Digital Inclusion of Subalterns: Dominance Without Hegemony?

• In Event: Voices From the Margins in the Global South: A Critique of Development Discourse

Abstract

The increasing “ITization” of our everyday work and home life coincided with a time in world history that was seeing the increasing “NGOization” (Alvarez, 1997) of welfare tasks worldwide. In fact what is an alarming trend when these two connect in a context of micro-financialization of the everyday through digitality is that a digital subaltern 2.0 is produced/staged and colludes with a monetizing of subaltern voice that works as a stand-in for empowerment. The commodification and monetizing of subaltern voice in global markets serves to displace the subaltern body and works to free up rural land for urban encroachment in the name of so-called development projects. In a provacative move to think about Guha’s (1997) articulation of “dominance without hegemony” in relation to the formation of postcolonial nationhood and citizenship – I raise questions about the formation and production of subaltern (consumer) citizenship and digital inclusion through platforms that facilite "philanthropy 2.0" within a "development 2.0" framework that reinstates neocolonial hierarchies. This raises questions about what it means to contest neocolonialism while adhering to a development paradigm based in contemporary paradigms of material and social upward mobility.

Author

• Radhika Gajjala, Bowling Green State U