Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Upstate New York

Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Upstate New York
Dimensions: Variable
Media: Video documentation of public performance, Interactive ‘Micro-Seminar; Artist’s Books, Digital Prints
Acknowledgment: Art Omi International Artists Residency, Max Goldfarb, Ross Willows, Moon Choi
Year: 2008

KEYWORDS
+ postcoloniality and the politics of knowledge
+ the third world intellectual in the first world academy
+ ‘theory’ and ‘practice’: a false binary?
+ the problematic relationship of the intellectual with violent protest
+ Edward Said, Subaltern Studies and Indian historiography

The title of this work, references the Indian historian Ranajit Guha’s landmark 1983 book, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. The text on the banners are the chapter titles of Guha’s book and are also the ‘elementary aspects’ as theorised by Guha. The peasant and tribal insurgencies that Guha researches all occurred in the earlier part of the British colonial presence in India and it significantly predates the more organised and nationalised anti-colonial struggle of the 1920s. The words ‘organised’ and ‘nationalised’ can be read here as markers of bourgeoisie liberal politics which had the middle classes as its power base, markedly different from peasant constituency of the insurgencies.

This book has been remarkably influential in the larger academic discipline of post-colonial studies and has inspired a generation of South Asian as well as Latin American scholars. Guha was also the intellectual founder of the groundbreaking and influential Subaltern Studies Group - a collective of historians committed to rewriting the history of colonial India from the distinct and separate point of view of the masses. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India can be read as the foundational manifesto for the Subaltern Studies Group.

Edward Said, the renowned scholar and professor of literature at the Columbia University who died in 2003,was a highly influential figure in the field of post-colonial studies. Said had also introduced Guha and his colleagues work to the American academic audience.
Apart from the fundamentally political nature of his scholarship, particularly his seminal work on Orientalism, Said as a Christian-born Palestinian Arab and an émigré intellectual, was also an eloquent and impassioned advocate of the Palestinian cause.

The rock-throwing gesture of the performance refers to the iconic and controversial photograph of him hurling stones, along with a throng of people, at the barbed-wire fence separating Lebanon from Israel – the act was a symbolic ‘celebration’ of the Israeli withdrawal from the area in July 2000. The performance took place close to the lunch area at the Art Omi studios. It was performed for approximately 15 minutes during lunch hours. I started close to the banners and gradually backed up to the lunch tables.

Post performance, and in continuation of the work, I set up an informal ‘micro-seminar’ on Ranajit Guha and Indian historiography. The mock-didactic setting was just a ploy to initiate interaction and discussion. For this micro-seminar I had also prepared a set of mock-samizdat-handout style typographic posters that make up an ultra-condensed version of Guha’s book.