VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Gill, Bikrum Singh"

Browsing by Author "Gill, Bikrum Singh"

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The 2020 Indian Farm Laws in the Global Financial-Agritech Accumulation Regime
Gill, Bikrum Singh (2021-10-31)
Much of the popular analysis of the 2020 farmers protests in India identifies an “authoritarian” BJP government as the primary antagonistic force threatening the livelihoods of farmers in major grain producing states such as Punjab. This paper is motivated by concern that such a “methodologically nationalist” and “presentist” account risks obscuring more than it reveals regarding what is at stake in the contestations over the 2020 farm laws. It addresses these limitations by asking instead how the contestation over the farm laws renews the confrontation over the appropriation of the surplus value of the “agrarian South” that was set in motion by the rise of the neoliberal form of global capital accumulation in the late twentieth century. Locating the contemporary moment within the long history and broader geography of neoliberal capitalist imperialism brings to light the accumulation imperatives of global financial-agribusiness capital as key motive forces underpinning the farm laws. Attention is thus drawn in this paper to how the deepening of the privatization, liberalization, and financialization of agriculture in the Global South remains a key strategy for addressing global capital’s structural crises of over-production and over-accumulation. The paper argues that the intensification of neoliberal agrarian restructuring in India via the 2020 farm laws has opened further space for both a familiar mode of global agribusiness accumulation that aims to capture the surplus value of the real agricultural economy and for an emergent agritech mode of accumulation that is centered more on harvesting data in order to generate profits through financial speculation in the derivative agricultural economy. The paper concludes by emphasizing that the farmers movement is correct in contesting the farm laws, as the deepening of Indian agriculture’s integration into global capitalism threatens to render farmers into a category of permanently surplus labor.
Binge-Restrict-Repeat: The Governmentality of Eating Regimes
Cutter, Linea Lee (Virginia Tech, 2023-05-15)
This study employs Michel Foucault's conceptualization of governmentality, or dispersed rationalities that seek to calculate and maximize the health of the population, to study how eating regimes of truth influence how individuals relate to their bodies and each other. Importantly, the study of eating regimes elucidates how food rules are portrayed in the discourses, institutions, philosophical and moral propositions, administrative measures, and technologies (what Foucault refers to as societal apparatuses of power, or dispositifs) that address what and how to eat. In this dissertation, I specifically analyze dispositifs that promote certain foodstuffs as devotional objects that can be utilized as forms of pleasure and/or self-control. I conceptualize artificial sweeteners as ingestible stores of self-control and biopower, arguing that they provide a lens through which to view how mealtime rituals, temporalities of eating, and the intersubjective perceptions of the relationship between food consumption and the ideal healthy body have transformed in the face of discourses that emphasize the need to strip food of carbohydrate- and calorie-loaded consequences. The dissertation analyzes how contemporary dietary discourses in the United States encourage individuals to view freedom of food choice as a binary selection between binge and restrict eating practices. I argue that this notion of dietary balance is part of what I refer to as the neoliberal binge-restrict eating regime. I analyze the binge-restrict eating regime on three different yet supplementary registers: 1) that of neoliberal discourses of dietary balance, which are premised on logics and technologies of rigid, machine-like correction and anticipatory compensation through carefully planned periods of restriction and healthy eating followed by food binges, or periods where an individual indulges in seemingly unhealthy foodstuffs; 2) that of discourses that encourage the individual to consume endlessly but not allow signs of "excessive" consumption to develop in the body; 3) and that of edible instantiations of the binge-restrict eating regime, with a particular emphasis on artificial sweeteners. The dissertation concludes that the contemporary notion of dietary balance as "binge-restrict" is informed by a popular interpretation of food rules as rigid, algorithmic truths and contributes to a loss of embodied knowledge regarding how to eat well.
