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Even Modi’s former economic aides find the recent growth rates of 8% announced by the government “mystifying.” Major discrepancies in the way GDP is being calculated make the data hugely problematic. One of Modi’s former chief economists holds that if correctly measured, India’s economy would actually be found to be decelerating.
Meanwhile, foreign direct investment is plunging. FDI levels are now the lowest in nearly two decades. Even local investors are shying away from opening their wallets. Private capital expenditure remains low. Private sector investment has in fact been falling as a proportion of GDP since 2012 and the economy is now largely driven by huge government investment.
The consumer goods market continues to be sluggish, with people cutting down on staples—emblematic of economic stress. Private consumption growth is the slowest in 20 years, setting aside the pandemic low. Tractor sales, a proxy for the economic health of villages (where 70% of Indians live), have fallen steeply. Banks are battling the worst deposit crunch in two decades as household savings are at a 47-year low while household debt levels are at a record high. Not exactly the signs of a booming economy. In the last financial year, India’s goods exports fell 3% and its crude imports, 14%.
Unemployment is also endemic. The share of young people with secondary or higher education among unemployed youth has almost doubled in 20 years; a third of graduates are unemployed. Jobless Indian youth now pursue opportunities in conflict zones in Israel and Ukraine, and try to smuggle themselves into the West. Indians are currently the third-largest group of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., their numbers having surged faster than those from any other country.
Despite all of Modi’s drumbeating on boosting India’s manufacturing sector with his much-trumpeted “Make in India” campaign, manufacturing’s share of the GDP has fallen.Far from increasing manufacturing jobs, India is losing them in millions. The ranks of farmworkers, meanwhile, have risen by 60 million in the past four years. Agriculture now actually employs a greater share of workers than it did five years ago, a reversal that points to deindustrialization.
There are also concerns about data manipulation. Before the last parliamentary election in 2019, the government buried its own employment data before the election as it showed the unemployment rate to be at a 45-year-high, leading to resignations of members of the National Statistical Commission. A key five-yearly consumer survey result was withheld that year because of “data quality issues.” When it was finally released this February, it showed poverty and inequality has fallen, and consumer spending had tripled in a decade. That contradicts the government’s own findings and data found elsewhere.
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At times the “viral” travels of the concept of homonationalism, as it has been taken up in North America, various European states, Palestine/Israel, and India, have found reductive applications in activist organizing platforms. Instead of thinking of homonationalism as an accusation, an identity, a bad politics, I have been thinking about it as an analytic to apprehend state formation and a structure of modernity: as an assemblage of geopolitical and historical forces, neoliberal interests in capitalist accumulation both cultural and material, biopolitical state practices of population control, and affective investments in discourses of freedom, liberation, and rights. Homonationalism, thus, is not simply a synonym for gay racism, or another way to mark how gay and lesbian identities became available to conservative political imaginaries; it is not another identity politics, not another way of distinguishing good queers from bad queers, not an accusation, and not a position. It is rather a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality. To say that this historical moment is homonational, where homonationalism is understood as an analytics of power, then, means that one must engage it in the first place as the condition of possibility for national and transnational politics. Part of the increased recourse to domestication and privatization of neoliberal economies and within queer communities, homonationalism is fundamentally a deep critique of lesbian and gay liberal rights discourses and how those rights discourses produce narratives of progress and modernity that continue to accord some populations access to citizenship—cultural and legal—at the expense of the delimitation and expulsion of other populations. The narrative of progress for gay rights is thus built on the back of racialized others, for whom such progress was once achieved, but is now backsliding or has yet to arrive. I have thus theorized homonationalism as an assemblage of de- and reterritorializing forces, affects, energies, and movements. While the project arose within the post 9/11 political era of the United States, homonationalism is also an ongoing process, one that in some sense progresses from the civil rights era and does not cohere only through 9/11 as a solitary temporal moment
— Rethinking Homonationalism, Jasbir Puar
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June Jordan, An Address to the Students of Columbia University During Their Anti-Apartheid Sit-in, April, 1985; in On Call. Political Essays, South End Press, Boston, MA, 1985, pp. 117-122
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"Addressing an election rally in Rajasthan’s Banswara, he said, “Pehle jab unki sarkar thi, unhone kaha tha ki desh ki sampati par pehla adhikar Musalmano ka hai. Iska matlab, ye sampati ikatthi karke kisko baatenge? Jinke zyada bacche hain, unko baatenge, ghuspaithiyon ko baatenge. Kya aapki mehnat ki kamayi ka paisa ghuspaithiyon ko diya jayega? Aapko manzoor hai yeh? (Earlier, when they (the Congress) were in power, they had said Muslims have the first right to the wealth of the nation. This means they will distribute this wealth to those who have more children, to infiltrators. Should your hard-earned money be given to infiltrators? Do you agree to this)?”
