Theory from the Trenches

Over the past few years, we have seen renewed efforts to “decolonize.” From the toppling of statues to the revision of disciplinary canons, much of the focus has been on overturning colonial residues in our cultural and epistemological landscapes. Theory from the Trenches offers a radically different vision of decolonization — one driven not by bureaucrats, professors or social media activists but by peasants, a vision that was at once global and local, dedicated equally to decolonizing the less visible structures of political economy as it was to fighting epistemic battles. 

The book focuses on the stories of landless peasants in Pakistan who in the 1970s joined the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP), the country’s historically largest communist party. While the MKP supported peasants in occupying colonially-established estates, it also enrolled them into a global communist movement, one that believed revolutionary theorizing was necessary for revolution. While some peasants retheorized Euro-centric Marxisms to incorporate Sufi Islam, others developed theories of communist belonging or comradeship that drew inspiration from tribal relations. I conceptualize these peasant experiments in theory-making as trench theory, with the trench metaphor flagging a mode of subterranean theorizing geared specifically toward political combat.

Theory from the Trenches has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (OGS), and the Jackman Humanities Institute and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. The book draws on my dissertation, which was awarded the S. S. Pirzada Prize on Pakistan and the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS) prize for Best Dissertation in the Social Sciences.