The Brahmin Problem: Charity, Expenditure and the Genealogy of Sovereignty in Travancore
Shajahan, Muhammed Shah (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-15)
Envisioned as a contribution to South Asian studies in general, and the fields of historical and political anthropology in particular, this dissertation develops around a set of relationships centered on the concept of sovereignty. In addressing the question of what the expenditure on Brahmins and the colonial, missionary, and Nair critiques against it meant for the evolving notion of sovereignty for the princely state of Travancore in the nineteenth century, I argue that the colonial, missionary and Nair critiques were not just based on the economic logic of productivity and the governmental logic of welfare, but also on the recognition of the Brahmin Problem as the fundamental crisis of sovereignty. Brahmin is the name of a problem that concerns the practice of expenditure, the relationship of property, and the construction of religion in the nineteenth-century Travancore. Travancore, located in the southwest of today's South India, was a native princely state under the indirect rule of the British East India Company in the first half of the nineteenth century and under the British crown in the second half. The problem was articulated in the colonial critique of spending money on Brahmins, their ceremonies, and their feeding. In trying to construct an archive of the crisis out of this problem embedded in the colonial and later missionary and Nair critiques of the state's expenditure in the nineteenth century, I focus on three key sites of contestation. The first one is the relationship of property, the second is the practice of feeding, and the third is expenditure on ceremonials. The postulation of the problem in these three sites is marked by colonial policies such as the integration of temples, or Brahmin properties, to the state treasury in the early nineteenth century and the activation of expenditure as a category of critique owing to the colonial pressure on the native state of Travancore to ensure the surplus of two lakhs rupees per year for the tributary payment for the British and the emergence of what I call public critique in nineteenth century. In my effort to build this problem, I particularly pay attention to its relationship with the evolving notion of sovereignty in the nineteenth century. This relationship is not a stable or steady text for analysis, but rather contingent on how the state variously negotiated this problem, leading to the emergence of the concepts of charity, trust, and religion. I characterize this negotiation of the state as translation, transposition, and adaptation within the colonial grammar of power. The archive of this negotiation, characterized by translation, transposition, and adaptation, provided me with the first material to think about charity, trust, and religion and see how they were connected to the evolving sovereignty of the state. By drawing on primary sources collected from various archives in Kerala, I map how sovereignty constituted a problem space in Travancore for a genealogical rumination. Following David Scott, Quentin Skinner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Talal Asad, and Michel Foucault, I employ genealogy as a method to understand sovereignty as a relationship of power rather than an absolute type of power. This relationship of power is characterized by the crisis of the Brahmin Problem, giving rise to what I call, following Scott, the problem space of sovereignty. My primary sources consist of Travancore administrative records, temple records, written exchanges between the Dewan of Travancore and the British Resident, royal orders, colonial policy records, records of the policy discussion for temple reform, newspapers, and magazines. The dissertation concludes with a reflection on the scholarly stakes in studying sovereignty as a relationship of power in the context of caste, religion, and state in the contemporary context.
Can the river speak? Epistemological confrontation in the rise and fall of the land grab in Gambella, Ethiopia
Gill, Bikrum Singh (SAGE, 2016-04)
In this paper, I focus on the role of knowledge production in the rise and fall of the Indian multinational agribusiness firm Karuturi’s efforts to become a leading global supplier of food through the initiation of large-scale industrial agricultural production in the Gambella province of Ethiopia. In particular, I interrogate a modernist epistemological framework which privileges the ‘‘developmental’’ knowledge of the Ethiopian state and the ‘‘productive’’ knowledge of Indian capital as central to the urgent task of mastering nature and bringing dormant virgin lands to life, while at the same time it necessarily discounts, through processes of racialization, displaced indigenous peoples and nonhuman life forms as beings incapable of efficient and productive economic activity. My argument in this paper is that while modernist knowledge production and mobilization has been critical to Karuturi’s construction of the Gambella land concession as a staging ground for its launch into global prominence in agro-food provisioning, it has also proved fatal to the project, as the epistemological inability to incorporate indigenous knowledge that accounts for ‘‘extra-human’’ agency left the company dramatically unaware of the particular socio-ecological dynamics of the Baro River ecosystem on whose floodplain the land concession was located.
