Richa Nagar

For those who work in alliances across borders, coauthoring stories can become a powerful tool to mobilize experience in order to write against relations of power that produce violence, and to imagine and enact contextually grounded visions and ethics of social change. Such work means not only grappling with the complexities of identity, representation, and political imagination, but also rethinking assumptions and possibilities associated with engagement, expertise, and the very ideas of storytelling and authorship. Drawing on partnerships with sangtins and others, this chapter reflects on the labor process, assumptions, possibilities, and risks associated with coauthorship as a medium for mobilizing intellectual spaces, in which stories from multiple locations in an alliance can speak with one another and evolve into more nuanced critical interventions that destabilize dominant discourses and methodologies. The chapter ends with the last scene of a play in Hindi and Awadhi that the author wrote with members and supporters of Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (SKMS), Aag Lagi Hai Jangal Ma (The Forest Is Burning), in 2010. Even as this scene articulates the ways in which rural lives and livelihoods are relentlessly violated by structures of power and by our own complicities with those structures, it calls for continuing to place our hopes in fighting, dreaming, writing, and singing together.

... Five Asian ex-civil servants said in their inter-views (conducted by Richa Nagar in October and November, 1992) that due to the Africanization of the civil services, a large ... T B. Sheth Public Library and Indc-Tanzania Cultural Center 24 Shishu Kuni (Children's Center) 25. ...

GROWING UP GLOBAL: ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING AND CHILDREN'S EVERYDAY LIVES. BY CINDI KATZ, MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2004 WORKING FIMINISM, BY GERALDINE PRATT, PHILADELPHIA: TEMPLE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004 Like social theorists more generally, feminists have tended to think about process through time. Rethinking social processes through space (what geographers now call space-time) offers opportunities to side-step some unproductive feminist standoffs about, for instance, the materiality of discourse and the possibilities of universal norms across difference. -Geraldine Pratt, Working Feminisms [Ijfthe disruptions of social reproduction in Howa and Harlem are two effects of a common set of processes, .. . then any effective politics challenging a capital-inspired globalization must have similar global sensitivities, even as its grounds are necessarily local.. . . Precisely because globalization is such an abstraction, albeit with varying forms, struggles against global capital have to mobilize equivalent, alternative abstractions. I offer this countertopography as one such mobilization in the hopes that it invigorates the sort of political imagination able to counter the disabling effects of globalized capitalism.-Cindi Katz, Growing Up Global Growing Up Global and Working Feminisms tell stories about very different places and people, in very different styles, and often with a different set of theoretical tools. Yet Cindi Katz's and Gerry Pratt's projects are bound together by commitments that overlap, inform, and reinforce each other. Geography lies at the heart of both scholars' concerns as they draw countertopographies to connect struggles that are shaped by global processes across diverse scales and worlds. Both tell stories of deskilling and displacements, and of resilience, reworking, and resistance in the face of "revanchism" (Katz, 243). And both make a commitment to stay with the empirical problems of the "locals"-situations from which Filipina domestic workers or the children of Howa and Harlem cannot walk away. In so doing, they force the reader into a "longer, more lasting, closer association from which there is no immediate release" (Pratt, 4). Here we provide a brief overview of the two texts, and explore some of the specific ways in which they articulate "vigorous materialist transnational feminismfs]" (Pratt, 3) by reimagining research practices and uses of theory in the vast and differentiated terrain created by global processes. NEGOTIATING THE RECENT FUTURE IN HOWA AND HARLEM Katz, in Growing up Global, weaves children's social development through imposed economic restructuring of their communities, texturing capitalist development with the interstitial practices of everyday life. She focuses on a particular aspect of social reproduction, the ways children learn about and understand their environment, in order to "delineate between the admittedly overlapping material social practices that are loosely considered 'resistance'" (242). This approach is undertaken in Howa, an eastern village of Sudan, ten years into a governmentsponsored agricultural project. The Suki project formalized land tenure, closed grazing fields to herders, transformed farmers into tenants, and forced changes in cultivation from subsistence to cash crops. Katz stretches her complex account of development, in the dual sense of childhood development and capitalist development, from Howa to 1990s Harlem, in the throes of postindustrial decline. By focusing on the everyday practices of children's work and play during periods of intense economic transition, Katz develops a "countertopography"-an unlikely reading of two places along an abstract contour line. In this case, Howa and Harlem are linked by the "deskilling of youth." Through a detailed ethnographic study of children's work, play, and learning in Howa, punctuated by struggles over children's play spaces and opportunities in Harlem, Katz seeks to mobilize "alternative abstractions" to counter those of capitalist globalization. …

This opening section conveys, in the form of a bilingual poem (in English and Hindustani), the intellectual and political aspirations and commitments of the book while also introducing the reader to its blended and multilingual genre. The poem registers protest through metaphors and materialities of hunger, theatre, and manual labor. The refrain, "translation, no italics" underscores the manner in which the translations are forever shifting and evolving as a part of ongoing journeys; they cannot be fixed and reduced to their italicized equivalents.

Part 1. Differentiated Ways of Knowing. Introduction. Measuring, Describing, and Mapping Difference and Development. Knowing the Third World: Colonial Encounters. Knowing the Third World: The Development Decades. The Third World and Neoliberal Globalization. Part 2. Differentiated Livelihoods and the Nonhuman World. Geographies of Population: Discourse and Politics. Contested Environments: The Entanglements of Environment, Development, and Globalization. Disease and Health. Uncertain Rains: The Atmospheric Energy Cycle and the Hydrologic Cycle. Other Challenges to Rural Livelihood: Soils, Vegetation, and Pests. Nature as Latitudinal Trickster: The Carbon Cycle and Plant Growth. The Management of Tropical and Subtropical Ecosystems: The Pokot of West Central Kenya - An Indigenous Knowledge System. Part 3. Differentiated Social Relations Encountering Global Strategies. The Historical Geography of Colonialism and the Slave Trade. Colonialism as Spatial and Labor Control System. The End of Colonialism and the Promise of Free Trade. Trading Primary Commodities. Peripheral Industrialization: Paths and Strategies. The Earth's Crust as Resource. Urbanization, Migration, and Spatial Polarization. Transnational Production. Foreign Branch Plants and Economic Growth. Seo, Money and Global Finance Markets. Seo, Borrowing Money: Aid, Debt, and Dependence. Toward Different Worlds.

Part Two revolves around protests and campaigns that have formed Sangtin Kisan Mazdoor Sangathan's battles with the Indian state, its development apparatus, and the intimate and violent hierarchies of caste, class, religion, and gender within and against which SKMS saathis live and fight every day. It describes SKMS's struggles to bring water to a dry irrigation channel and to win unemployment compensation under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA). Significantly, these stories are simultaneously about articulating a vision of solidarity through the continuous work of evolving complex relationships and political analyses among SKMS saathis, including a Savarna writer, such as the author herself, who is not a kisan or mazdoor and who earns her living as a university professor in the USA.

Through four 'learning moments' with SKMS, Nagar outlines the book's inspirations, sites, and contours. She discusses how those who are pushed to social margins create politics and knowledge by refusing imposed frameworks. Learning from such refusals requires hungry translations that are open and flowing and that are embedded in embodied solidarities that require radical vulnerability. Such translations strive to converse across incommensurable landscapes of struggles in order to co-agitate against universalized languages that erase the vocabularies and visions of those reduced to hungry bodies. In reconceptualizing politics as a shared labor on an uneven terrain that makes perfect retelling impossible, hungry translation becomes continuous collective labor of troubling inherited meanings of the social and of making our knowledges more alive to the creativity of socio-political struggle.