“Ye Congress ka manifesto keh raha hai, ki woh mataon aur beheno ke sone ka hisaab karenge, uski jarthi karenge, jaanakari lenge aur phir woh sampati ko baant denge. Aur unko baatenge, jinko Manmohan Singh ji ki sarkar ne kaha tha ki sampati par pehla adhikar Musalmanon ka hai. Bhaiyon aur behno, yeh Urban Naxal ki soch, meri mataon, behno, aapka mangal sutra bhi bachne nahi denge (Congress’s manifesto says they will take stock of the gold mothers and daughters have, and will distribute that wealth. Manmohan Singh’s government had said Muslims have the first right to wealth. Brothers and sisters, this Urban Naxal thinking will not spare even the mangal sutras of my mothers and sisters),” he said."
22 April, 2024
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As the 19th century gave way to the 20th, the caricature of the enemy shifted more decisively from the West to the Muslim. As the desire to homogenise the Hindu community took hold, Hindu Right organisations began engaging with Bengal’s marginalised castes in a way the Left did not even contemplate doing till the late-20th century. The slow incorporation of lower castes within the Hindu fold went hand-in-hand with the steady expulsion of Muslims from the national body.
Organisations like the Bharat Sevashram Sangha and Hindu Mahasabha played a crucial role in both processes, often providing what we can call intellectual justifications for such strategies. If Mukherji propagated demographic fears, the Mahasabha and the Sangha worked on the ideological mission of keeping the Hindu community together. This required preventing restless and assertive lower caste communities from breaking away from the dominance of the upper caste bhadralok.
Founded by Swami Pranabananda in 1917, one of the Sangha’s primary missions was urging Hindus to fortify themselves as an unbreachable, unified community. Such a mission called for an end to caste discrimination and the practice of untouchability. To achieve its ideological ends, Hindu organisations identified tribals and Dalits as their primary target groups. [...] The campaigns, aimed at reorganising the village economy, carried out social work in backward areas. [...]
By 1926, the Sangha ran more than a dozen ashrams in areas of eastern and southern Bengal dominated by marginalised caste communities. The organisation founded Hindu Milan Mandirs, conceptualised on the lines of mosque gatherings, apart from launching Rakshi Dals comprising armed volunteers to defend Hindus against enemies. This movement for the assimilation of Hindus (Hindu Samanvyay Andolan) worked on multiple registers. The Hindu Milan Mandir provided spaces to hold prayers, conduct rituals and festivals, and deliberate on issues related to Hindu society. The young were taught history, the elderly given an education in the Shastras. There were libraries with books on Hinduism and the Hindu way of life. Schools of martial arts training were set up for self-defence.
Through the 1930s and 1940s, both the Mahasabha and the Sangha worked in tandem to fortify the Hindu community as one. Even as the BSS urged upper castes to end untouchability, it also asked lower castes to integrate themselves with the larger Hindu community by giving up their “hatred” of upper castes. These organisations wanted to direct Dalit anger at Muslims, representing them as the primary other and threat to Hindus. The Sangha’s spaces of Hindu congregation, Pranabananda believed, would facilitate organising as a homogenous, non-porous community. They served, or at least attempted to serve, the purpose of subsuming smaller oppositional caste-based identities into a sweeping fold of Hindu identity. Such a ubiquitous Hindu identity, proponents hoped, would steer groups away from caste antagonism and towards building a Hindu Dharma Rashtra. In some ways, the scale and operations of this intricate organisational network resembled the structure of the RSS, founded in 1925. During riots and famines, Hindu Milan Mandir volunteers would rush to the aid of Hindus, collecting monthly subscriptions and food from each member.
