WHAT IS THE POLITICAL? A VIEW FROM THE “GLOBAL SOUTH”*

In Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South, Prathama Banerjee challenges the ontological givenness of the category of the political in South Asian histories. The claim is surprising since the most productive interventions that heralded a postcolonial turn in the field have been preoccupied with analyses of colonialism, nationalism, political economy, and sovereignty. I situate Banerjee's claims in the context of her arguments about the meaning and appositeness of a decolonial historiography of the global South. This book is an attempt to break out from the postcolonial into a decolonial mode of history writing. While seemingly simple, stable, universal, and singular, the political, she argues, is anything but. How, then, do we recognize it? The political shows itself through a contest or comparison with that which is not identical to it, the nonpolitical. The semantic field of the political always includes “nonpolitical” and “extrapolitical” aspects such as the economic or the spiritual. And the concept of the political comes undone when we follow up on these connections. This essay analyzes the intellectual stakes of the book as a conceptual history of the political by analyzing its constituent “elements”: Self, Action, Idea, and People. I conclude with an assessment of it as a model for decolonial histories of the global South.