Common Time: Geology, Sovereignty, Planetarity

Matthew Shutzer, Duke University

This paper examines the historical and conceptual relationship between post-colonial sovereignty and ideas about the commons. It will focus on how industrially-valuable geological strata - coal, petroleum, and iron-ore - came to be understood as the common patrimonial wealth of "the people" in India during the 1950s and 1960s. I will explore how sovereign assertions over these resources were connected to new and often contested modes of claiming a "commons" as a condition of post-colonial development. This included the historical conceptualization of Indian socialism's break with so-called "feudal" arrangements of landownership, the emergence of linguistic and communal counterclaims over geological strata, and the problem of labor's right to share in the abundance of the underground. The paper will conclude by looking at how the resource nationalism that characterized early decolonization provided the conditions of possibility for thinking about the "planet" itself as a commons.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 192. Critical Social Theory from the Global South