RE-Articulating Everyday Resistance. Edgy, Plural, More-THAN-Human Cohabitations in an Age of Translocalisation

If as theorist and physicist Karen Barad (2007) says, ‘individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating’, shiftingattention from individual human action to human-nonhuman cooperation, from the urban inhabitant – already on the verge of being replaced by the figure of the migrant – to the more-than-human cohabitant, seems to be in order. Addressing the session’s question, How can one give room to forms of liberations that are not typically conceived to be ‘political struggle’ in Western ‘radical’ canons?, this paper proposes a reflection on more-than-human cohabitation emerging from global migration.

An ethnographic account of fieldwork conducted in Italy and Bangladesh reconstructs the trajectories of adaptive seeds imported, developed, selected and cultivated by migrants from Bangladesh on fields fallen vacant, or underused, as a result of rural exodus, flawed EU agricultural policies and rain scarcity. The ‘deshi sobji’, vegetables of the native country, growing in urban niches, cities’ peripheries, leased fields, and already traded far beyond Italy, tell about intra-actions which straddle urban and rural spaces in two continents and are counter-hegemonic, deflating assumptions of human control and European domination. Resilient connections supported by far-flung socio-ecological infrastructures, a more-than-human engendering of urban-rural territories, are revealed.

Under conditions of intensifying ecological devastation, with exacerbated social relations and border regimes, instances of human resistance (whether through self-organisation, advocacy, or migration) to marginalisation and/or discrimination along the lines ofrace, gender, class, caste are overlaid with resistant multispecies cooperations. Can these be understood as constituent forms of a more performative resistance, even if they lack its explicit solidarity and collective intentionality? By becoming more sensitive to biological interdependency, grasping multispecies cohabitations and connections which enable situated resistance to capitalist expulsions, can urban research help circulate, propagate, scale up everyday more-than-human resistance?