Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy

The article calls for a recognition of caste as a structuring reality of agrarian life in South Asia. Such a recognition may also have a larger and comparative bearing beyond India. The article also argues for a simultaneous recognition of the serious problems with the almost universally accepted “idealistic” conceptualizations of caste. Further, approaching caste as an aspect of land relations and the realities of economic processes would significantly enhance our understanding of its obvious materiality, which makes it persist in contemporary times. A widespread “blindness” towards caste in the agrarian studies and, likewise, the imaginations of caste primarily as a “religious” phenomenon have broader academic and political implications. Bringing them together would thus require a recognition and opening-up of this academic conundrum. A critical engagement with the disciplinary framings of agrarian studies and, perhaps more importantly, of caste studies is thus called for.

This article focuses on the development and transformations of adivasi political identity and its articulations with indigenous consciousness in India since the advent of colonial capitalism. The apogee of adivasi politics and the “politics of indigeneity” since the 1970s has coincided with the networking among indigenous groups within the United Nations. The history of such politics will be traced in order to illustrate the forms in which social identities appear over a long historical process. In other words, the changing character of the antagonistic contradictions between the hegemon and different sections of the oppressed will be illustrated, including the articulation of “indigeneity” and “adivasi” consciousness. Methodologically, the article promotes a dialectical interpretation of the phenomenon and counters a metaphysical analysis of identity politics.

The genesis of racism, its specific features, conceptual boundaries, and position within capitalist relations of production have been widely discussed. Although there is no consensus as to what came first, and neither as to what prevails in the complex and relational dynamics of social reproduction, there is a general agreement that racism is a multidimensional phenomenon that combines group discrimination and hierarchization, guided by naturalized assumptions and supposedly inherent differences. This study examines the historical features of several racist theories to provide a more accurate view of the reflexive determinations between capitalism and racism.

Zimbabwe’s radical Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP), implemented in 2000, diversified the agrarian structure by replacing a few large commercial farms with many smaller-scale farms. In understanding how the allocations evolved, studies have emphasized the effects of class, political party affiliation, gender, citizenship, and generation. However, the influence of ethno-regionalism or ethnicity on land access has been understudied. This article examines how ethnic mobilization structured the results of land distribution on the basis of survey data and other sources. Ethno-regionalism was inevitable in the small-scale A1 farms, since it mainly resettled peasants near their communal areas of origin. However, in the small capitalist A2 farms, ethnic tensions were perceived through exclusions of the “insiders,” as they were edged out of the allocations by the urban middle classes seeking accumulation opportunities in the context of an economic crisis. It is argued that if the latter trajectory persists, demand for land will continue to rise and fuel future land struggles, which might be colored by grievances of prior marginalization along ethnic lines.

This article provides a historical overview of the struggles and organizational processes of rural black, or Afro-rural, communities in Brazil and the Americas, variably known in local nomenclatures as quilombos, mocambos, palenques, cumbes, cimarrones, and maroons. The objective is to clarify who these communities are and how they were formed in Brazil and the Americas. The study is based on research with rural black community leaders, their accounts, and their experience. It shows that processes of resistance to slavery and oppression induced the formation of Afro-rural communities, leading to their recognition in national constitutions.

This article examines the reimagination of communities in an industrial cassava frontier of Ghana in the wake of a contested land grab supported by state and community institutions. Qualitative and survey data were used to construct the existing social relations in the communities through the lens of earlier processes of agrarian change that have transformed the social base of the communities. It is argued that the expansion of capitalist production systems into agrarian areas results in local citizenship contestations centered on land, and redefinition and reclassification of people and their access to land. The multiple claims and contestations that arose from the land grab and the political reactions from below are highlighted. It is further argued that differentiated dispossession and class differences determine the strategies used by affected people. While some farmers demonstrated agency by holding on to a “little pie” to enjoy greater community social cohesion, others, drawing from their local citizenship status, although contested, fought the land grab.

This review essay summarizes and synthesizes three books on Black and Indigenous agrarian struggles in the modern-day territories of the USA. It discusses how they recount the centrality of land, national liberation, self-reliant development, food sovereignty and sustainable forms of agriculture and land management to Black and Indigenous radical struggle. It then suggests parallels and divergences between those struggles and those in the Third World’s agrarian south. It focusses on the anti-systemic dimensions of national liberation struggles in the core, especially those carried out historically by Black and Indigenous movements, and details how those movements historically looked out beyond the US landmass for solidarity and to build internationalist fronts. Finally, it reflects on their role in destabilizing settler-capitalism in the USA.

A. Narayanamoorthy, R.V. Bhavani, and R. Sujatha (Eds.) (2019). Whither Rural India? Political Economy of Agrarian Transformation in Contemporary India: A Festschrift for Venkatesh B. Athreya. New Delhi: Tulika Books. ISBN 9788193732960 (Hardback), 264 pp., ₹950.