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The stratificatory aspects of the use of cultural forms like astrology have intriguing connections with social change, especially as such forms transfer the ideas of one social class or age to another. A comparative example is the working class fascination with phrenology in Victorian England. It was through the medium of phrenological instruction, which Victorian working men often received at Mechanics’ Institutes and from the popular press, that their class came to understand many of the assumptions and implications of eighteenth-century rational and materialist philosophy. For example, the phrenological notion that one can, by evaluating the bumps on one’s skull, learn of and thereby cultivate one’s strengths, is a neat application of the Enlightenment confidence in the perfectability of man. Sinhalese astrology is a similar working out of abstract notions about reality and human nature, namely the leeway a person has to alter his karmic destiny. What is important is that both phrenology and astrology reduce cultural notions to practicable schemata for directing human action and evaluating it, and thus bridge a substantial gap for actors, not to say social scientists.
David Pingree, Sinhalese Astrology, South Asian Caste Systems, and the Notion of Individuality
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Had to organize some more of my notes.
Some recently published books on intersections of Blackness, Indigeneity, disability/health, gender, colonialism, transnationalism, and art in the Americas.
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Caribbean:
Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century (Kaysha Corinealdi, 2022)
Between Fitness and Death: Disability and Slavery in the Caribbean (Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, 2020)
LGBTQ Politics in Nicaragua: Revolution, Dictatorship, and Social Movements (Karen Kampwirth, 2022)
Chocolate Surrealism: Music, Movement, Memory and History in the Circum-Caribbean (Njoroje M. Njoroje, 2016)
La Raza Cosmetica: Beauty, Identity, and Settler Colonialism in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Natasha Varner, 2020)
The Creole Archipelago: Race and Borders in the Colonial Caribbean (Tessa Murphy, 2021)
Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (Julio Capo Jr., 2017)
Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (Yesenia Barragan, 2021)
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Black art, knowledge:
Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (Larisa Kingston Mann, 2022)
Voices of the Race: Black Newspapers in Latin America, 1870–1960 (Edited by Paulina L. Alberto; et al., 2022)
West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals: History, Memory, and Transnationalism (Raphael Chijikoe Njoku, 2020)
Queer African Cinemas (Lindsey Green-Simms, 2022)
At Home in Our Sounds: Music, Race, and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris (Rachel Anne Gillett, 2021)
Selling Black Brazil: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Salvador, Bahia (Anadelia Romo, 2022)
Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500-1850 (Kalle Kananjoa, 2021)
Fugitive Movements: Commemorating the Denmark Vesey Affair and Black Radical Antislavery in the Atlantic World (Edited by James O'Neill Spady, 2022)
Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945 (Rafael Cardoso, 2020)
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United States:
The Entangled Labor Histories of Brazil and the United States (Edited by Teizeira da Silva, et al., 2023)
Country of the Cursed and the Driven: Slavery and the Texas Borderlands (Paul Barba, 2021)
Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Kathryn Olivarius, 2022)
West of Slavery: The Southern Dream of a Transcontinental Empire (Kevin Waite, 2021)
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More on transnationalism, health, gender:
Transimperial Anxieties: The Making and Unmaking of Arab Ottomans in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1940 (Jose D. Najar, 2023)
South-South Solidarity and the Latin American Left (Jessica Stites Mor, 2022)
Reimagining the Gran Chaco: Identities, Politics, and the Environment in South America (Edited by Silvia Hirsch, Paola Canova, Mercedes Biocca, 2021)
Peripheral Nerve: Health and Medicine in Cold War Latin America (Edited by Anne-Emanuelle Birn and Raul Necochea Lopez, 2020)
Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in Transnational Media Industries (K.E. Goldschmitt, 2020)
Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World, 1924-1968 (Courtney Campbell, 2022)
Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic (Erika Denise Edwards, 2020)
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Israeli settlers embarked on a murderous rampage across the occupied West Bank over the weekend, killing at least three Palestinians and destroying property in more than a dozen villages and towns. The immediate trigger for the attacks was the disappearance on Friday, April 12 of Binyamin Ahimeir, a 14-year-old Israeli who went out shepherding that morning from the recently “legalized” Malachei HaShalom (“Angels of Peace”) outpost. By the time Israeli authorities found Ahimeir’s body the following day and declared him a terror victim, the settlers’ rampage through the surrounding Palestinian communities was already in full swing.
