Passive Revolution in the Postcolony

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution—the transformation of social orders from above through reform, absorption, and selective modernization—has become increasingly salient for understanding the trajectories of postcolonial societies. Since Partha Chatterjee’s influential claim that passive revolution offers the most illuminating framework for interpreting the process of postcolonial transition, scholars have revisited Gramsci’s concept to understand how the decolonization project was contained and ultimately diverted. From Asia to Africa to Latin America, postcolonial states have often transformed inherited colonial structures through selective reform, elite negotiation, and incorporation from above—remaking hegemony rather than dismantling it. This panel invites papers that critically extend this line of inquiry, exploring passive revolution as a lens for analyzing the contradictory processes through which ruling classes, nationalist movements, and international institutions have managed crises of legitimacy and development in the postcolonial world. How do these processes articulate political modernization with the reproduction of inequality? What new forms of subaltern incorporation, consent, and exclusion do they generate? The panel seeks to generate dialogue among Marxist, postcolonial, and decolonial traditions, asking how passive revolution might illuminate continuities between colonial and postcolonial modes of rule. We especially encourage submissions that connect local and global scales, or that explore the contradictions of reformist transformation in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Sub Unit

• Global and Transnational Sociology Section / Passive Revolution in the Postcolony

Presider

• Zachary Levenson, Florida International University

Individual Presentations

• Passive revolution: a contested concept and a research agenda - Cihan Ziya Tugal, University of California-Berkeley

• Late Petro-State Politics: The Struggle for Temporal Hegemony in Guyana - Anna Feign, University of California-Berkeley

• Incorporation Without Determination: Iran and the Passive Revolution Problem - Kevan Harris, University of California-Los Angeles

• Revolutionary Junctures and the Time of Decolonization - Mushahid Hussain, Trinity College

• The Stolen Passive Revolution: Intelligentsia Hegemony and Dependent Development at Europe's Former Imperial Periphery - Tomasz Zarycki, University of Warsaw, Poland

Discussant

• Simeon J. Newman, University of Toronto

Session Organizer

• Zachary Levenson, Florida International University