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The complaints of Duplin County residents and the Environmental Justice Community Action Network about general permitting for hog farms in Eastern NC. These permits would give way to more ground and water pollution due to the relaxed regulations on corporate farms that hold multiple different numbers of livestock. Plans for the implementationa pipline called the "Grady Road project" interrupt the family and small scale farms in the ares. A quote from the Duplin County NAACP president Robert O. Moore says:

"The corporation has refused to implement any technology to clean up the water, citing the cost of doing so was too expensive. Yet the cost of this biogas project rivals the cost that would have been to implement cleaner and safer technology to ensure the safety of those living near these operations."

Many local groups in Eastern NC counties have previously tried to receive assistance to help with their agriculture waste managment systems, yet fall short due to many government officials only focusing on corporate farms. 

Read more at the link: https://southerlymag.org/2022/03/24/biogas-could-do-more-harm-than-good…
 

Early local organizing that uses conflict and difference as a way to generate transformative solutions. Solutions that serve more then one worldview instead of growing otherness, separateness, and hierarchy. In the book Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, brown states... 

At the human scale, in order to create a world that works for more people, for more life, we have to collaborate on the process of dreaming and visioning and implementing that world. We have to recognize that a multitude of realities have, do, and will exist.

An example of success using this strategy is the Dogwood Alliance in joint with other partners who put a stop to a wood pellet mill in Lumberton, NC. The article located on the Dogwood Alliance webpage about this victory states the following. 

THE CLOSURE OF THIS FACILITY IS ALSO A WIN FOR OUR CLIMATE. THE BURNING OF THESE PELLETS WOULD HAVE ADDED THOUSANDS OF TONS OF CARBON DIOXIDE TO THE ATMOSPHERE, THE EQUIVALENT OF 155,580 CARS ON THE ROAD.

Link to this webpage: https://www.dogwoodalliance.org/2022/04/statement-wood-pellet-mill-stop…

In an article written in August 2022 details the complaints of residents of Duplin County and the Environmental Justice Community Action Network in response to a general permit for hog farms in Eastern North Carolina that would pollute the ground and water by relaxing regulations on farms with varying numbers of livestock. A quote from Sheri White-Williamson, cofounder of the Community Action Network, says, 

“A general permit is a one-size fits all system, regardless of the number of animals you have,” she said. “That doesn’t seem to make good environmental sense. At the very minimum we would like to see the denitrification system that has shown to be better for taking care of the toxins that come out of this process. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.”

Local groups urge the DEQ to set regulations on a case by case basis depending on the size of biogas operations and should require cleaner systems and ways of getting rid of waste.

The article is linked here:https://coastalreview.org/2022/08/groups-challenge-ncs-biogas-general-p…

This July 14th news article (Oglesby 2022) mentions the The Waterkeeper Alliance as a stakeholder group commenting on biogas projects:

Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group, also criticized the general permit, calling it “woefully inadequate” and saying it fails to assure compliance with water quality protections required under North Carolina law.

Note that the case study for Calhoun County, Texas revolves around a clean water lawsuit against Formosa Plastics, led by a group of actvists associated with the Waterkeeper movement. See the essay The Waterkeepers Win.

From a recent news article (July 12, 2022):

On July 1, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ)—the state’s environmental regulator—issued general biogas permits for swine, cattle, and wet poultry operations, allowing them to bypass individual water quality review and public hearing processes when installing an anaerobic digester on their lagoons. The permits are in effect until Sept. 2024.

[...]

The permits reduce communities’ ability to weigh in on individual projects and will fast-track biogas operations in the state. Environmental groups heavily opposed the draft released in February. 

See the first part of the article series here.

I first read Gayatri Spivak's, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," many years ago and re-reading it now offers a different context and path to making sense of this work. First, Kim Fortun's contextual introduction is a generative space from which to read this brilliant and complex critique of the Subaltern Studies collective. She provides an opening from which to re-think the place of scholarly engagement within, and as participants of, communities of practices inspired by the research Katie Cox and Angela Okune. Fortun's introduction is a pedagogical gesture, a reflection on her own teaching and learning over time. In re-reading this essay, I can see now that Spivak's essay is also a gesture, opening a place of critique as the grounds for re-imagining and reclaiming the possiblity of Subaltern voices. Spivak highlights the assumptions, the metanarratives, embedded in the collective's historiographical practice as a form of knowledge production.

I have two reflections. First, in reading Spivak's critique of historiography both specific (Guha and Chakrabraty) and more general (Western European) and her analysis of their strategic utility is persuasive. I am reminded of other forms of historiography--specifically microhistory--which also engages in the practice of reading the archive against the grain and which, by avoiding making claims about broader historical patterns and systems, is not subject to Spivak's analysis of historiography. I wonder what microhistorical work emerges from the colonial archive.

