University of Chicago

Department Member, Anthropology

Visiting Lecturer

Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University

Thesis Title: ENERGY EMERGENCY: PHULBARI AND DEMOCRATIC POLITICS IN BANGLADESH

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Precis of Nusrat Chowdhury's dissertation:


This dissertation offers anthropological perspectives on popular politics in Bangladesh. Two events anchor my analysis: a mass protest movement in Phulbari in the northwest that ousted a UK-based energy company in 2006 and a state of emergency that was invoked in early 2007 and lasted for about two years. Following fieldwork in 2007-2008, the dissertation explores how these local events intervene in the mutually implicated discourses of energy security and national politics. Both areas have been in crisis in recent times, most spectacularly because of the Emergency that coincided with my fieldwork and a power deficit of a third or more of national daily requirement.

Together, the two events made a curious pair. For a range of sympathizers of subaltern uprisings Phulbari signaled the future of popular politics; the Emergency, for its part, was evoked to reform a national political habitus. The hierarchical and antinomial status of technocracy and politics clearly set up in a global development paradigm found its most vivid expression during this time. That it was on the question of energy that a new brand of progressive politics emerged – energy being a typically technocratic problem involving donors, agencies, specialist knowledge and governmental apparatus – is what made the period of my research a significant moment of reflection.

At an analytical level, I argue that a dialectic of visibility and opacity shaped Phulbari’s politics and the national political scene with which it has been intertextual. The public culture of the Emergency, or what I describe as its “politics of non-politics,” pivoted on the question of transparency, a term that privileges the visual register. I start the dissertation by analyzing textual productions that challenged the conceptual boundaries of “citizens” and “crowds” vigorously guarded by the state for the purposes of technocratic governance. The rest of the thesis progresses by documenting the moments of friction among different regimes of value that the Phulbari Movement brought to the surface. Cash and collaborators, for instance, became evidence of the collusion between the nation and multinational capital. They were repeatedly and spectacularly targets of popular violence. Coal, as a subsurface form of wealth invisible to the naked eye, also evoked concepts of resource that differed sharply between the company, the protest movement, and many of its participants. Finally, by focusing on accidents and wounds to point to the affective nature of politics, the thesis presents ethnographic details that engage with ideas of citizenship, gender, development, and democracy in their culturally specific articulations. The dissertation, in sum, is a commentary on the ever more intimate yet inadequately theorized relationship between resource and politics in Bangladesh as elsewhere in the global south.

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