Preface: Prometheus in the Garden of Eden. Essays on the Anthropocene

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The 'working class' in a pre-capitalist culture : a study of the jute workers of Calcutta, 1890-1940

This thesis examines the problems of protest, solidarity, organization and class consciousness in the history of the jute mill workers of Calcutta in the period 189Q to 1940. The jute workers were a very large labour force, numbering well over 250,000 in the years mentioned, who were involved in several strikes and other militant acts of protest against their employers. Yet they never formed strong and enduring trade unions and their sense of class-solidarity remained remarkably fragile, often giving way to internecine conflicts of religion or ethnicity. It is argued here that none of these problems can be reduced to purely political, technical or economic explanations. In particular,the thests examines the relationships of power and authority that the workers were involved in both inside and outside the jute mills. The consciousness of the Calcutta jute workers is shown here to be of a pre-bourgeois nature and this, it is contended, presents special problems in the development of labourcapital relationship or of class consciousness among the workers in the Calcutta jute industry. The history of this group of industrial labourers thus provides grounds for reflection on Marx's theory of the working class which takes a hegemonic bourgeois culture for granted

The Annotation of Skin

Taking my cue from Black Skin, White Masks where Frantz Fanon suggests the skin's profound impact, physically and psychically, in an ‘epidermal racial schema’ (2008 [1952]: 92), I examine how the annotated skin–culturally marked skin that is further marked–plays a crucial role in opening up questions around heritage, cultural memory and difference. I propose that British Asian artists like Hetain Patel, through deliberately chosen strategies such as the hyper-visualization and hyper-orientalizing of the skin in performance, urge us as audience to confront certain fixed racial and cultural assumptions around the meaning of skin, and force us instead to look closely at skin as a palimpsestic surface of a complex lived experience