Resistance Studies Initiative Fall Speaker Series:
Distinguished researchers and activists share critical reflections on resistance issues.
Refreshments will be served
Open to all
Nusrat S. Chowdhury is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Amherst College. She teaches and writes on popular sovereignty and political communication with particular focus on Bangladesh. Her book, Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh (Stanford U Press 2019) makes an original case for the crowd as a defining feature and a foundational force of democratic practices in and beyond South Asia
Abstract: In this paper, she explores some of the constitutive contradictions of popular politics. She will do so by focusing on the ephemeral and accidental configurations of the crowd in the political life of Bangladesh. The paper starts with representations of crowds in Bangladeshi literature and ends with ethnographic vignettes from her fieldwork on protest movements. She ultimately will argue that crowds are a true political pharmakon in the sense that they are both solutions and scapegoats in performances of popular politics, thereby complicating the concept of resistance.