CSSH congratulates Mareike Winchell (“Liberty Time in Question: Historical Duration and Indigenous Refusal in Post-Revolutionary Bolivia” (CSSH 62-3, 2020)) on the recent publication of her book After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022). The publisher writes of the book:
How are injurious pasts redeployed by the dispossessed? After Servitude explores how agrarian engineers, Indigenous farmers, Mestizo mining bosses, and rural workers navigate racial hierarchies rooted in histories of forced agrarian labor. In the rural Bolivian province of Ayopaya, where the liberatory promises of property remain elusive, Quechua people address such hierarchies by demanding aid from Mestizo elites and, when that fails, through acts of labor militancy. Against institutional faith in property ownership as a means to detach land from people and present from past, the kin of former masters and servants alike have insisted that ethical debts from earlier racial violence stretch across epochs and formal land sales. What emerges is a vision of justice grounded in popular demands that wealth remain beholden to the region’s agrarian past. By tracing Ayopayans’ active efforts to contend with servitude’s long shadow, Mareike Winchell illuminates the challenges that property confronts as both an extractive paradigm and a means of historical redress.
Congratulations also to Shozab Raza, whose dissertation, Theory from the Trenches: Revolutionary Decolonization on Pakistan’s Landed Estates (University of Toronto, 2022), has just been awarded the 2022 S.S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies! Find the prize announcement and dissertation abstract here, and don’t miss the CSSH article where he develops some of its key arguments: “The Sufi and the Sickle: Theorizing Mystical Marxism in Rural Pakistan” (CSSH 64-2, 2022).