Capital Without Capitalism: Adam Smith, Arrighi, and Cultural Political Economy
Smith, Christopher Thorne (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-24)
20th century debates within Marxism regarding the origins of capitalism—debates culminating in the Brenner Debate of the late 70's—have not been resolved. Recently, Giovanni Arrighi's Adam Smith in Beijing contributes to these debates by returning the conversation to the inheritance of classical political economy. Arrighi offers fresh readings of Adam Smith and Karl Marx to redefine capitalism and national development for the 21st century, paying particular attention to the relationship between state political power and market forces. Specifically, Arrighi makes the case that Marxists should not conflate markets with capitalism; that, in fact, markets are necessary for societies hoping to generate wealth for all. In making this argument, Arrighi argues for a market socialism, for a world of capital without capitalism. This thesis contextualizes this argument within the history of the Brenner Debate, noting how Arrighi's work refines earlier world-systems analysis and complicates Robert Brenner's accusation of Neo-Smithian Marxism. More importantly, this thesis considers closely Arrighi's argument and its reliance on the political economy of Adam Smith. It notes that contradictions in Smith's work lead to confused conceptions of capitalism for Arrighi and for the world at large, especially when one considers Smith's philosophical and ethical writings. Utilizing the lens of Inayatullah and Blaney's "cultural political economy", this thesis critiques Arrighi for neglecting the philosophical components of Smith's work, and attempts to expand Arrighi's definition of market socialism to account for capitalism as an ethical and philosophical project.
China in Africa. An assessment of China's role in developing infrastructure and providing aid to development projects. An imperialist model of governance? Or is China redefining the way we assess international relations?
Common, Kaitlin Rebekah (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-29)
"The original meaning of imperialism was a simple one: 'imperial government,' that is, empire in the classical sense (such as existed in ancient Rome, China, and Greece). In more recent times, imperialism has become synonymous with western hegemony in Africa and Asia from the 18th through the 20th centuries and with the spreading cultural influence of the United States" (Webster 2021). The aim of this thesis is to explore whether imperialism can be applied to China's foreign policy agenda through the apparatus of infrastructure. Using Kenya as a case study, it will assess how development, aid conditionality and employment play key roles in China's foreign policy model in Africa. The thesis will assess the role that China has in Kenya's development and adds to a growing field of literature that analyses the role of the Belt and Road Initiative in tackling the infrastructure deficit prevalent in Africa. It will conclude by identifying that gap that exists in China's infrastructure model and that imperialism is not an accurate definition of China's foreign policy agenda.
Cynical Futurities: A Critical Methodological Intervention Toward a Cynical Geography
Ramnath, Leah A. (Virginia Tech, 2024-05-14)
In this dissertation, I disentangle the Cynical figure – one who is capable of confronting structures of power by speaking truth to power – within a Westernized, Euro-centric discourse that authorizes the Cynic as an exceptionally powerful political subjectivity. Heeding the words of Sylvia Wynter, "…the Jester's role in the pursuit of human knowledge alternates with the Priest's role—transforming heresies into new orthodoxies, the contingent into modes of the Absolute." I recover the Cynic, once sutured to a distinctly Foucauldian discursive tradition to argue Black and Brown women function as contemporary Cynics using largely a Black Feminist theoretical framework. Drawing on biomythographies written by Black and Brown women, I future a Cynical discursive tradition in which the cynic is known by a different name.
Four Stories About Food Sovereignty: The Potential and Limits of Community Action and Transnational Solidarity under Conditions of Global Capitalism
Gill, Bikrum Singh (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2019-10-17)
The Women and gender in International Development Discussion Series is organized by the Center for International Research, Education, and Development (CIRED) and is an Inclusive VT initiative of Outreach and International Affairs (OIA). The series offers an opportunity for scholars and development practitioners to share their research and knowledge surrounding gender and international development with the Virginia Tech community and beyond.