According to the human rights group Yesh Din, Israeli settlers attacked 11 Palestinian villages and towns on Saturday alone. They threw stones, set fire to more than 100 vehicles, damaged scores of homes and businesses, and slaughtered hundreds of livestock. In the village of Beitin, near Ramallah, settlers shot dead 17-year-old Omar Hamed. In Al-Mughayyir, slightly further north, 25-year-old Jihad Abu Aliya was killed in circumstances that are still somewhat unclear: settlers were attacking the village at the time, but the Israeli army stated that Abu Aliya was killed by their fire. Another incident captured on a security camera shows Israeli soldiers standing guard while settlers set fire to a car in the town of Deir Dibwan, also near Ramallah.
The pogroms continued into Monday, when Israeli settlers shot dead two Palestinian shepherds — Abdelrahman Bani Fadel, 30, and Mohammed Ashraf Bani Jama, 21 — on land belonging to the community of Khirbet al-Tawil, east of the town of Aqraba near Nablus. According to testimonies from villagers, a large group of settlers, some of them armed, entered privately-owned Palestinian land near the residents’ homes at around 4 p.m. with a herd of cows (settlers are increasingly choosing to herd cows over sheep and goats because they eat more and are harder to frighten). Later, more settlers arrived, some of them armed and masked. Soldiers also arrived on the scene.
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hey you might've been asked this before sorry if so, but have you read or do you have any thoughts on A short history of Trans Misogyny?
I have read it! I have a few thoughts.
I think it's a strong and important work that compiles historical archives into sharp analyses of how "trans misogyny" (using Jules Gill-Peterson's spacing) is not a recent phenomenon but a globalized structure with centuries of history. I also think it's flawed, for reasons I'll get into after a quick summary for those who haven't had the chance to read it yet.
JGP divides the book into three main chapters, the first on the notion of "trans panic". There, she traces how variants of this anxiety with the trans-feminized subject have presented—to deadly effect, for the subject—in such different settings as early colonial India, the colonization of the Americas, the racialized interactions between US soldiers stationed in the Philippines and the local trans women living there, and of course the contemporary United States itself. In every case she analyzes this "panic" as the reaction of the capitalist colonial enterprise to the conceptual threat that the trans-feminized subject poses; we are a destabilizing entity, a gender glitch that undermines the rigid guarantees of the patriarchal order maintaining capitalism. Punishment follows.
The second chapter is my favourite, and considers the relationship between transfeminine life and sex work. I posted a concluding excerpt but the thrust of the chapter is this: that the relegation of so many trans women and trans-feminized people to sex work, while accompanied by the derogation and degradation that is associated with sex work, is not itself the mere result of that degradation inflicted upon the subject. In other words, it is not out of pure helplessness and abjection that so many trans-feminized people are involved in sex work. Rather, sex work is a deliberate and calculated choice made by many trans-feminized people in increasingly service-based economies that present limited, often peripheralized, feminized, and/or reproductive, options for paid labour. Paired with a pretty bit of critical confabulation about the histories of Black trans-feminized people travelling the US in the 19th century, I think this made for great reading.
In her third chapter, JGP narrativizes the 20th century relationship between the "gay" and "trans" movements in north america—scare quoted precisely because the two went hand-in-hand for much of their history. She emphasizes this connection, not merely an embedding of one community within another but the tangled mutualism of experiences and subjectivities that co-constituted one another, though not without tension. Then came the liberal capture of the gay rights movement around the 70s, which brought about the famous clashes between the radicalisms of Silvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson (neither of whom, JGP notes, ever described themselves as trans women) and the institutions of gay liberalism that desired subsumption into the folds of capital. This is a "remember your history" type of chapter, and well-put.
I think JGP is correct to insist, in her introduction, on the globalizing-in-a-destructive-sense effects of the colonial export of trans womanhood. It is, after all, an identity conceived only mid-century to make sense of the medicalized trans subject; and "gender identity" itself (as JGP describes in Histories of the Transgender Child) is a psychomedical concept conceived to rein in the epistemic instability of trans existence. This is critical to keep in mind! But I also think JGP makes a few mistakes, and one of them has to do with this point.
