Interview with Bharti Arora, an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of English, University of Delhi.

Special Section titled: Decolonial praxis/es of solidarity in Indian literary and cultural discourses on social movements

For the full journal issue, see: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ccsa20/33/1

Summary

The special section probes how Indian literary and cultural discourses represent the making, unmaking, and remaking(s) of solidarity among citizen subjects, who agitate for their rights vis-à-vis hegemonic discourses of the nation-state. Such an exploration becomes significant to challenge what Mignolo (2018) calls ‘the colonial matrix of power’ (141),and the ways in which this matrix creates and enforces a regime of domination, management and control of South Asian states and their indigenous resources. The biggest challenge that confronts decolonised states is the reconstitution of ‘epistemological decolonization, as decoloniality to clear the way for new intercultural communication, for an interchange of experiences and meaning, as the basis of another relationality in opposition to the universalist projections of the western civilization’ (Mignolo 2021, 4). Werbner and Davis (2005), like Mignolo (2021) have cautioned against the idea of the nation-state, which is based on the hegemony of a particular group/community over all others, where the ideological apparatuses of civil society and state are controlled by a particular community. This vision comes closer to deploying exclusionary tactics of racism, which constructs ‘minorities into assumed deviants from the normal’ (Yuval-Davis 1997, 11), and systemically excludes them from accessing resources of the state.