In urban and peri-urban areas across the Global South, politicians, planners and developers are engaged in a voracious scramble to refashion land for global real estate investment, and transfer state power to private sector actors. Much of this development has taken place on the outskirts of the traditional metropoles, in the territorially flexible urban frontier. At the forefront of these processes in India, is Gurgaon, a privately developed metropolis on the south-western hinterlands of New Delhi, that has long been touted as India's flagship neoliberal city. Subaltern Frontiers tells a story of India's remarkable urban transformation by examining the politics of land and labour that have shaped the city of Gurgaon. The book examines how the country's flagship post-liberalisation urban project has been shaped and filtered through agrarian and subaltern histories, logics, and subjects. In doing so, the book explores how the production of globalised property and labour in contemporary urban India is filtered through colonial instruments of land governance, living histories of uneven agrarian development, material geographies of labour migration, and the worldly aspirations of peasant-agriculturalists.

The book examines how globalised urban labour and property markets are produced by agrarian actors, institutions, spaces and territories.

This book uses cross-cultural analysis across Eurasia and Afro-Asia to trace the roots of contemporary border disputes and insurgencies in South Asia. It discusses the way frontiers of British India, and consequently the modern states of India and Pakistan, were drafted through negotiations backed up by organized violence, showing how this conce

This book reconstructs Deleuze and Guattari’s micropolitics toward a philosophy of ‘becoming-revolutionary’. It provides novel ways to comprehend their political philosophy, through a critical engagement with Chantal Mouffe’s theorization of radical democracy, Michael Hardt and Negri’s diagnosis of Empire, Franco Berardi’s analysis of semiocapitalism, the Philippine Party-List System Act, and the ASEAN Integration Project, to name a few. These initiatives aim to examine, expand, and challenge Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy against the backdrop of various present-day predicaments and practices that perpetually allow people to choose their own oppression. Furthermore, the book embarks on an invigorating journey through philosophy, politics, cultural studies, and contemporary events, searching for new modes of thinking and resistance that carry with them the radical potentials of a revolution-to-come. Through the philosophy of becoming-revolutionary, the book endorses the cultivation of new concepts, subjectivities, and relations, capable of subverting advanced capitalism and other kinds of ethical fascism toward a people- and world-to-come.

From the late 1970s into the early 1990s, a generation of female filmmakers took aim at their home countries’ popular myths of the frontier. Deeply influenced by second-wave feminism and supported by hard-won access to governmental and institutional funding and training, their trailblazing films challenged traditionally male genres like the Western. Instead of reinforcing the myths of nationhood often portrayed in such films—invariably featuring a lone white male hero pitted against the “savage” and “uncivilized” native terrain—these filmmakers constructed counternarratives centering on women and marginalized communities. In place of rugged cowboys violently removing indigenous peoples to make the frontier safe for their virtuous wives and daughters, these filmmakers told the stories of colonial and postcolonial societies from a female and/or subaltern point of view. Herstories on Screen is a transnational study of feature narrative films from Australia, Canada, the United States, and New Zealand/Aotearoa that deconstruct settler-colonial myths. Kathleen Cummins offers in-depth readings of ten works by a diverse range of women filmmakers including Jane Campion, Julie Dash, Merata Mita, Tracey Moffatt, and Anne Wheeler. She reveals how they skillfully deploy genre tropes and popular storytelling conventions in order to critique master narratives of feminine domesticity and purity and depict women and subaltern people performing acts of agency and resistance. Cummins details the ways in which second-wave feminist theory and aesthetics informed these filmmakers’ efforts to debunk idealized Anglo-Saxon femininity and motherhood and lay bare gendered and sexual violence and colonial oppression.

The American frontier, a potent symbol since Europeans first stepped ashore on North America, serves as the touchstone for Kerwin Klein's analysis of the narrating of history. Klein explores the traditions through which historians, philosophers, anthropologists, and literary critics have understood the story of America's origin and the way those understandings have shaped and been shaped by changing conceptions of history. The American West was once the frontier space where migrating Europe collided with Native America, where the historical civilizations of the Old World met the nonhistorical wilds of the New. It was not only the cultural combat zone where American democracy was forged but also the ragged edge of History itself, where historical and nonhistorical defied and defined each other. Klein maintains that the idea of a collision between people with and without history still dominates public memory. But the collision, he believes, resounds even more powerfully in the historical imagination, which creates conflicts between narration and knowledge and carries them into the language used to describe the American frontier. In Klein's words, "We remain obscurely entangled in philosophies of history we no longer profess, and the very idea of 'America' balances on history's shifting frontiers."

With a team of anthropologists and geographers, Insidious Capital explores “value and values” in what may well be the last phase of capitalist globalization. In a global perspective of fast transforming social spaces that move from East to West, the book explores the struggles around the exploitation and valuation of labor, environmental politics, expansion of the ground rent, new hierarchies, the contradictions of higher education, the off shoring of “immaterial” labor, the illiberal right, and the mobilizations against it. This is a book about the variegated frontlines of value within an uneven, but not random, geography of capitalist expansion.

Tracking Bengaluru’s dramatic urban transformation through the entanglements of finance, land frenzy, real estate volatility, and livelihood upheavals Over the past two decades, Bengaluru’s exploding real estate sector and massive infrastructure investments have led to land speculation targeting working-class neighborhoods and agricultural land for development. Chronicles of a Global City turns Bengaluru inside out to examine its “world-city” transformation that stimulated rapid urbanization and unbounded growth. Moving the spotlight away from the urban elites and “new middle class,” this book explores how people caught up in the whirlwinds of change in Bengaluru—from construction laborers, street vendors, domestic workers, and platform delivery workers to small-time property brokers, petty landlords, and local politicians—experience, struggle, aspire, invent, strive, and speculate to make a livable city for themselves. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research and activist experiences, Chronicles of a Global City vividly illuminates the multifaceted entanglements of finance capital, real estate markets, livelihood struggles, and fraying ecologies in urban and peri-urban Bengaluru. Its anchoring concept, “speculative urbanism,” provides a powerful, innovative lens for understanding the risk-laden practices of leveraging land, labor, and resources for the promise of future profit. Contributors: Hemangini Gupta, Pierre Hauser, Priyanka Krishna, Eesha Kunduri, Kaveri Medappa, Usha Rao, Shaheen Shasa, Swathi Shivanand, Vinay K. Sreenivasa.