My second reflection is more broadly about critique as a generative opening. In the zoom discussion there were moments when contributors began mapping their own encounters with theory (French, German), almost as a rite of passage. I began wondering what other genealogies we bring to our work. This text is a tour de force. It is powerfully incisive. Prerna Srigyan spoke of the multiple meanings of "dangerous" within it. As a strategic text, I find the difficulty in reading Spivak exasperating. As a narrative strategy I think the difficulty is, in part, intentional, which compounds my interpretation. I cannot read Spivak and find affinity, even as I recognize her masterful critique. In a prior discussion Duygu Kasdogan introduced me to the idea of dissenus, as opposed to consensus, as a strategic goal. In reading Spivak as critique, perhaps Spivak is an author willing to position herself not as a guide for collaboration but as a figure of dissenus even as she works to create this generative opening for further work.

         Bringing last week’s conversation on education into contact with this weeks’ discussion of deconstruction and post-colonial theory, I would like to ask the following question: what would it yield if we extended Spivak’s affirmative deconstruction of the subaltern studies group and their participation in historiography to the university and to process of academic publication more generally? In this text, Spivak engages in deconstruction to highlight the subalternists’ own participation in the projects of discursive displacement that they analyze and for successfully failing to incorporate post-structural theory into their method of historiography. Extrapolating from this point, both post-structural and post-colonial theory, too, have been successful as failed-discursive displacements within the university. They have achieved (somewhat paradoxically) some level of hegemony in certain disciplines within the university. However, we learn them, develop them, publish and teach them within an ecology of departments, schools, and institutions that are structured by and that reproduce antithetical values and ethical commitments. This is coming to a head. The neoliberal model of university is in crisis, both from an ideological and logistical standpoint. The question is then not if a discursive displacement will take place within the university’s current sign system, but rather when, how, and what kind of functional change this displacement (however un/successful) will engender.

         The COVID-19 pandemic is implicated in both the logistical and ideological dimensions of this crisis. In short, the logistical crisis posed by quarantine is bringing to light aporias of “the social text” that rendered the university’s existence legitimate and its value legible. Both graduate and undergraduate students alike are being forced to critically reconsider the possibility and expected benefits of their pursuits of higher education. In a complementary if reactionary fashion, the leadership and public representatives of many universities are making the strategically unsound decision to double-down on defending their value in conventional terms. What could be gained by adopting the scholastic ethical commitments of deconstruction, as a first step towards “question[ing] the authority of the [academy] without paralyzing [it], persistently transforming conditions of impossibility into possibility.” (Spivak 1996, 210).

          At another level, I think it is important to consider how the successes and blind spots of the Subalternists might help us to identify our own, as critical scholars of our historical moment. Spivak describes the theoretical contribution of the Subalternists as a theory of change, one that on pivots on/from the force of crisis. Living in the midst of a crisis, it is easy to look backwards from the contemporary and to feel nostalgic for what now seems to be much more endurable and sensible times. However, to do so is to fail to recognize how the germs of our current present were working in those times. Or, in Spivak’s terms, “if the space for a change (necessarily also an addition) had not been there in the prior function of the sign-system, the crisis could not have made the change happen. The change in signification-function supplements the previous function” (1996, 206). Nostalgia is not an escape, no matter how far back you go, the past always leads to this present. Secondly, it is also easy to witness the blunders of the Trump administration or to watch as lockdown protestors arm themselves for open conflict and to essentialize these characters as an origin or source of social problems. But to do so would be to deny the “instituted trace at the origin.” While Trump and lockdown-protestors may not fit the bill of the subaltern, it is important to realize that their “subject effect” has taken shape in and through contrast and conflict with the contemporary left. How can we understand the role of critical scholarship in laying the scene for anti-academic sensibilities of the more radically conservative groups to take hold? They did not take shape in a vacuum but rather as “part of an immense discontinuous network ("text" in the general sense) of strands that may be termed politics, ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on” (Spivak 1996, 213). In other words, how might we rethink and refashion cultural critique in light of the consequences of our own history of failures at discursive displacement?

(in my very limited understanding): Spivak offers a critique of the Subaltern Studies collective by "reading with and against the grain" of the texts produced by the collective. I like this overview of the collective's history, key concepts, critiques and an annotated bibliography of their texts. The collective broadly offered a reading of colonialism in the Indian subcontinent which sought to recover a history of the subaltern (which for them is the peasant exploited alike by a colonial and indigenous elite, insurgent against both colonial and feudal domination; derived from Gramsci's Italian peasant) from the colonial archive, even though the voice of the subaltern was noticeably absent in such archives. Their intervention was primarily against an "elite historiography" that had narrated nationalism as an upper-class, upper-caste project, but had failed to represent dissent and resistance from peasant rebellions.

