Although Guha started off as an academic saboteur within the field of Indian historiography, his radical questioning of elitism characteristic of political, cultural and sociological understanding of Indian society radically redirected us to ‘the small voices of history’. His works such as Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, and Dominance without Hegemony not only challenged the prevalent notions about subaltern/ popular politics but also provided some of the lexicons and conceptual categories that informed the postcolonial critique of universalist history of capital and thereby helped de-teleologise and decolonise the understanding of dissent and resistance. His contribution thus went beyond the formation of an academic group premised on studying Indian society, but has a deep resonance for decolonial thinking in previously colonised countries. Academic engagements with Guha’s work, whether commemorative or critical, so far engaged with his writings in English. But Guha has produced a significant corpus of writings in his native Bengali language. The special issue therefore invites contributions that read Ranajit Guha as a significant thinker from the Global South with continuing relevance for vernacular traditions both within and outside of India. 

We invite papers that engage with, both restricted to, to the following subthemes: 

• Ranajit Guha and Susovan Sarkar: Bringing Gramsci to India
• Ranajit Guha and the Radical Intellectual Tradition in India
• Ranajit Guha and the Global South Thinking Tradition
• Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies Collective
• In Comparison: Ranajit Guha and Fanon/ Aime Cesaire/ Cabral / Du-Bois
• Ranajit Guha and His Vernacular Bengali Writings
• Ranajit Guha Today: Aporias and Openings

Please send 300-500 word proposals to editorskairos@gmail.com by 7 June 2023