Protest and the City: On Object, Affect and Vulnerability
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Niharika Singh
Abstract
A lathi has a flesh of its own. Gandhi carried one, the police carries its own. Fashioned of wood thinned out and stemmed long, lathis being sold in shops are as unnerving as when clutched in hands, building authority. In one, it refuses to be simply ornamental, in the other, it marks bodies with legality. Authority emanates from this marking, the blood that spills and the deaths of which accountability is in its invisibility of documentation. Lathis are charged on the suspecting/unsuspecting who force an appearance in spaces distanced from actual belonging. In this article, there is a narrative of such a breakdown of the conflict itself, the space and the appearances. Reading through affect is a lot about undoing; grand concepts, strict functioning, identities addressed. Affect also has a lot to do with attachments. And attachments flow in and out of a network wherever bodies gather, in assemblies, demonstrations, in strikes and in riots. In these attachments, decisions are felt which later empiricist read as fixity of ideas and ideologies, only later, but affect is in the now.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editors’ Forum
- Introduction: The Global Riot
- The Feminist Strike as Threshold
- Riot, Strike, Commune: Gendering a Civil War
- Labor, Debt, and Reproduction: The Feminist Strike as a Revolution of Everyday Life
- “We Were Like Slaves, All Women. But We Won’t Come Back.” On the Rebellions Sparked by the Disappearance of the Hacienda in an Afro-Ecuadorian Community
- Queering the Protest’s Temporalities
- Collective Violence and Politics in Argentina
- Trans-border Friendships and Strategic Inclinations: Some Insights on the Molecular Emergence of Subversion in Chile
- Protest and the City: On Object, Affect and Vulnerability
- Crossed Wires in the Motor City: A Genealogy and Analysis of the 1967 Riots and the 1968 Strike Wave in Detroit
- Containing the Surplus Rebellion: Prison Strike/Prison Riot
- Review Essay
- Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier eds. Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World; John Harrison and Michael Hoyler eds. Doing Global Urban Research; Eve Darian-Smith and Philip McCarty. The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies
- Book Reviews
- Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines
- The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editors’ Forum
- Introduction: The Global Riot
- The Feminist Strike as Threshold
- Riot, Strike, Commune: Gendering a Civil War
- Labor, Debt, and Reproduction: The Feminist Strike as a Revolution of Everyday Life
- “We Were Like Slaves, All Women. But We Won’t Come Back.” On the Rebellions Sparked by the Disappearance of the Hacienda in an Afro-Ecuadorian Community
- Queering the Protest’s Temporalities
- Collective Violence and Politics in Argentina
- Trans-border Friendships and Strategic Inclinations: Some Insights on the Molecular Emergence of Subversion in Chile
- Protest and the City: On Object, Affect and Vulnerability
- Crossed Wires in the Motor City: A Genealogy and Analysis of the 1967 Riots and the 1968 Strike Wave in Detroit
- Containing the Surplus Rebellion: Prison Strike/Prison Riot
- Review Essay
- Sven Beckert and Dominic Sachsenmaier eds. Global History, Globally: Research and Practice around the World; John Harrison and Michael Hoyler eds. Doing Global Urban Research; Eve Darian-Smith and Philip McCarty. The Global Turn: Theories, Research Designs, and Methods for Global Studies
- Book Reviews
- Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines
- The Biafran War and Postcolonial Humanitarianism: Spectacles of Suffering