In her first chapter, under the discussion of trans misogyny in colonial India, JGP of course uses the example of the hijra. Unfortunately, she commits two fundamental errors in her use: she mythologizes, however ambiguously, the "ascetic" lives of hijra prior to the arrival of British colonialism; and she says "it's important to say that hijras were not then—and are not today—transgender". In the first place, the reference to the "ascetism" of hijra life prior to the violence of colonialism is evocative of "third-gender" idealizations of primeval gender subjectivities. To put the problem simply: it's well and good to describe the "ritual" roles of gendered subjects people might try to construe contemporarily as "trans women", the priestesses and oracles and divinities of yore. But it is best not to do so too loftily. Being assigned to a particular form of ritualistic reproductive labour because of one's failure to be a man and inability to perform the primary reproductive labour of womanhood-proper is the very marker of the trans-feminized subject. "Ascetism" here obviates the reality that it wasn't all peachy before (I recommend reading Romancing the Transgender Native on this one). Meanwhile, in the after, it is just wrong that hijra are universally not transgender. Many organize specifically under the banners of transfeminism. It's a shame that JGP insists on keeping the trans-feminized life of hijra so firmly demarcated from what she herself acknowledges is globalized transness.
My second big complaint with the book is JGP's slip into a trap I have complained about many times: the equivocation of transfemininity with femininity (do you see why I'm not fond of being described as "transfem"?). She diagnoses the root of transmisogyny as a reaction to the femininity of trans women and other trans-feminized subjects. In this respect she explicitly subscribes to a form of mujerísima, and of the trans-feminized subject as "the most feminine" and (equivalent, as far as she's concerned) "the most woman". Moreover, she locates transfeminist liberation in a singular embrace of mujerísima as descriptive of trans-feminized subjectivity. As I've discussed previously, I think this is a misdiagnosis. Feminization is, of course, something that is done to people; it is certainly the case that the trans-feminized subject is in this way feminized for perceived gender-failure. This subject may simultaneously embrace feminized ways of being for all sorts of reasons. In both cases I think the feminization follows from, rather than precedes, the trans misogyny and trans-feminization, and there is a fair bit of masculinization as de-gendering at play too, to say nothing of the deliberate embrace of masculinity by "trans-feminized" subjects. Masculinity and femininity are already technologies of gender normalization—they are applied against gender deviation and adapted to by the gender deviant. The deviation happens first, in the failure to adhere to the expectations of gender assignment, and I don't think these expectations can be summarized by either masculinity or femininity alone. I think JGP is effectively describing the experience of many trans-feminized people, but I do not think what she presents can be the universalized locus of trans liberation she seems to want it to be.
Now for a pettier complaint that I've made before, but one that I think surfaces JGP's academic context. In her introduction she says:
In truth, everyone is implicated in and shaped by trans misogyny. There is no one who is purely affected by it to the point of living in a state of total victimization, just as there is no one who lives entirely exempt from its machinations. There is no perfect language to be discovered, or invented, to solve the problem of trans misogyny by labeling its proper perpetrator and victim.
Agreed that "there is no perfect language to be discovered"! But JGP is clearly critical of TMA/TME language here. Strange, then, that less than ten pages later she says this:
this book adds the phrase trans-feminized to describe what happens to groups subjected to trans misogyny though they did not, or still do not, wish to be known as transgender women.
So JGP believes it is coherent to talk about "groups subjected to trans misogyny", which she thinks consists of the union of trans women and what she called "trans-feminized" groups. If this is to be coherent, there must be groups not subjected to trans misogny. So we've come around to transmisogyny-subjected and not transmisogyny-subjected. Look: you cannot effectively theorize about transmisogyny without recognizing that its logic paints a particular target, and you will need to come up with a concise way of making this distinction. But JGP dismissing TMA/TME with skepticism about "perfect language" and immediately coining new language (basically TMS/not TMS) to solve the problem she un-solved by rejecting TMA/TME... it smells of a sloppy attempt to make a rhetorical point rather than theoretical rigour. It's frustrating.
I have other minor gripes, like her artificial separation of "trans women" from "nonbinary people" (cf. countless posts on here lamenting the narrow forms of existence granted TMA people if we want recognition as-such!) or her suggestion that "a politics of overcoming the gender binary" is mutually exclusive from rather than necessarily involved with struggles around "prison abolition, police violence, and sex work". Little things that give me the sense of theoretical tunnel-vision. But I don't think all this compromises the book's strengths as a work of broad historical analysis. I would simply not take every one of its claims as authoritative. Definitely give it a read if you have the chance, especially for the second and third chapters.