Hip Hop, Bluegrass, Banjos, and Solidarity: Race and Class Histories in Appalachia U.S.A
Salmons, Patrick Jeremiah (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-10)
This dissertation examines the historical race and class tensions across the United States, and particularly focuses on Appalachia as a potential place of resistance against racial and class injustice. Arguing for a thick cross-racial solidarity movement, I examine the history of Black oppression from slavery to current modes of oppression such as mass incarceration and colorblind constitutionalism. The presence of anti-Black racism and under acknowledgement of whiteness hinders any form of cross-racial solidarity. To combat this, I ask, are the genres of hip hop, bluegrass, and country able to provide a reckoning of the continual racial oppression of Black people and an acknowledgement of whiteness, in Appalachia and the U.S.? I examine the historical progression of bluegrass and country, and hip hop, through the history of the banjo and music industry. The banjo, an African instrument, links Appalachia with histories of both Black expression and racial oppression. From here, I argue that the history of the music industry provides a further understanding of racial injustice that is parallel to the instances of institutional racial injustice in the U.S. This history provides evidence that Black artists used their music to enable social movements and resistance against systemic racial injustice in the U.S. Throughout several chapters, I analyze the many untold, forgotten, and hidden histories of Black racial violence that exists in the U.S. and Appalachia, and how music operates as a tool of resistance that can enable Black liberation against racial injustice. Through an examination of racial injustice in my hometown of Martinsville, Virginia, and using music as a tool, I suggest that, a thick cross-racial solidarity can exist with a recognition of historical racial injustice against Blacks, both locally and nationally, an acknowledgment of whiteness, an anti-racist framework for community activism, and a centering of Black voice, narrative, and Black liberation.
How does the US utilize Islamophobia in Counterterrorism Policy
White, Owen Thomas (Virginia Tech, 2021-05-14)
The 'War on Terror' has been the longest ongoing conflict that the US has been involved in and shows no sign of ending in the near future. The threat of terrorism is something that the US government has continually warned the populace about prior to the start of the 'war on terror.' The the fear that the US places on terrorism focuses on Islamic extremism in particular and can be considered to be unjust. This leads to the understanding that the US takes part in Islamophobia because of its continuation of an unjust fear towards Islam. Islamophobia is an idea that has primarily been associated with individuals instead of the state or media. This thesis utilizes the work of Khaled Beydoun to show how the US has kept the idea of Islamophobia away from the state's sphere of responsibility while also creating policy that takes part in Islamophobia. Beydoun provides this thesis with new definitions for Islamophobia that allow for new conclusions to be made when the state is considered. This is combined with an understanding of how the media covers events and protects the state from the ideas of Islamophobia. The understanding of violence, as shown by Asad, created within the state influences this thesis greatly because of its connection to how the state reacts to attacks. The state has historically targeted minority groups as an "other" that can be targeted with policy and seen as a threat to the populace. This has allowed far-right groups who target minority groups to grow without being targeted by the state, these groups are allowed to continue their violence because it aligns with the states goals. This thesis looks to combine these ideas with case studies of different attacks in order to show how the US utilizes Islamophobia in counterterrorism policy.
The Inner Life of Value: Exploring Fundamental Premises in Marxist and Classical Political Economy
Gignoux, Hannah Rose (Virginia Tech, 2022-06-16)
This thesis will examine some of the basic principles of Classical and Marxian Political Economy. At the center of the project is an examination of two distinct but related subjects: 1) value and 2) internal critique. I begin with a broad overview of the methodological and theoretical principles integral to the study of Marxian political economy and highlight its link to the content of Marx's work. I demonstrate the riven-ness of the concept of value throughout the thesis and show that this riven-ness is integral to rather than accidental to the concept of value itself. In essence, I propose that in order to fully grasp how Marx is taken up by political economists, feminists, ecologists, and critical race scholars in order to understand exploitation and oppression, it is necessary to return to the basic premises of political economy as the foundation of many of these theories.
