Vinay Gidwani
Biographic Data
| ID | 83605 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vinay Gidwani |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vinay |
| FAMILY NAME | Gidwani |
| SIGNATURE | GIDWANI V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Minnesota |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 702 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Repair Work as Care
If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for profits is the abstraction of life itself and of the human/nonhuman relations that sustain it, creating a wake of waste in its path. Repairing the fraying human and ecological systems that underwrite life entails ongoing care work that is frequently invisible or devalued, and whose burdens fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations. We detail thi…
Articulation work
If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformations in cities of the global south, then a less visible but equally vital dimension is the process of land assembly on which residential and commercial real estate speculation and development are premised. This paper pries open the value chain of land assembly that underlies these transformations in a rapidly expanding peri-urban frontier of Bengaluru,…
The Gender of Value
546 Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Priti Ramamurthy and Vinay Gidwani The Gender of Value: Punctuated Violence and the Labor of Care Usha is the eldest daughter of a high-caste, Rajput family from a small village in eastern Uttar Pradesh in north India.1 She married into a family that owns three bighas (approximately 1.8 acres) of land. But no one in her marital family has tilled it for the last three generations . U…
Keywords in Radical Geography
Keywords in Radical Geography
Agrarian questions of labor in urban India
Our paper re-considers the agrarian question in urban India by focusing on the social reproduction of labor in informal economy households. Based on life histories of working-class women of rural origin, we explore lived forms of differentiation within the informal economy, the social division of labor as mediated by intersecting lines of difference, and possibilities of disorienting normative hierarchies through acts of 'cultural production'. Ou…
Other Geographies
Other Geographies
Neil Smith's Long Revolutionary Imperative
Whether writing about gentrification or nature, the production of space or the politics of scale, uneven development or public space, globalization or revolution, the geographer Neil Smith was nothing if not provocative. Neither Festschrift nor hagiography, this special issue of Antipode critically engages Smith's work-not to unpick the rich tapestry, but to draw the threads out and spin them on in new directions. Consisting of newly commissioned…
The Waste-Value Dialectic
Capitalist value making is underwritten by the production and disposal of waste through a complex, often invisible economy of informal waste recycling. This infra-economy is anchored by nodes that process and circulate variegated forms of waste generated in cities and their adjoining hinterlands. Bholakpur, in the city of Hyderabad, India, is one such place. There are hundreds like it scattered around the country. Even as they perform the double …
The Ethical Imperative
The virtuosity of Karen Bakker's book, Privatizing Water, lies in its depth of understanding and methodical assessment of water provision, its refusal to lapse into the easy embrace of entrenched dichotomies, and its relentless commitment to asking how we can find solutions to urban water crises that are workable and just. Bakker strives to extend this notion of justice to both the human and non‐human realms. Whether she succeeds is moot, because…
The work of waste
My essay focuses on the marginalised people whose livelihoods depend on gathering, sorting, transporting and selling garbage in India's huge informal economy, livelihoods now challenged as municipal governments contract the recycling of waste to corporations. The evolving, bumpy geography of the waste economy creates permanent border areas of primitive accumulation and both devalorised and valorised people and places. I make a case for understand…
Introduction
This special issue, papers presented at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded conference in Jakarta (March 2011), examines the current 'urban century' in terms of three revolutions. Revolutions from above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form they have taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldwide to organise urban development around neoliberal norms. Revolutions from below refer to the multi…
Six theses on waste, value, and commons
The origins of capitalist value theory lie in transformations of property through enclosure of 'commons-as-waste' and practices of 'commoning' that supported these. These processes, repeated with difference, remain with us. Capitalist value production becomes a structure of necessity in societies that are profit seeking rather than needs oriented; the history of capitalist value is one of the unrelenting attempts to subordinate needs-oriented for…