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The first round of the Lok Sabha elections in West Bengal and Manipur was marred by incidents of violence.
Firing, booth capturing attempts, and destruction of EVMs have been reported from several polling stations in Manipur, disrupting the polling process. There are unconfirmed reports of people getting injured in these incidents.
Armed men fired several rounds at a polling station in Thamanpokpi, located within the Moirang assembly segment, Times of India reported.
Arambai Tenggop, a pro-BJP Meitei militant organisation allegedly threatened that could be no Congress agent on polling booth. People on social media, claimed that the Police are standing quietly watching the booth capturing.
In Khurai Thangjam Leikai, angry civilians destroyed EVM and election related articles protesting the manipulative and corrupted duty officials.
Additionally, vandalism inside a polling station has also been reported under the Thongju Assembly seat of Imphal East district.
Polling is being held for Manipur’s Inner Manipur Lok Sabha constituency and 15 assembly segments of the Outer Manipur Lok Sabha constituency. The remaining 13 assembly segments of the Outer Manipur constituency will vote on April 26.
In Bengal, several incidents of violence were reported across the three parliamentary seats in the first phase, as TMC and BJP members clashed in various areas of the Cooch Behar seat.
According to sources close to both parties, during the first few hours of voting, the TMC and the BJP each filed 80 and 39 complaints, respectively, about incidents of violence against voters, intimidation of voters, and assaults on poll workers. The constituency of Alipurduars and Cooch Behar saw most of the incidents.
In the Sitalkuchi area of the Cooch Behar constituency, the TMC claimed that BJP workers had physically assaulted poll workers, preventing voters from reaching booths.
Claiming that the TMC was intimidating voters, the saffron party refuted the claims.
Sitalkuchi saw heavy violence during the previous assembly elections, which resulted in the death of four people in firing by central authorities.
Television footage revealed that TMC and BJP workers got into a brawl in the district’s Mathabhanga neighbourhood, injuring each other. Following accusations of intimidation against voters, employees of both parties confronted one another, according to The Telegraph.
Following claims that central forces were helping BJP members rig votes at some booths in the area, TMC workers staged a protest in another part of Mathabhanga. Anant Barman, the TMC block president from Bethguri, was taken to the hospital following reports that BJP activists had physically assaulted him.
The BJP, on the other hand, alleged that voting agents were stopped from entering booths in the Cooch Behar South district, and party workers were abducted by TMC members.
A district BJP spokesman alleged that five BJP workers in the Mathabhanga area were attacked by TMC members, leaving them injured and admitted to the hospital.
In the neighbouring Alipurduras constituency, the TMC alleged that CRPF personnel and BJP leaders were threatening and harassing voters, forcing them to vote for the saffron camp.
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Nestlé, the world’s largest consumer goods company, adds sugar and honey to infant milk and cereal products sold in many poorer countries, contrary to international guidelines aimed at preventing obesity and chronic diseases, a report has found.
Campaigners from Public Eye, a Swiss investigative organisation, sent samples of the Swiss multinational’s baby-food products sold in Asia, Africa and Latin America to a Belgian laboratory for testing.
The results, and examination of product packaging, revealed added sugar in the form of sucrose or honey in samples of Nido, a follow-up milk formula brand intended for use for infants aged one and above, and Cerelac, a cereal aimed at children aged between six months and two years.
In Nestlé’s main European markets, including the UK, there is no added sugar in formulas for young children. While some cereals aimed at older toddlers contain added sugar, there is none in products targeted at babies between six months and one year.
Laurent Gaberell, Public Eye’s agriculture and nutrition expert, said: “Nestlé must put an end to these dangerous double standards and stop adding sugar in all products for children under three years old, in every part of the world.”
Obesity is increasingly a problem in low- and middle-income countries. In Africa, the number of overweight children under five has increased by nearly 23% since 2000, according to the World Health Organization. Globally, more than 1 billion people are living with obesity.
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Just in case, some might enjoy. Had to organize some notes.
These are just some of the newer texts that had been promoted in the past few years at the online home of the American Association of Geographers. At: [https://www.aag.org/new-books-for-geographers/]
Tried to narrow down selections to focus on critical/radical geography; Indigenous, Black, carceral, abolition, anticolonial, archipelagic geographies; futures and place-making; imperial imaginaries and environmental perception; confinement, escape, mobility; housing/homelessness; literary and musical geographies.
