This essay explores the role of subaltern groups in Sudan’s 2018–2019 uprising and the immediate aftermath of Bashir’s overthrow, with a specific focus on relations between various subaltern groups and the middle classes. It begins by briefly mapping out some of the social, political, and economic transformations during the National Islamic Front’s (NIF) reign that gave rise to new subaltern formations, before focusing on the uprising itself. Drawing primarily on recent translations of Gramsci’s writings on subaltern groups and research in Sudan during and after the uprising, it then aims to shed light on shifting solidarities, tensions, and divisions between subaltern groups and the middle class in particular, with a focus on the role of nationalism(s) in unifying and fragmenting social groups at different periods. It illustrates how these groups mobilized and articulated their opposition to the regime through multiple and at times divergent appeals to nationalism, memories of past resistance, and labour revolt harking back to the colonial period, before exploring some of the tensions and contradictions brought to the fore in the post-Bashir period and emergence of organizations representing subaltern groups. In doing so, it interrogates the possibility and challenges of building subaltern hegemony in contexts such as Sudan in the present conjuncture, with particular attention to the regional and international.

Scholars of the Middle East have questioned whether, and to what extent, the waves of mass mobilizations that swept the region in the 2010s can be considered revolutions. The article seeks to contribute to this debate by adopting what György Lukács terms the Marxist standpoint of concrete totality. This allows for a dialectic understanding of reality in which the whole ceaselessly reinvents itself in relation to its parts. In analytical terms, concrete totality is understood through Antonio Gramsci’s concept of historical bloc, which represents the moment of unity in a society, when multiple factors create and in turn are shaped by an unstable and changing whole. The article argues that it is by exploring the hegemonic contraction of the historical bloc, the outbreak of a revolutionary situation, and the subsequent struggle to reshape society among various and unstable networks, that revolutions can be understood. The cases of Tunisia (2010–2014), Egypt (2011–2013), and Algeria (2019–2021) are selectively used to show how this approach works empirically.

This essay argues that the uneven breakdown of hegemony in Jordan across economic, institutional, and ideological dimensions was the terrain upon which social resistance – first from within the public sector – emerged in the mid-2000s. Drawing on interview evidence, archival and secondary sources, I explain the timing (mid-2000s) and composition (a subset of public sector workers) of social mobilization in Jordan by making three interrelated claims: (1) Jordan's first and only hegemonic bloc coalesced relatively late, in the 1970s; (2) when this nascent hegemony began to break down in the early 2000s, it occurred slowly (at first) and unevenly, leading to uneven spatial and temporal patterns of grievance formation; (3) in parallel, uneven hegemonic contraction, coupled with increased state repression, served to preclude or contain social mobilization from much of the popular sector and working class – with the exception of a subset of public sector workers. Finally, I argue that the study of protest dynamics in the case of Jordan advances the use of Gramscian concepts in contentious politics by demonstrating the importance of taking into consideration the unevenness of hegemonic contraction as well as the reflexive relationship between hegemonic articulation and resistance.

Frustrated by economic depravity, peasants and their urban supporters revolted against the bigger landowners and the State in a violent frenzy in West Bengal, India in the 1960s. These revolts were a part of the Naxalite movement that followed left-extreme politics and adopted a line of annihilating class enemies. Women were at the crossroads of the power struggles between the Naxalites and actions taken by the State. They were marginalized within the Naxalite movement and faced scrutiny for their association with violence by the Indian society. This essay will look at literary fiction such as Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar Churashir Maa (1974), Samaresh Majumdar’s Kalbela (1981) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland (2013) to form an understanding of how female participants of the Naxalite movement were represented in popular culture. The analysis highlights how the female participants of the movement faced multiple challenges to survive in extreme settings, constantly surrounded by violence. As the private and public domains overlap in a revolution, the normative system order breaks down. The contributions of female Naxalites from these private spheres are marginalized by the historiography of the movement, which focuses on the public domain. This influences the representation of female Naxalites in popular culture. The essay explores how female Naxalites were sidelined to caregiving roles or were viewed as deviants who had transgressed their femininity to enter the violent male-dominated domain of the Naxalite movement.

