Paper short abstract:

The paper contends that an insistence on the signifier ‘southern’ even when it is defined as an epistemological position continues to remain polemical and fails to offer alternatives that can capture the complexities of the globe and not just of factions such as the North or the South.

Paper long abstract:

The paper looks at the difficulty of representing/ writing the figure of the woman worker from the global south, a problem that DM Siddiqi noted almost 10 years ago writing about women garment workers in Bangladesh i.e., what does it mean to write about this figure without falling into ‘global moralism’ that contains the third-world as it is written about extensively from ‘under western eyes’. While Siddiqi took the discursive turn to situate her subjects, this paper aims towards analytics that are situated but instead of speaking from, to or against the west, the north, the elite or the privileged, they articulate a politics for “the entire seven billion”. The paper offers an ethnographic account of an Industrial town in North India, a strike, the union and the activities of a worker’s newspaper, Faridabad Majdoor Samachar (FMS), to reflect on the aforementioned problematic through a close reading of the activities, the transformation of the newspaper and its praxis in last 30 years and their excessive insistence on "aadan-pradaan banaam shastrarth" which roughly translates to “conversational interaction vs polemics”, where polemics is defined as proving the ‘other’ wrong. Through an analysis of FMS’ praxis, the paper contends that an insistence on the signifier ‘southern’ even when it is defined as an epistemological position continues to remain polemical and thus fails to offer alternatives to contemporary epistemological and political articulations, alternatives that can capture the complexities of the globe and not just of factions such as the North or the South.