| This dissertation argues that the figures of the peasant and the autochthon became central figures of collective ethical and political change in modernity. The paradox is obvious: peasants and aboriginal peoples are generally considered to be the antonyms of all that the word 'modernity' stands for. They normally figure the 'problem' awaiting 'solution' by some modernizing project of development. The dissertation covers four writers working between the 1880s and the 1940s for whom peasants and aboriginals came to represent or embody some of the urgent questions and answers raised by a situation of ongoing modernization. Through readings of works by Karl Marx, D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and Tarasankar Bandyopadhyay, I show how the peasant and the aboriginal have been imagined as counter-modernizing figures rather than as mere residual archaisms. Here the jagged and uneven modernizing project is cast in terms of Karl Marx's critical concept of primitive accumulation, and broadened into Michel Foucault's notion of biopower. I look at these as an increasingly widespread and systematic assault on the multiple and differentiated ways of life of peasants and indigenous peoples all over the planet. My four writers respectively focus on the Russian peasant commune, the Hopi of Arizona, the Breton peasants, and the Kahars of Bengal. The four authors studied imaginatively shift the focus to try and show that the peasant and aboriginal peoples they write about are not interstitial to the process of modernization, but are at its cutting edge as its targets. This imagining involves further paradoxes, however. Marx's brief account of peasants stands as a promise not kept and as a prefiguration of the uses to which the peasant was later put in 'actually existing Socialism'; Lawrence and Lewis, both leaning towards fascism, vividly dramatize the problems of modernity while abstracting and deterritorializing the very figures they deploy against that modernity; finally, Bandyopadhyay makes us question the received terms in which the story of modernization as primitive accumulation is told. |