The NGOization of Indian Agricultural Development and Implications for the Agrarian Question
Hammond, Erin Elizabeth (Virginia Tech, 2024-06-27)
India failed to answer the agrarian question after independence by not undertaking expansive land reforms and rural redistribution of resources and wealth. Instead, India followed the national bourgeois path of development, liberalizing agricultural production systems based on rural bourgeoisie and foreign interests. This path of development has led to unequal rural development and the NGOization of agricultural development. For agrarian and peasant producers in India, the liberal and privatized NGO development path of the Indian agriculture sector has had significant implications for their social, political, and economic well-being. The role of the private, for-profit NGO in the liberal, capitalist agriculture production system has not been given as much attention as the role of the Indian and foreign governments, international institutions, and transnational corporations. This thesis argues that private, for-profit non-governmental development organizations working in rural India reproduce imperial structures of foreign dependency and increases the subsumption of peasant and agrarian producers. NGOization conceals the global power structures at play within Indian agricultural production and can impede upon alternative solutions to the Indian agrarian question by appropriating local thought leaders, grassroots movements' narratives, and Indigenous knowledge, which further perpetuates imperial and colonial structures of rural communities and leads to the de-depeasantization of rural production systems.
Open Access Week 2020 Keynote: Counting what counts in recruitment, promotion and tenure
Gadd, Elizabeth; Ewing, E. Thomas; Finkielstein, Carla V.; Gill, Bikrum Singh; Johnson, Sylvester; Walters, Tyler (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2020-10-20)
Open Access Week 2020 keynote speaker, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Gadd, Research Policy Manager (Publications) at Loughborough University in the UK, gives a talk about how what we reward through recruitment, promotion and tenure processes is not always what we actually value about research activity. The talk explores how we can pursue value-led evaluations - and how we can persuade senior leaders of their benefits. The keynote talk is followed by a panel discussion with faculty members at Virginia Tech: Thomas Ewing (Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research and Professor of History), Carla Finkielstein (Associate Professor of Biological Sciences), Bikrum Gill (Assistant Professor of Political Science), and Sylvester Johnson (Professor and Director of the Center for Humanities. The panel is moderated by Tyler Walters (Dean, University Libraries). The slides from this presentation are in Loughborough University's repository under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
The Peasant and the Farmer: (Re)Constituting Settler Colonialism and Capitalist Relations in the US Imaginary
Jones, June Ann (Virginia Tech, 2024-03-27)
In the face of catastrophic climate change, scholars and activists have sought to fundamentally transform the existing food system in the United States. One solution being offered, repeasantization, seeks to reinvigorate the idea of the small farm accompanied by principles of ecological production. While invoking the term "peasant" promises something potentially new in the US context, where the farmer is hegemonic, this movement could end up reenacting the failures of the homesteading and back-to-the-land movements which reconstituted settler colonial and capitalist relations in the US imaginary. Using literature from peasant studies, development studies, and Marxist theory, I develop a theoretical orientation towards this potential problem which focuses on how the ideas of the peasant and the farmer are part of a dialectic which has regularly reinforced the existing dominant paradigm. Imagining a new way of thinking, I introduce the concept of the "peasant+ imaginary" in order to outline the ways that the general way of thinking about farming and farmers in the US serves the ideological function of 'othering' alternative practices and subjectivities. Through a historiography which focuses on the structural logic and compulsions of settler colonialism and capitalism, I reconstruct the history of the peasant-farmer dyad in the US context. Through a critical discourse analysis of Farmers' Bulletins, I also show how the United States Department of Agriculture reinforced a settler-capitalist farmer subject-formation in the interest of a "national agriculture" which served to marginalize Black, Indigenous, and non-capitalist ways of being. This dissertation is my contribution to literature which seeks to reimagine the US food system, with the goal of creating a truly sustainable agriculture which nourishes the land and the people who work and live on it.
Post-Coal Futures in Central Appalachia: A Critique of the Appalachian Regional Commission and Liberal Economic Development Models
Gore, Caleb William (Virginia Tech, 2022-05-17)
This project critically evaluates liberal development plans created for Central Appalachia by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) through a historical materialist lens. It demonstrates that these plans and their explicitly liberal origins are not sufficient for the working classes in the region to achieve a sustainable 'post-coal' future. Central Appalachia is one of the most impoverished regions in the United States and its political economy was shaped largely by coal mining that was overseen by absentee proprietors. This mono-economic structure has bred unique political conditions in the region. The economics of coal have historically influenced most political decisions. As the coal industry has declined, the region has been subjected to multitudes of economic development plans from the ARC. However, Central Appalachia still exists as an impoverished peripheral zone within the United States' political economy. This thesis is motivated by the decline of coal and the economic and ecological hardships this has created for the region's working-class, and the urgent need to begin envisioning a post-coal future for the region which avoids the insufficiency of liberal economic development. The thesis is not purely an attack on the ARC as an organization, but is rather a critique of the methods they use to enact economic development and shows how these methods are not only inadequate for the Appalachian working class, but all working classes subjected to the liberal economic development model.
