ABSTRACT
In the conclusion to The Making of Neo-liberal India, Rupal Oza asks: “When the nation is defended against the global, what form of local resistance is generated? [ . . . ] Which dominant narratives are solidifi ed in the uncritical coupling of the local as national? Which publics are evoked in the defence of the local?” (Oza 2006, 140). By foregrounding such questions, Oza makes an important theoretical intervention in accounts of the political identities generated through local and national resistances to globalization. She argues, by examining a range of sites, that “middle class and Hindu constructions of the nation dominate the discourse” on globalization (Oza 2006,140). Oza tells stories about the political geographies through which exclusionary forms of the local and national are rendered in opposition to forms of the global. She develops a strong sense of the spatial practices through which such domination works. This opens up a politically prescient set of questions about struggles over how local resistances are envisioned.
