Logistical Asia by Brett Neilson Ned Rossiter & Ranabir Samaddar

Author:Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter & Ranabir Samaddar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer Singapore, Singapore

Coda

In the above discussion, the idea of labour has been developed primarily through narrative examples. I close this chapter by offering a more theoretical explanation of my approach. Attentive readers will have grasped that I do not situate postcolonial labour outside processes of neoliberal development . Labouring subjectivities , in my view, are never encountered as purely resistant selves. At the same time, I do not want to frame labour as inescapably implicated in neoliberal development alism—as the co-constitutive double of logistical worlds, if you will. Labouring subjectivities are never purely docile bodies. I seek to understand how labour generates a dialectic of interiority and exteriority with respect to logistical worlds. This approach allows for a more historicized and dynamic understanding of labouring subjectivities in the context of Siliguri’s metropolitan transformation.

Moving on, the political-economic mélange of people in flux—of wholesalers, retailers, traders, military and security personnel, tea planters and labourers, trafficked bodies and their consumers, gun-runners, political fugitives, asylum-seekers, railwaymen, construction workers , and stateless groups—cannot be understood outside the governing sign of neoliberalism. In fact, in 2002, India, Nepal , Bhutan , and Bangladesh considered a proposal to create a free trade zone in the Siliguri area which would allow the four countries to connect directly with each other without restrictions. Two observations are in order. First, it is not strange that an area which is a hub of heavy military securitization occasioned by neurotic obsession about territorial integrity is also a proposed hub of international free trade . This paradoxical coupling of military securitization and neoliberal circulation has been a marker of the northeast in general. Observing this paradox allows us to controversially state that Siliguri , and by extension North Bengal, is perhaps more integrally a part of India’s northeast than it is a part of the rest of West Bengal. Second, the creation of a free zone for commodity trade is not awaiting an international diktat in the area. As has been suggested above, such a zone has already come into being informally. A walk through the bazaars of Siliguri testifies to this. The new shopping complexes have not even offered the meekest challenge to the booming business of the Seth Srilal Market, the Sevoke Road, and Hill Cart Road bazaars or the airport market at Bagdogra . These markets are prominent places to buy daily-use goods and are extremely popular among people from nearby areas as well as tourists from all over the world. They are awash with commodities imported from neighbouring countries, by means both licit and illicit.

Like so many other spaces in Siliguri , the bazaars dent the city’s sanitized self-image as a hub of neoliberal development and reveal the seamier, probably dominant side of a border town in the throes of economic expansion. Siliguri is a node for smuggled goods and trafficked human beings. These are the logistical flows of crime and commerce that co-constitute Siliguri under the sign of neoliberal capital . They are flows that attract constant commentary in government

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