Preserving Power, Remaking the Past: Race, Colonialism, Modernism, and Architectural Preservation
Flahive, Robert Andrew (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-16)
This dissertation examines how institutions and individuals navigate the histories of racial difference and settler colonialism by focusing on architectural preservationists' explanations of what are referred to as white cities. Through dialogue between architectural history, international relations, and critical heritage studies, I map the making and remaking of the histories of white cities, or what were designed as "European" zones – in opposition to "Indigenous" zones – that brought together modernist architecture, white supremacy, early twentieth-century European settler colonialism, and architectural preservation. My focus on preservationists' narrations of these white cities extends interdisciplinary work charting their historical production from a group of scholars focusing on the relationship of architecture in the production of domination in European colonialism. My work extends this scholarship by shifting to preservationists' narrations of white cities through the question: how do preservationists remake the histories of racial difference and settler colonialism that underpinned the production of white cities? In this dissertation, I argue that preservationists remake the histories of racial difference and settler colonialism that produced white cities by relying on what I refer to as didactic narratives to legitimate preservation interventions. Preservationists use these didactic narratives to reframe white cities as part of national histories, the universalism of the World Heritage List, and the history of the modernist movement in architecture and planning. My argument advances by showing preservationists' appropriations of the didactic narratives in the World Heritage List inscription materials for White City of Tel Aviv (2003), Rabat, Modern Capital and Historic City: A Shared Heritage (2012), and Asmara: A Modernist African City (2017) and through ethnographic fieldwork with local preservationists in Casablanca and Tel Aviv. To frame these analyses, I map the institutional changes within the UNESCO World Heritage Committee that sought greater legitimacy by expanding the typological and geographical scope of the World Heritage List. To do so, the institution enlisted the International Committee for the Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement (DOCOMOMO-International) to recraft the criteria to include twentieth-century modernist architecture onto the List. However, DOCOMOMO promoted a particular way of interpreting white cities through the didactic narratives that led to the proliferation of white cities on the World Heritage List. By charting the different ways that preservationists appropriate the didactic narratives in the World Heritage List materials and in the text of semi-structured interviews and from participant observation, I show how the intersecting power structures of white supremacy and settler colonialism that were embedded in the production of white cities are adapted by preservationists in the co-constitution of international institutions, disciplinary knowledge, and individual subject positions.
The Specter of Liberal Benevolence: Power, Podcasts, and Perpetual Peace
Blankenship, Spencer Edward (Virginia Tech, 2021-12-08)
This thesis attempts to understand how American hegemony is reproduced. Despite heavily criticizing American military expansion, the foreign policy elite still abet the expansion of the American military apparatus. I argue that international liberalism is used to capture the hearts and minds of the professional-managerial class. Specifically, the framings of the democratic peace theory, multilateralism, and international law soften the violent and deleterious interventionist decisions made by the foreign policy elite. Furthermore, these framings are used to academically bolster liberalism and add to their cultural legitimacy and saliency in civil society. By interrogating a podcast made by foreign policy elites, I show how podcasts function as a key site of hegemonic reproduction.
