Scripting Defiance

Four Sociological Vignettes

Author by : Amrita Pande , Sumangala Damodaran , Nicos Trimikliniotis , Wiebke Keim , Ari Sitas

Tulika Books 2022

Language: English

540 Pages

In Stock!

Price INR 1650.0 Price USD 82.5

About the Book

This second volume from the authors (along with several others) of Gauging and Engaging Deviance is positioned between the ideas of deviance and defiance, and attempts to uncover ‘scripts’ through which notions of deviance as well as acts of defiance unravel. Taking on the project of 'Another Sociology or An Other Sociology' that was hinted at in the first volume, this volume argues that instead of the monologue about the binary of European modernity and its traditional backwoods, the contours are to be found in another archive, one that is made up of significant scripts or narratives of defiance that endured and endure through subaltern people’s cultural formations despite and in response to dominant ideas and ideologies. Such scripts within this archive, the authors of this volume propose, will help sociology reconstitute itself away from its original mandate: to be part of the 'fixers', to help the maintenance of social order, to predict and control aberrant behaviour and to create functional individuals and ensembles. With the pandemic having thrown a blanket over major patterns of defiance in the contemporary period, this volume weaves an understanding of the pandemic in terms of the idea of 'miasmic deviance' introduced in the first volume. The chapters look at specific figures of discontent whose scripts define most of the symbolic resources against systems of domination: the worker, the woman, the student, the artist, the migrant and refugee, the prisoner, and, as a counter-voice, the movements of reaction to their discontent - movements of authoritative restoration.

Sumangala Damodaran
Sumangala Damodaran, formerly at Ambedkar University Delhi, works in the areas of Development Studies and Popular Music Studies. She is also a musician and composer who has archived and written about Indian resistance music traditions, and done collaborative performative and scholarly work on music with poets, musicians and academics from South Africa, China, Tanzania and Ethiopia.

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Ari Sitas
Ari Sitas is a poet, dramatist and sociologist. He was at the core of the transformation of Labour Studies, of popular and theatre work, and a range of cultural initiatives in South Africa. He has been awarded the highest honour bequeathed to South Africans for his scientific and creative work, the Order of Mapungubwe. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of Cape Town and a Gutenberg Chair at the University of Strasbourg.

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