Sustainability, Ecology, and Agriculture in Women Farmers’ Voices: Culture-Centering Gender and Development

Abstract

Abstract The neoliberal/neocolonial transformation of agriculture in the global South is achieved through the hegemony of expert-led interventions of privatization that erase the knowledge of agricultural practices held by subaltern communities. Neocolonial development interventions serve the privatizing logics of agro-capital through the circulation of logics of profits, efficiency, and growth through both paid and state-controlled communication channels. In this backdrop, our ethnographic description of a culture-centered intervention carried out in solidarity with dalit, women farmers organized under the umbrella of sanghams (cooperatives) points toward communication sovereignty as a theoretical anchor for re-imagining the relationships among ecology, agriculture, and sustainability in resistance to capitalist agriculture. Challenging hegemonic models of participatory engagement put forth by neocolonial structures of development, the concept of communicative justice inverts listening, radically placing power in the hands of subaltern communities. Layers of inequalities from households to community spaces to market structures are disrupted through the voices of dalit women farmers and their participation in practices that materially resist capitalist agriculture. Moreover, the co-creative work of generating theory from within subaltern struggles for sovereignty in the global South dislocates the colonial nature of abs/ex-tractive theorizing in the metropole in the North, situating the work of theorizing amidst the lifeworlds of subaltern communities performing everyday transformative practices that dismantle capitalist logics.