Rethinking the Concept of Left-behind Places. a Dialogue with Partha Chatterjee’s Notion of ‘Political Society’
With this concept, Chatterjee attempts to rethink spaces normally perceived from a Eurocentric and nationalist point of view as ‘left-behind by progress' and populated by ‘surplus population’ as instead 1) ‘productive’ spaces of: new processes of subjectivation, specific political forms and grammars, new forms of capitalist subsumption, resistance to the dynamics of subsumption, unforeseen urban forms; 2) structurally produced by capitalist logics and State dynamics, as ‘necessary spaces’; 3) permanently reincluded ‘in differential ways’ in the space of capital and the State
He observes these dynamics in the specific context of Calcutta. In particular, he examines the reorganisation of the ‘urban cartography’ in the postcolonial city along a fundamental division: between a space that ‘follows’ the Eurocentric ‘norms’ of urbanity and one that transgresses and exceeds them, giving rise to different norms. It is this second space that he calls ‘political society’.
In this paper I intend to retrace the construction of the concept of political society in Chatterjee - also in articulation with other authors of the ‘Global South’ (Samaddar, Sanyal, Gago, Simone) - in an attempt to exercise a different gaze on what in the social sciences is often perceived as a ‘place left behind’. I will do this by giving particular centrality to a. the urban/geographical reconfiguration from which the space of political society emerges, in Chatterjee's reading; b. and the political forms that emerge from this space. Among these forms, I will particularly examine populism, which is conceptualised by Chatterjee (Chatterjee 2020) as one of the fundamental political logics of ‘political society space’ and, more generally, of the postcolonial space.