Their consequent move was therefore not only to offer other archives for writing a subaltern history but also to reframe key moments in elite historiography to reveal the presence of the subaltern. This, they thought, would reveal also the presence of a subaltern consciousness and solidarity, which was as much, if not more critical to decolonization in the Indian subcontinent and elsewhere. The Subaltern Studies collective's larger theoretical and political commitment thus centered around the question: How can we read absences of the archive to articulate consciousness and solidarity?

Spivak's object of analysis are the collective's texts. She argues that historans of the subaltern want to give us a theory of change (broader social change but also particular shifts and tensions between feudalism, capitalism, colonialism). But what they end up doing is offering a theory of consciousness in line with Marxist and anti-humanist thought, assuming that collective consciousness, through a recognition that things are not what they seem to be, leads to change.

Spivak argues that this is a strategic move, and that the collective must not abandon the subaltern subject as an object of analysis. But what they need to do is not speak of the subaltern as a monolith, not assume that subaltern consciousness is collective, much less a radical consciousness. Nowhere is this more lucidly expressed than in her analysis of how women are written within the collective's texts, where they are present but as passive objects of exchange over and through whose bodies class consciousness formed. It is also present in what I think is her most damning critique of the collective: "the transactional quality of interconflicting metropolitan sources often eludes the (post)colonial intellectual". Spivak is calling out the collective for not reading/citing other scholars who also attempt to articulate a radical anti-hegemonic consciousness. This is the double bind of the subaltern for Spivak: capturing it with careful historiographic work at the same time pointing to its absence. For Spivak this is not a point of paralysis, but a point to start from, acknowledging that there is no way out of the inadequacy of representation. 

I think Spivak could offer two interventions:

(1) First, her notion of "cognitive failure" is helpful to understand how COVID-19 is unfolding. For her, it is not being able to grapple the object of analysis: “Unless the subject separates from itself to grasp the object, there is no cognition, indeed no thinking, no judgment.” She writes this statement to talk about the Marxist and anti-humanist tendency to abhor cognitive failure and see it as inducing paralysis. For Marx and Gramsci, for example, this has been a question of the proletariat class recognizing that they are excluded from the labor of their own bodies, through which their shared consciousness can arise.

For Spivak, however, through her critique of the Subaltern Studies collective,  there is no escape from cognitive failure. Just as it is okay that the collective will not be able to speak for the subaltern as much as there is value in it, it is alright to not be able to grapple. The COVID-19 moment is instructive of failures upon failures: failure of neoliberalism, of the nation-state, of parochial activism, of scholarly projects. It is a failure of not being able to do anything even though we have a shared consciousness of failure. It is a failure of being able to be a person, or even being mourned with dignity. Spivak, through her stubborn insistence on being able to build from failure and residues, says that our usual ways of performing scholarship, activism, and subalternity will not work. We have to be able to come together from a point of exhaustion and failure. 

(2) Second, Spivak opens up the question of how we construct oppression and exclusion in the archive, especially if the oppressed and excluded figure is not present. The way COVID-19 is unfolding builds upon histories of institutional and informational opaqueness. How do we read absences of the archive, or "against the grain", against institutional and informational opaqueness?

(1) I am mostly frustrated by Spivak's, and even the collective's exclusion of Dalit thought and literature. I think that the argument of: “There simply are no subaltern testimonials, memoirs, diaries, or official histories”: is both incorrect and dangerous. Both Spivak and the Subaltern Studies overdetermine the influence of bourgeois nationalism and of figures like Gandhi, who were mainstream but not necessarily radical or even the most popular. In the Spivak reader, for example, there is no mention of Ambedkar's work, who as a Buddhist Dalit scholar and the architect of the constitution of the Indian nation-state, is a subaltern figure who spoke and wrote fiercely against both colonialism and the caste system. There is now the field of Dalit Studies which writes against the grain of this exclusion. The book Decolonizing Anarchism offers an anti-authoritarian narrative of decolonization, offering accounts of social movements and anti-colonial thought that advocated for complete liberation from the British empire, a goal later appropriated by mainstream liberal politics. 

(2) I wonder how to perform a comparison of recuperative scholarship like that of the Subaltern Studies collective with that of Black Radical Tradition? Is it possible to read Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism in conjunction with Ranajit Guha's Peasant Insurgency? What differences exist between articulating a shared subalternity and global Blackness? 

(3) What kinds of pedagogy does Spivak point us to?