Paradoxes of the Popular: Crowd Politics in Bangladesh

South Asia in Motion

by Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury

Few places are as politically precarious as Bangladesh, even fewer as crowded. Its 57,000 or so square miles are some of the world's most inhabited. Often described as a definitive case of the bankruptcy of postcolonial governance, it is also one of the poorest among the most densely populated nations. In spite of an overriding anxiety of exhaustion, there are a few important caveats to the familiar feelings of despair―a growing economy, and an uneven, yet robust, nationalist sentiment―which, together, generate revealing paradoxes. In this book, Nusrat Sabina Chowdhury offers insight into what she calls "the paradoxes of the popular," or the constitutive contradictions of popular politics. The focus here is on mass protests, long considered the primary medium of meaningful change in this part of the world. Chowdhury writes provocatively about political life in Bangladesh in a rich ethnography that studies some of the most consequential protests of the last decade, spanning both rural and urban Bangladesh. By making the crowd its starting point and analytical locus, this book tacks between multiple sites of public political gatherings and pays attention to the ephemeral and often accidental configurations of the crowd. Ultimately, Chowdhury makes an original case for the crowd as a defining feature and a foundational force of democratic practices in South Asia and beyond.

Genres: Politics, Bangladesh, Anthropology

264 pages, Hardcover

Published August 27, 2019

Reviews

[LaanSiBB]

Centring the crowd as the locus for democratic change provides a critical analysis to peek the densest country of the world. I'm particularly interested in technological wrestling between state surveillance and public exploration of social media. The part for British postcoloniality is also up for debate. When the legacy is represented by corrupted government and educational system, not only how marginalised groups fighting for rights are presented as the metric, but also how groups come together for general reform requires more attention from academia.

[Margot DV]

Just so academic. I feel like my biggest issue was just how many different topics and ideas it spoke about - not just throughout the book, but also in chapters and even in individual sections. It felt like a ton of interesting shorter essays smashed together. The stuff I did get was cool though! Excited to talk about in-class because I want to get more out of it lol.

[versarbre]

a sort of media analysis of mediation....the author seems to be too much influenced by her advisor. As a result, one could hardly read the book smoothly without knowing something that Mazarella had written...Maybe a book should have helped all first-time reader get the points and pictures.