ABSTRACT

This book explores the idea that alternatives to our present condition are available in the present, such that a search for alternatives must involve rigorous study of some of its central texts, events, and thinkers.

Through engagement with selected modern thinkers, texts, and events, it imagines a different future from the position of the current postcolonial moment, indicating the possibilities that emerge from the present and which shape contemporary radical thinking.

An invitation to imagine a possible future marked with alternative possibilities of conducting struggles, and living through contentions and social restructuring, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social and political theory, political philosophy, colonialism and postcolonialism, and historical materialism.

chapter |16 pages

Introduction

Time, and the Politics and Poetics of Alternative

part Section One|58 pages

Social Transformation and the Space and Time of Nation

chapter 1|19 pages

Karl Marx

Colonialism, Nation Form, and Social Transformation

chapter 2|19 pages

Home, World, and an Uncertain Nation

chapter 3|18 pages

In the Time of Nations

part Section Two|38 pages

The Problematic of Population and Power in Transformative Politics

chapter 4|18 pages

The Problem of Population

Recalling Marx's Critique of Malthus

part Section Three|36 pages

Two Universalisms

part Section Four|34 pages

Contentions and Antagonisms as Template of Alternative Thinking

chapter 8|16 pages

Charles Tilly's Theorising of Contention

chapter 9|16 pages

Genocide

A Most Contentious Word and Concept of Modern Time

part Section Five|28 pages

Beyond the Political, Imaginaries of Other Kinds

chapter 10|15 pages

The Impossibility of Politics

Brecht, Manto and Two Acts of Literature

chapter 11|11 pages

Memories of the Forgotten

part Section Six|87 pages

Event as a Congealed Site of New Possibilities

chapter 12|18 pages

Settling Account with the Point of Origin

Marx, Engels, and the Revolution of 1848

chapter 14|15 pages

Occupy College Street, 1967–69

chapter 16|16 pages

Layers of Solidarity

chapter |2 pages

Epilogue