Gramsci at the Margins
The Afterlives of “Waste”
We contend that “waste” is the political other of capitalist “value”, repeated with difference as part of capital's spatial histories of surplus accumulation. We trace its work on India through a series of historical cuts, and suggest that the travels and perils of waste give us a “minor” history of capitalist surplus—the things, places and lives that are cast outside the pale of “value” at particular moments as superfluity, excess, or detritus; …
Antipode in an Antithetical Era
David Harvey
Noel Castree and Derek Gregory ( eds ), David Harvey: A Critical Reader . Oxford : Blackwell Publishing , 2006 . 324 pp . ISBN 0-631-23510-8 ( paperback ), US$ 33.95 David Harvey is a charismatic representative of the dialectical Marx, and like any committed delegate he makes it his task to, both, speak of Marx and speak for Marx. His writings, at a minimum from Social Justice and the City (1973) to A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), embody…
Capitalism's Anxious Whole
Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse . The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not ‐va…
Capital, interrupted
The central Gujarat region of western India is home to the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste who have leveraged their rural dominance to become a powerful global diaspora of merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels' intriguing ascent, Vinay Gidwani analyzes its broad implications for the nature of labor and capital worldwide. With the Patels as his central case, Gidwani interrogates established concepts of value…
The Subaltern Moment in Hegel's Dialectic
I stage the question 'What about dialectics?' by showing Frantz Fanon's insurrectionary fidelity to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his dialectic. Fanon is an acute and disloyal reader of Hegel, and relentlessly probes the moment of negation in Hegel's dialectic to pry it open for an emancipatory, nonsublative politics of a 'new humanity'. Fanon's attempts to side with the radical implications of otherness disclose the 'subaltern moment' in Heg…
Subaltern Cosmopolitanism as Politics
Thanks to Connie (whose last name will go unnamed in the interests of anonymity) for sharing her life and collaborating in the authorship of this article. Thanks also to my friend Ajay Skaria for clarifying the dangers of theory that is glibly cosmopolitan. Finally, thanks to Noel Castree and Melissa Wright as editors of Antipode and to an anonymous member of the Editorial Board for instructive comments and advice
The Limits to Capital
Geographies of Work
Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion
Harnessing primary and secondary evidence from India, our essay conceptualizes the cultural dynamics of migration. In so doing, it demonstrates the incompleteness of standard marginalist and Marxist accounts of labor circulation. As a corrective, we examine the linkages between culture, politics, space, and labor mobility and offer a way to think about them by building on poststructural critiques of development and postcolonial theories of migran…
The Afterlives of “Waste”
We contend that “waste” is the political other of capitalist “value”, repeated with difference as part of capital's spatial histories of surplus accumulation. We trace its work on India through a series of historical cuts, and suggest that the travels and perils of waste give us a “minor” history of capitalist surplus—the things, places and lives that are cast outside the pale of “value” at particular moments as superfluity, excess, or detritus; …
Circular migration and rural cosmopolitanism in India
In this article we present a provisional theory of rural cosmopolitanism as a counterpoint to conventional discussions of cosmopolitanism and demonstrate its significance for studying South Asian modernities. We explore our ideas through the figure of the circular migrant: someone who transmits through movements in geographic space not just sensi bilities and ideas, but also the materials and techniques that enable the transformation of social sp…
Six theses on waste, value, and commons
The origins of capitalist value theory lie in transformations of property through enclosure of 'commons-as-waste' and practices of 'commoning' that supported these. These processes, repeated with difference, remain with us. Capitalist value production becomes a structure of necessity in societies that are profit seeking rather than needs oriented; the history of capitalist value is one of the unrelenting attempts to subordinate needs-oriented for…
The work of waste
My essay focuses on the marginalised people whose livelihoods depend on gathering, sorting, transporting and selling garbage in India's huge informal economy, livelihoods now challenged as municipal governments contract the recycling of waste to corporations. The evolving, bumpy geography of the waste economy creates permanent border areas of primitive accumulation and both devalorised and valorised people and places. I make a case for understand…
Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion
Harnessing primary and secondary evidence from India, our essay conceptualizes the cultural dynamics of migration. In so doing, it demonstrates the incompleteness of standard marginalist and Marxist accounts of labor circulation. As a corrective, we examine the linkages between culture, politics, space, and labor mobility and offer a way to think about them by building on poststructural critiques of development and postcolonial theories of migran…
Agrarian questions of labor in urban India
Our paper re-considers the agrarian question in urban India by focusing on the social reproduction of labor in informal economy households. Based on life histories of working-class women of rural origin, we explore lived forms of differentiation within the informal economy, the social division of labor as mediated by intersecting lines of difference, and possibilities of disorienting normative hierarchies through acts of 'cultural production'. Ou…
The Waste-Value Dialectic
Capitalist value making is underwritten by the production and disposal of waste through a complex, often invisible economy of informal waste recycling. This infra-economy is anchored by nodes that process and circulate variegated forms of waste generated in cities and their adjoining hinterlands. Bholakpur, in the city of Hyderabad, India, is one such place. There are hundreds like it scattered around the country. Even as they perform the double …
Introduction
This special issue, papers presented at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded conference in Jakarta (March 2011), examines the current 'urban century' in terms of three revolutions. Revolutions from above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form they have taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldwide to organise urban development around neoliberal norms. Revolutions from below refer to the multi…
Subaltern Cosmopolitanism as Politics
Thanks to Connie (whose last name will go unnamed in the interests of anonymity) for sharing her life and collaborating in the authorship of this article. Thanks also to my friend Ajay Skaria for clarifying the dangers of theory that is glibly cosmopolitan. Finally, thanks to Noel Castree and Melissa Wright as editors of Antipode and to an anonymous member of the Editorial Board for instructive comments and advice
Repair Work as Care
If the Anthropocene is the Capitalocene, then one of its signature attributes in the drive for profits is the abstraction of life itself and of the human/nonhuman relations that sustain it, creating a wake of waste in its path. Repairing the fraying human and ecological systems that underwrite life entails ongoing care work that is frequently invisible or devalued, and whose burdens fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations. We detail thi…
The unbearable modernity of ‘development’? Canal irrigation and development planning in Western India
Articulation work
If the entanglements of real estate and finance capital are pivotal in ongoing urban transformations in cities of the global south, then a less visible but equally vital dimension is the process of land assembly on which residential and commercial real estate speculation and development are premised. This paper pries open the value chain of land assembly that underlies these transformations in a rapidly expanding peri-urban frontier of Bengaluru,…
Geographies of Work
The Quest for Distinction
In this article I examine how the rural labor process is constitutive of social identity, particularly status, by harnessing empirical evidence from Kheda District, Gujarat, and other parts of India. Emphasis is on the labor practices of the dominant Lewa Patel caste, and only secondarily on the practices of other caste groups. My central claim is that the labor process is a primary arena in which the quest for social distinction occurs and that …
Capitalism's Anxious Whole
Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse . The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not ‐va…
The Subaltern Moment in Hegel's Dialectic
I stage the question 'What about dialectics?' by showing Frantz Fanon's insurrectionary fidelity to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his dialectic. Fanon is an acute and disloyal reader of Hegel, and relentlessly probes the moment of negation in Hegel's dialectic to pry it open for an emancipatory, nonsublative politics of a 'new humanity'. Fanon's attempts to side with the radical implications of otherness disclose the 'subaltern moment' in Heg…
The Limits to Capital
Neil Smith's Long Revolutionary Imperative
Whether writing about gentrification or nature, the production of space or the politics of scale, uneven development or public space, globalization or revolution, the geographer Neil Smith was nothing if not provocative. Neither Festschrift nor hagiography, this special issue of Antipode critically engages Smith's work-not to unpick the rich tapestry, but to draw the threads out and spin them on in new directions. Consisting of newly commissioned…
