Can the Dalit woman speak? How ‘intersectionality’ helps advance postcolonial organization studies

Abstract

Through a sustained engagement with postcolonial/subaltern studies scholarships, I would inquire into how intersectionality as an approach could advance an argument in the context of the postcolonial organization studies. This would ensure a submerged possibility of understanding ‘workplace resistances’ and their varied dynamics. The case study involves both contemporary ethnographic and in-depth historical accounts sourced from the Dalit women’s protests at tea plantations in the south Indian state of Kerala in 2015 (along with pertinent secondary sources). The article explores how ‘self-organizing’ by the mis-organized, during the course of the struggle, turned them into active political subjects: a ‘subject position from which to speak’. Exposing certain theoretical constraints within the postcolonial approach and incorporating insights from deeper subjective aspects of the labour process, social reproduction in postcolonial perspectives, and the feminist literature on intersectionality as an integrative narrative, an attempt is made to supplement the postcolonial organization studies and open up the gateway to its advancement.