Sprawling Fields and Food Deserts: An ontological exploration of food and farming systems in Ohio
Byg, Reed Lauren (Virginia Tech, 2020-07-07)
Ohio is one of the largest agricultural producers in the United States and yet Ohioans experience food insecurity at a rate two percent higher than the national average. An analysis of Ohio's agricultural sector in relation to the current global food system suggests that the neoliberal imaginary orders social and ecological relations at both the international and domestic levels. This ordering perpetuates and justifies the continued exploitation of both labor and land and is based on ontological separation of human and ecological systems. This imaginary has given rise to the framework of food security, which has become the singular framework under which solutions to food and climate challenges are outlined by both local policy makers and major development and agricultural organizations. This effectively limits the possible solutions to only those solutions that fit within this imaginary. In considering the continued prevalence of food insecurity in both national and international contexts, it is necessary to explore other avenues for proposing solutions to the current food challenges, which will only grow as the impacts of climate change worsen. Food sovereignty, more specifically urban food sovereignty, offers an alternative ontological framework that expands the realm of possible solutions to food insecurity as a feature of the food sovereignty movement's recognition of multiple ways of being.
Strange(r) Maps: The cosmopolitan geopolitics of Sri Lankan tourism
Ward, Shelby Elise (Virginia Tech, 2019-04-15)
Concerned with the ongoing coloniality within the form and interactions of international relations, this project examines the legacy of colonial mapping practices on contemporary geopolitics. Specifically, I investigate Sri Lankan tourist maps as subversive examples of the politics of vision implicated within the historical formation of island-space under colonial mapping practices (i.e. Portuguese, Dutch, and British), and the contemporary political implications of the island geography as the state, including exclusionary identity politics during the the civil war (1983-2009). Using a mix-analysis approach, including interviews, participatory mapping, and autoethnography, as well as feminist, postcolonial, and critical theoretical lenses, I argue that Sri Lankan tourist maps serve as examples of the historically developed and continued right to space, mobility, representation, and resources between the Global North and South in what I term "cosmopolitan geopolitics." As geopolitics can be identified as the relationship between territories and resources, cosmopolitan geopolitics is concerned with the power relations when such elements as culture, authenticity, history, and religion are marked in places, people, and experiences as valued resources within the international tourist economy, particularly in this project which connects the colonial histories of mapping, travel, and international relations. In order to address the imperial, masculine politics of vision this project is separated into two parts: the first is concerned with the ontology and colonial legacy the map (Chapters 1-3), the second with the politics of the map, including exclusionary politics of the nation state (Chapters 4-6). Chapter 1 investigates the politics of island space as represented on the tourist map, where the state serves as both a "treasure box" and "caged problem." Chapter 2 argues that the cartoon images and icons serve as a resource map for contemporary geopolitics, and Chapter 3 indicates that this map simultaneously acts an invitation to the cosmopolitan, with assumed access and hospitality. Examining the various ways that the exclusionary politics of the Sinhala-Buddhist state are implicated in the representations on the tourist map, Chapters 4-6 look at cultural tourist sites, natural or wildlife sites, and former war zones, respectively. Overall, this is an interdisciplinary examination between postcolonial studies, critical tourism studies, critical geography, and Sri Lankan studies that examines the continued politics of vision and access to space with both international and domestic political-economic implications.
Towards Decolonial Climate Justice: An Analysis of Green New Deal and Indigenous Perspectives
Crew, Melissa Lynn (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-15)
The Green New Deal has gained international significance as the only prominent climate legislation in the United States. The Green New Deal has also become emblematic of a larger movement for climate justice; however, further analysis of the Green New Deal and its assumptions indicates that it falls short of enacting meaningful justice for those most effected by climate change, but least responsible for causing it. This shortcoming is due to the absence of calls to decolonize. Because of the large role U.S. militarism and imperialism play in contributing to the climate crisis, decolonization must be central to climate justice projects. Marx's concept of the metabolic rift and the phenomenon of humans' separation from nature through colonial acts of dispossession and enclosure of land plays an important role in thinking through the ways the Green New Deal recognizes this same phenomenon but fails to go deeper and recognize broader implications of the metabolic rift for continued U.S. imperialism. Additionally, the rocky legacy of the environmental justice movement raises questions as to whether working with the settler state can lead to meaningful justice. Though the Green New Deal is an operation of state recognition of the climate crisis as connected to other social inequalities, it does not overcome the settler state's reliance on racial capitalism and continued exploitation of people and the environment. A climate justice program that is in fact centered on decolonization and indigenous sovereignty is available and must be supported.

Browsing by Author "Gill, Bikrum Singh"

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