Antipode in an Antithetical Era
New Theory or New Dogma? A Tale of Social Capital and Economic Development from Gujarat, India
The quest to discover the most robust predictors of economic development continues unabated. Social scientists have run the gamut, for instance, from demographic pressure to the degree of price distortion, and savings rate to the rate of technical innovation. Currently, the attention is on "social capital." Although empirical studies operationalize social capital in an almost bewildering number of ways, the shared impulse of these studies, the ar…
The Gender of Value
546 Feminist Studies 47, no. 3. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Priti Ramamurthy and Vinay Gidwani The Gender of Value: Punctuated Violence and the Labor of Care Usha is the eldest daughter of a high-caste, Rajput family from a small village in eastern Uttar Pradesh in north India.1 She married into a family that owns three bighas (approximately 1.8 acres) of land. But no one in her marital family has tilled it for the last three generations . U…
The Quest for Distinction
In this article I examine how the rural labor process is constitutive of social identity, particularly status, by harnessing empirical evidence from Kheda District, Gujarat, and other parts of India. Emphasis is on the labor practices of the dominant Lewa Patel caste, and only secondarily on the practices of other caste groups. My central claim is that the labor process is a primary arena in which the quest for social distinction occurs and that …
The cultural logic of work
This two-part essay seeks to explain why group-based and individual piecework arrangements have become the modal form of payment for a variety of agricultural tasks in central Gujarat, India. Part 1 of the essay reviews New Institutional Economics (NIE) and Marxist Political Economy (MPE) approaches to the labour process, and claims that while the 'efficiency' and 'disciplinary' considerations emphasized by NIE and MPE in their explanations of co…
The Cultural Logic of Work
This two-part essay seeks to explain why group-based and individual piecework arrangements have become the modal form of payment for a variety of agricultural tasks in central Gujarat, India. Part 1 of the essay reviews New Institutional Economics (NIE) and Marxist Political Economy (MPE) approaches to the labour process, and claims that while the 'efficiency' and 'disciplinary' considerations emphasized by NIE and MPE in their explanations of co…
The unbearable modernity of ‘development’? Canal irrigation and development planning in Western India
New Theory or New Dogma? A Tale of Social Capital and Economic Development from Gujarat, India
The quest to discover the most robust predictors of economic development continues unabated. Social scientists have run the gamut, for instance, from demographic pressure to the degree of price distortion, and savings rate to the rate of technical innovation. Currently, the attention is on "social capital." Although empirical studies operationalize social capital in an almost bewildering number of ways, the shared impulse of these studies, the ar…
Circular Migration and the Spaces of Cultural Assertion
Harnessing primary and secondary evidence from India, our essay conceptualizes the cultural dynamics of migration. In so doing, it demonstrates the incompleteness of standard marginalist and Marxist accounts of labor circulation. As a corrective, we examine the linkages between culture, politics, space, and labor mobility and offer a way to think about them by building on poststructural critiques of development and postcolonial theories of migran…
Circular migration and rural cosmopolitanism in India
In this article we present a provisional theory of rural cosmopolitanism as a counterpoint to conventional discussions of cosmopolitanism and demonstrate its significance for studying South Asian modernities. We explore our ideas through the figure of the circular migrant: someone who transmits through movements in geographic space not just sensi bilities and ideas, but also the materials and techniques that enable the transformation of social sp…
The Limits to Capital
Geographies of Work
Subaltern Cosmopolitanism as Politics
Thanks to Connie (whose last name will go unnamed in the interests of anonymity) for sharing her life and collaborating in the authorship of this article. Thanks also to my friend Ajay Skaria for clarifying the dangers of theory that is glibly cosmopolitan. Finally, thanks to Noel Castree and Melissa Wright as editors of Antipode and to an anonymous member of the Editorial Board for instructive comments and advice
David Harvey
Noel Castree and Derek Gregory ( eds ), David Harvey: A Critical Reader . Oxford : Blackwell Publishing , 2006 . 324 pp . ISBN 0-631-23510-8 ( paperback ), US$ 33.95 David Harvey is a charismatic representative of the dialectical Marx, and like any committed delegate he makes it his task to, both, speak of Marx and speak for Marx. His writings, at a minimum from Social Justice and the City (1973) to A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), embody…
