Title: Garments and Maoists in Nepal: The ethnic politics of class movement confronting market failure and national transition

Speaker: Dr. Mallika Shakya (South Asian University; 2014 Fellow, Asia Leadership Fellow Program)

Date and Time: 15:30-17:30, Sunday, 19 October, 2014

Venue: Meeting room No.1, 3F, Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo

Abstract:
Disillusioned by the unfulfilled promises of development, Nepali garment workers' efforts to make sense of their everyday life increasingly took ethnic expressions, and eventually became the proselytizing ground for the urban class movement waged by the Maoist rebels. What I offer in this paper is an ethnographic portrayal of how the garment shop floors went from being the capitalist fronts of industry competitiveness to the Maoist battle ground for labour uprising. My suggestion is that the contexts of colossal developmental failure and unprecedented state transformation, alongside the politics of daily resistance, are constitutive of ethnic politics that took a new meaning in twenty first century Nepal. This paper is a critical inquiry into Nepal's current national transition through the interplay of class and ethnic activism, notions of politics and development, and practice.

Contact: Katsuo Nawa

*The lecture is open to public; no registration is required.

担当：名和