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Once active spaces for everyday political discussions among the youth, reading rooms have ceased to attract youngsters today, as news is increasingly "consumed", not "engaged with". Seen here, Comrade Santo Gopalan Reading Room and Library, Fort Kochi. Picture by author, 16 January 2017.
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Communism arrived in the south Indian state of Kerala in the early twentieth century at a time when the matrilineal systems that governed caste-Hindu relations were crumbling quickly. For a large part of the twentieth century, the Communist Party – specifically the Communist Party of India (Marxist) – played a major role in navigating Kerala societ...
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Communism arrived in the south Indian state of Kerala in the early twentieth century at a time when the matrilineal systems that governed caste-Hindu relations were crumbling quickly. For a large part of the twentieth century, the Communist Party-specifically the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-played a major role in navigating Kerala society th...
Citations
... Consider Nelson, for instance that makes a representation of the anxieties of a state struggling to negotiate with its exceptionalism. Kerala as a state is founded on a sub-nationalism built around a discourse of exceptionalism interlinked with a faith in rationalistic modernity (Harikrishnan 2020;Mannathukkaren 2013:271). However, the impact of the climate changeinduced floods was so drastic and sudden that it arguably changed the psyche of Kerala forever. ...
In cases where structural oppression conditions the broader public sphere, the democratic ideal of a receptive public may be threatened by at least two possible outcomes which appear to undermine its stated goal of increasing understanding of counterhegemonic ideas amongst mainstream, oppressive groups. Either (a) counterhegemonic ideas are defanged to make them sufficiently palatable to a new audience, or (b) counterhegemonic ideas are taken up intact, and as a result the extant networks of publics which depend on oppressive structures and hierarchies will be destroyed. As we will argue, in certain cases of colonialism such as the Straits Philosophical Society in colonial Singapore, the conditions which receptive publics are supposed to ameliorate: (i) the social costs of speech, (ii) inequality of epistemic labour, and (iii) the antagonism between groups, are not only an irreducible feature of counterhegemonic efforts, but are in fact increased in the attempt to maintain receptive publics. However, this may be more a feature than a bug: receptive publics need not be seen only as communicative intermediaries for oppressed groups, but as a possible dialectical step towards new modes of socio-material life.