The management of the Vietnamese refugee crisis, when the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) resettled approximately three million refugees between 1975 and 1997, remains a cornerstone of UNHCR’s self-representation and an oft-cited example of successful intervention to this day. However, the focus on resettlement obscures the fact that UNHCR’s engagement in Vietnam started well before the end of the war, in 1973, in the form of humanitarian aid. This essay argues that UNHCR’s early engagement with Vietnam intended to realize the organization’s international ambitions, namely, to further globalize its reach. After its successful war of decolonization, Vietnam attained a special position in the Global South as well as in the communist bloc that allowed UNHCR to build new relationships beyond the West. The essay makes extensive use of archival material, not only from UNHCR’s archives and Western countries, such as the United States and Great Britain, but also from the Vietnamese National Archives, to show how in these early stages the usage of the word “refugee” became a taboo for UNHCR officials and the communist Vietnamese authorities alike. This reluctance to recognize those leaving Vietnam as refugees impeded their chance at protection, while it allowed UNHCR to intervene in the crisis on behalf of the Vietnamese government. Hence, rather than a saviour of refugees from Vietnam, UNHCR let its own interests prevail, violating its mandate to protect refugees. Examining international crisis management and foreign intervention in Vietnam, this essay demonstrates that UNHCR attempted to exploit the crisis to exponentially expand its own size and globalize its reach to both the post-colonial and the communist worlds. Paradoxically, only when UNHCR changed course, adopting the Orderly Departure Program of 1979, did the Office expand to become one of the leading agencies within the UN system.

It is an exciting time for the infrastructure humanities, with numerous publications, the formation of the UK’s first Infrastructure Humanities Group, and a swell of conferences and panel events on infrastructure appearing in recent years. As infrastructure becomes an increasingly familiar object and method of study in the arts and humanities, this essay reviews three books – two edited collections and one monograph – that were published under the broad umbrella of the infrastructure humanities in 2023. Drawing from these reviews and a series of reflections on the field, the essay offers a sketch of the origins of the infrastructure humanities, a snapshot of current interests and directions, and potential areas for inquiry moving forward.

This essay explores the works of two internationally celebrated Anglophone writers, Lydia Davis and J. M. Coetzee. I argue that Davis and Coetzee instantiate an alternative approach to the minor in contemporary world literature that combines a foregrounding of minor figures such as the woman (in Davis’s collection Can’t and Won’t) and the child (in Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy) with a use of minor forms (crypto-allegory, flash fiction) to develop an agonistic political sensibility. This sensibility stands in contrast to the universalist assumptions that inform dominant discourses of world literature and, at the same time, challenges an emphasis on absolute difference that reduces the work of minoritization to marking forms of cultural, ethnic or gendered identity. While these two authors are rarely considered in parallel, they share an interest in translation, multilingualism, a proximity to literary theory and the academy, and a strong indebtedness to the minor literatures of Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka. I trace these affinities in each author’s late works of the 2010s. In Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy, the prophetic child David constitutes the ambiguous kernel of three fictions that complicate and displace the transcendental appeal established by the religious allusion of their titles. Inversely, Davis interrogates women’s confinement to bodily immanence to construct an aesthetic of fragmentary transcendence that both disrupts this confinement while nonetheless situating subjectivity as ineluctably embedded (notably in the very reflexive and discursive forms of the stories themselves). By refusing closure, both authors develop an aesthetic of generative contradiction that points to new ways of negotiating intersubjective difference.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Britain signed treaties to secure the right to establish concessions along the Yangtze River in China. Despite extensive scholarly analysis of the history of British concessions, one aspect that is often overlooked is that these treaties did not specify the locations for these concessions. As a result, the British had to negotiate with local Chinese officials to acquire suitable sites. This essay aims to delve into the history of Sino-British relations and the spatial dynamics of occupation by examining the interactions between the British and Chinese in determining concession sites within Yangtze River port cities – specifically Zhenjiang, Hankou, and Jiujiang. It reveals that, following the Second Opium War, British arrivals and Chinese authorities established an implicit understanding. Despite diverse strategies employed by Chinese authorities in managing foreign affairs – ranging from appeasement to radical measures – the British consistently pursued potential advantages and preferred negotiation to maximize their respective interests. Consequently, these concessions were located in less desirable positions along the Yangtze River, surrounded by waterways. This strategic placement facilitated British cargo landings while enabling the Chinese to retain control over foreign arrivals, effectively transforming them into metaphorical islands within these cities.