Capitalism's Anxious Whole
Two Hegels inhabit the Grundrisse . The first is conservative of the “selfsame” subject that continuously returns to itself as non‐identical identity and propels “history”. The other Hegel tarries with the “negative” he (which or variously calls “non‐being”, “otherness”“difference”) to disrupt this plenary subject to Marx's reading of a Hegel who is different‐in‐himself lends Grundrisse its electric buzz: seizing Hegel's “negative” as the not ‐va…
Capital, interrupted
The central Gujarat region of western India is home to the entrepreneurial landowning Patel caste who have leveraged their rural dominance to become a powerful global diaspora of merchants, industrialists, and professionals. Investigating the Patels' intriguing ascent, Vinay Gidwani analyzes its broad implications for the nature of labor and capital worldwide. With the Patels as his central case, Gidwani interrogates established concepts of value…
The Subaltern Moment in Hegel's Dialectic
I stage the question 'What about dialectics?' by showing Frantz Fanon's insurrectionary fidelity to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his dialectic. Fanon is an acute and disloyal reader of Hegel, and relentlessly probes the moment of negation in Hegel's dialectic to pry it open for an emancipatory, nonsublative politics of a 'new humanity'. Fanon's attempts to side with the radical implications of otherness disclose the 'subaltern moment' in Heg…
The Afterlives of “Waste”
We contend that “waste” is the political other of capitalist “value”, repeated with difference as part of capital's spatial histories of surplus accumulation. We trace its work on India through a series of historical cuts, and suggest that the travels and perils of waste give us a “minor” history of capitalist surplus—the things, places and lives that are cast outside the pale of “value” at particular moments as superfluity, excess, or detritus; …
Antipode in an Antithetical Era
Gramsci at the Margins
Six theses on waste, value, and commons
The origins of capitalist value theory lie in transformations of property through enclosure of 'commons-as-waste' and practices of 'commoning' that supported these. These processes, repeated with difference, remain with us. Capitalist value production becomes a structure of necessity in societies that are profit seeking rather than needs oriented; the history of capitalist value is one of the unrelenting attempts to subordinate needs-oriented for…
The Ethical Imperative
The virtuosity of Karen Bakker's book, Privatizing Water, lies in its depth of understanding and methodical assessment of water provision, its refusal to lapse into the easy embrace of entrenched dichotomies, and its relentless commitment to asking how we can find solutions to urban water crises that are workable and just. Bakker strives to extend this notion of justice to both the human and non‐human realms. Whether she succeeds is moot, because…
The work of waste
My essay focuses on the marginalised people whose livelihoods depend on gathering, sorting, transporting and selling garbage in India's huge informal economy, livelihoods now challenged as municipal governments contract the recycling of waste to corporations. The evolving, bumpy geography of the waste economy creates permanent border areas of primitive accumulation and both devalorised and valorised people and places. I make a case for understand…
Introduction
This special issue, papers presented at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded conference in Jakarta (March 2011), examines the current 'urban century' in terms of three revolutions. Revolutions from above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form they have taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldwide to organise urban development around neoliberal norms. Revolutions from below refer to the multi…
The Waste-Value Dialectic
Capitalist value making is underwritten by the production and disposal of waste through a complex, often invisible economy of informal waste recycling. This infra-economy is anchored by nodes that process and circulate variegated forms of waste generated in cities and their adjoining hinterlands. Bholakpur, in the city of Hyderabad, India, is one such place. There are hundreds like it scattered around the country. Even as they perform the double …
Other Geographies
Other Geographies
Neil Smith's Long Revolutionary Imperative
Whether writing about gentrification or nature, the production of space or the politics of scale, uneven development or public space, globalization or revolution, the geographer Neil Smith was nothing if not provocative. Neither Festschrift nor hagiography, this special issue of Antipode critically engages Smith's work-not to unpick the rich tapestry, but to draw the threads out and spin them on in new directions. Consisting of newly commissioned…
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Geography (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (9 works)