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Shorelines: Space and Rights in South India, Stanford University Press, 2009. NAFTA at two years: the human and environmental toll (with John Cavanagh and Sarah Anderson), Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 1995. Articles “Community, Class, and Conservation: Development Politics on the Kanyakumari Coast.” Conservation and Society, Vol. 1, No. 2 (July-December), 2003, pp. 177-208. “Modernity from Below: Local Citizenship on the South Indian Coast.” International Social Science Journal, No. 175, March 2003, pp. 135-144. “Community, Place, and Citizenship.” Seminar: Shades of Green, a symposium on the changing contours of Indian environmentalism, No. 516, August 2002. “Indians in North Carolina: Race, Class, and Culture in the Making of Immigrant Identity,” Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, Vol. XX, Nos. 1&2, 2000, pp.105-113. “Is Development Just a Red Herring? Indian Fishworkers, Multinationals and the State,” South Asia Bulletin, Vol. XIV, No.2, 1994, pp. 108-114. “Between the Devil and the Deep Sea: the Dilemma of Artisanal Fisherpeople” (with M. H. Kalavathy), Frontline Magazine, November 18, 1994. “Routes of Tension: Shadow over a Festival.” Frontline Magazine, October 12-25, 1991. BOOK CHAPTERS “Indians in North Carolina: Race, Class, and Culture in the Making of Immigrant Identity” [Reprint] in Min Zhou and James Gatewood eds. Contemporary Asian America: a Multidisciplinary Reader, Second Edition, New York University Press, 2007, pp. 158-175. “Community, Place, and Citizenship.” [Reprint] Environmental Issues in India, Pearson Longman, 2007, pp. 444-453. “North Carolina’s Indians: Erasing Race to Make the Citizen.” In James Peacock and Harry Watson eds. The American South in a Global World, University of North Carolina Press, 2005, pp. 192-201. “The Micropolitics of Nature.” Review of A. Agrawal and K. Sivaramakrishnan, eds. Agrarian Environments: Resources, Representation, and Rule in India. American Ethnologist, Vol. 30, No. 3, August 2003, pp. 454-455.
“Poisoned Land: the Science and Politics of the Tar Creek Buyouts.” Multimedia (photography, video, and text) project in progress. Audiovisual Productions 2000 Desi: South Asians in New York (PBS/Glazen Creative Group) Associate Producer 1998 Fishing in the Sea of Greed Courses Taught Citizenship Development Space and Power Political Economy Politics of Nature Religion and Social Transformation in South Asia Asians in the United States Comparative Liberation Theologies
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Shorelines
Space and Rights in South India
by Ajantha Subramanian
Stanford University Press
2009
"This book is more than important: it is unique and path-breaking. Evocative of its place and time, it reveals the coast of India and, by implication, other coastal sites in Asia as a landscape of negotiations for livelihood rights. In avid focus, Subramanian calls attention to a community's capacity to mobilize their in-between positionality for political ends." —David Ludden,
New York University
"Shorelines boldly invites discussion of how social and political spaces are produced, what space does to political and social relations, and how people in fishing communities think about the relationship between water and land. It will produce a significant and lasting impact." —Arun Agrawal, University of Michigan
After a clerical sanction prohibited them from fishing for a week, a group of Catholic fishers from a village on India's southwestern coast took their church to court. They called on the state to recognize them as custodians of the local sea, protect their right to regulate trawling, and reject the church's intermediary role.
In Shorelines, Ajantha Subramanian argues that their struggle requires a rethinking of Indian democracy, citizenship, and environmentalism. Rather than see these fishers as non-moderns inhabiting a bounded cultural world, or as moderns wholly captured by the logic of state power, she illustrates how they constitute themselves as political subjects. In particular, she shows how they produced new geographies—of regionalism, common property, alternative technology, and fisher citizenship—that underpinned claims to rights, thus using space as an instrument of justice. Moving beyond the romantic myth of self-contained, natural-resource dependent populations, this work reveals the charged political maneuvers that bound subalterns and sovereigns in South Asia.