This paper explores the politics of invisibilising waste through peripheral spaces and built infrastructures of landfills. In particular, it examines the socio-spatial making and unmaking of the Bhalswa landfill in Delhi, from colonial to post-colonial times. It seeks to understand the processes and politics behind the opening of the landfill and the recent attempts at its closure, which have effectively failed. In doing so, it analyses the association of waste with urban marginalities both physical and social—in terms of the spaces it occupies and the lower-caste and class communities residing in the neighbouring areas of the landfill. Furthermore, the article critically explores the role of technology recently installed around the landfill in eliminating the waste crisis by invisibilising it – both spatially and materially, by incinerating waste and converting it into energy for profiteering purposes and creating new peripheries, i.e., in the atmosphere. This ‘dirty’ landscape of discarded materials, thus, offers us complex insights into the production of spatial inequalities, entrenchment of caste-based social hierarchies and the limits of technology.

Post-truth is increasingly linked to the decline of democracy through its association with fake news and misinformation. In recent literature, however, there has been a shift in discussing post-truth as a type of political discourse premised on desire. Building on this shift, I develop a new interpretive methodological framework to analyse textual data for post-truth narratives. The framework is premised on identifying and analysing the relationship between elite rhetoric of desire, emotions, and citizens’ positionality within the narrative using discourse analysis. I apply this approach to 1209 newspaper articles from three leading Pakistani newspapers during national elections between 2008 and 2018. I identify post-truth narratives on democracy and find that post-truth narratives highlight the democratisation attempts in the country. I argue that post-truth discourse can play an important role during democratisation, acting as a powerful mobilising strategy as opposed to being associated with the decline of democracy.

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.