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New stuff, early 2024:
A Caribbean Poetics of Spirit (Hannah Regis, University of the West Indies Press, 2024)
Constructing Worlds Otherwise: Societies in Movement and Anticolonial Paths in Latin America (Raúl Zibechi and translator George Ygarza Quispe, AK Press, 2024)
Fluid Geographies: Water, Science, and Settler Colonialism in New Mexico (K. Maria D. Lane, University of Chicago Press, 2024)
Hydrofeminist Thinking With Oceans: Political and Scholarly Possibilities (Tarara Shefer, Vivienne Bozalek, and Nike Romano, Routledge, 2024)
Making the Literary-Geographical World of Sherlock Holmes: The Game Is Afoot (David McLaughlin, University of Chicago Press, 2025)
Mapping Middle-earth: Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Cartographies (Anahit Behrooz, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024)
Midlife Geographies: Changing Lifecourses across Generations, Spaces and Time (Aija Lulle, Bristol University Press, 2024)
Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order (Anthony Ince and Geronimo Barrera de la Torre, Pluto Press, 2024)
New stuff, 2023:
The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Camilla Hawthorne and Jovan Scott Lewis, Duke University Press, 2023)
Activist Feminist Geographies (Edited by Kate Boyer, Latoya Eaves and Jennifer Fluri, Bristol University Press, 2023)
The Silences of Dispossession: Agrarian Change and Indigenous Politics in Argentina (Mercedes Biocca, Pluto Press, 2023)
The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Dueterte (Vicente L. Rafael, Duke University Press, 2022)
Ottoman Passports: Security and Geographic Mobility, 1876-1908 (İlkay Yılmaz, Syracuse University Press, 2023)
The Practice of Collective Escape (Helen Traill, Bristol University Press, 2023)
Maps of Sorrow: Migration and Music in the Construction of Precolonial AfroAsia (Sumangala Damodaran and Ari Sitas, Columbia University Press, 2023)
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New stuff, late 2022:
B.H. Roberts, Moral Geography, and the Making of a Modern Racist (Clyde R. Forsberg, Jr.and Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022)
Environing Empire: Nature, Infrastructure and the Making of German Southwest Africa (Martin Kalb, Berghahn Books, 2022)
Sentient Ecologies: Xenophobic Imaginaries of Landscape (Edited by Alexandra Coțofană and Hikmet Kuran, Berghahn Books 2022)
Colonial Geography: Race and Space in German East Africa, 1884–1905 (Matthew Unangst, University of Toronto Press, 2022)
The Geographies of African American Short Fiction (Kenton Rambsy, University of Mississippi Press, 2022)
Knowing Manchuria: Environments, the Senses, and Natural Knowledge on an Asian Borderland (Ruth Rogaski, University of Chicago Press, 2022)
Punishing Places: The Geography of Mass Imprisonment (Jessica T. Simes, University of California Press, 2021)
Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil (Edited by Mary E. Thomas and Bruce Braun, University of Minnesota Press, 2022)
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New stuff, early 2022:
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-fatness as Anti-Blackness (Da’Shaun Harrison, 2021)
Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World (Liam Campling & Alejandro Colás, Verso Books, 2021)
Coercive Geographies: Historicizing Mobility, Labor and Confinement (Edited by Johan Heinsen, Martin Bak Jørgensen, and Martin Ottovay Jørgensen, Haymarket Books, 2021)
Confederate Exodus: Social and Environmental Forces in the Migration of U.S. Southerners to Brazil (Alan Marcus, University of Nebraska Press, 2021)
Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place (Palgrave, 2021)
Krakow: An Ecobiography (Edited by Adam Izdebski & Rafał Szmytka, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021)
Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Amanda Smith, Liverpool University Press, 2021)
Open Hand, Closed Fist: Practices of Undocumented Organizing in a Hostile State (Kathryn Abrams, University of California Press, 2022)
Unsettling Utopia: The Making and Unmaking of French India (Jessica Namakkal, 2021)
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New stuff, 2020 and 2021:
Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America (Edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Joanna Page, 2020)
Mapping Indigenous Land: Native Land Grants in Colonial New Spain (Ana Pulido Rull, University of Oklahoma Press, 2020)
Reconstructing public housing: Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives (Matt Thompson, University of Liverpool Press, 2020)
The (Un)governable City: Productive Failure in the Making of Colonial Delhi, 1858–1911 (Raghav Kishore, 2020)
Multispecies Households in the Saian Mountains: Ecology at the Russia-Mongolia Border (Edited by Alex Oehler and Anna Varfolomeeva, 2020)
Urban Mountain Beings: History, Indigeneity, and Geographies of Time in Quito, Ecuador (Kathleen S. Fine-Dare, 2019)
