[POSTPONED] Toward Communities of Resistance: Rethinking Citizenship, Migration, and Belonging in Northeast India

Coloniality and structural violence are crucially implicated in the precarious existence led by the vast majority of people in the global South. Communities denied of the “right to have rights” are engaged in fights to reclaim their lands, their place in the world, and often their very right to exist. Yet this fight implicates us all as we resist crisscrossing vectors of injustice from our different relations to precarity and (dis)placement. Drawing upon activist research in solidarity with communities fighting labels of “illegal immigrant” and state-sponsored crisis of citizenship in Assam (Northeast India), this talk will grapple with multiple dimensions of structural violence, from its colonial underpinnings to ongoing peoples’ resistance against it. Anchored in decolonial, women of Color, and transnational feminist perspectives, this participatory action research project documents social suffering in disenfranchised communities and explores creative and culturally meaningful pathways for decolonial resistance. Centering defiant voices of these communities-in-struggle, the talk will illustrate the need to rethink dominant conceptualizations of citizenship, migration, and belonging; in doing so, troubling hegemonic ideas of “inclusion” tethered to nation state membership as well as illuminating possibilities for alternative collective imaginaries.