Political Ecospatiality
Livelihood, Environment, and Subaltern Struggles in Kerala

It narrates and analyses the situations that shape the strategies and practices of livelihood-environmental and identity politics in Kerala.

K. Ravi Raman (Author)

9781009337397, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 February 2025

260 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 2.2 cm, 0.54 kg

Political Ecospatiality offers a new perspective on subaltern struggles and raises the issue of how people with limited lobbying power can still organise to defend their honour or livelihood-environmental ecospatial systems. The book narrates and analyses the historical and contemporary situations that shape and reshape the strategies and practices of larger livelihood-environmental and identity politics in Kerala by drawing parallels from the rest of India and the global South. By employing Kerala as an example, it engages with and broadens debates in political economy, political ecology, and subaltern politics. The book moves through six ecospatial conflicts and assembles three key ideas – transverse solidarity, epistemological coalescence, and subaltern modernity – and applies them as analytical tools to form an overall framework of political ecospatiality.

Acknowledgements
1. What's politics proper?
2. Birlas in communist Kerala: narrative of subaltern river biography
3 Occupy Muthanga: land, forest and re-inventing indigenity and identity
4. Waters of transverse solidarity: dalits pulled down the shutters of Global Cola
5. Politics, epistemology and environmental modernity: anti-Endosulfan as ethical practice
6. Caste, land and the state: what if Chengara took the place of Muthanga?
7. Pombilai Orumai: plantation dalits, intersectionality and power
8. Ecospatiality in the Making?
Index.

Subject Areas: International environmental law [LBBP]