City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763-1856 (Marcus P. Nevius, University of Georgia Press, 2020)
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While I was writing this to you, Janet Napolitano, the former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security, assumed her new post as the twentieth president of the University of California system, the first woman to occupy the office. The revolving door between institutions of policing, bordering, surveillance, incarceration, illegalization, militarization, and schooling is not new. Indeed, in San Diego, where I am based, Alan Bersin was superintendent of public schools from 1998 to 2005, after three years of running U.S.–Mexican border law enforcement for Attorney General Janet Reno under President Clinton. After his stint governing schools, Bersin governed the border (again) in 2009, this time for the Obama administration, working as ‘border czar’ under Janet Napolitano, then Homeland Security secretary, now UC president. However, it would be a misguided comparison to describe the bodies of faculty and students as analogous to the bodies of detainees and deportees and migrants and suspectees. It is not analogous power but technologies of power that recirculate in these imperial triangles, for example, debt financing, neoliberal market policies, information systems, managing noncitizen populations, land development. If we consider triangular connections between war abroad and refugee management within, antiblackness and the maintenance of black fungibility and accumulation, and militarization and Indigenous erasure throughout empire, then we can understand why the governors of war and the governors of schools can have similar résumés, without pretending that the governed suffer through identical conditions.
la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 37–38.
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In 2022, the share of unemployed youths in the total unemployed population was 82.9%. Further, the report mentioned that the share of educated youths among all unemployed people increased 11.5% from 54.2% in 2000 to 65.7% in 2022. Among the educated (secondary level or higher) unemployed youths, women accounted for a larger share (76.7%) than men (62.2%).
The report pointed out that in 2022, the unemployment rate among youths was six times greater for those who had completed secondary education or higher (18.4%) and nine times higher for graduates (29.1%) than for persons who could not read or write (3.4%). Moreover, this trend was higher among educated young women (21.4%) than men (17.5%), especially among female graduates (34.5%), compared to men (26.4%) with similar qualifications
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Can you elaborate more on how hindutva is tied to zionism and white supremacy? I'm not trying to hate I'm genuinely curious.
tbh i don’t have the energy rn to write up an explanation myself, but here are some sources to get you started:
hindutva’s ties to fascism, nazism, & white supremacy broadly
hindu fascism 101: what is hindutva?, by the alliance for justice & accountability
why white nationalists are working with hindu supremacists, by safa ahmed at progressive
why white supremacists and hindu nationalists are so alike, by audita chaudhery at al jazeera
white and hindu supremacists are a match made in heaven, by amardeep singh dhillion at novara media
when hindu nationalism and white nationalism meet, by thomas crowley at jacobin
hindutva & zionism specifically
united in hate: the similarities and solidarities between hindutva and zionism, by ananya ray at feminism in india
the hindu nationalists using the pro-israel playbook, by aparna gopalan at jewish currents
why zionism rules the hearts of hindutva acolytes, by shreevatsa navatia at frontline (a magazine of the hindu)
in state repression and its justification, india and israel have much in common, by achin vanaik at the wire
violent majorities: indian and israeli ethnonationalism, a discussion between balmurli natrajan, lori allen, and ajantha subramanian at recall this book podcast
how hindu nationalists became best friends with israel, by goldie osuri at jacobin
india's hindutva proponents and zionist israel: strange bedfellows, by kavita chowdhury at the diplomat
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Scenes from Inshallah Kashmir, a documentary by Ashvin Kumar.
Kashmir has been under military occupation by the Indian State for several decades. More than 700,000 armed forces are currently stationed there and have been given wide powers of arrest, detention, torture and shoot to kill. In 1991, one of the battalions of the Rajputana Rifles entered the Kunan-Poshpora villages where they forced the men to leave their houses while they beat up and raped dozens of women.
There has been absolutely no accountability for the human rights violations committed by the Indian army/paramilitary forces in Kashmir.
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