Alternative Futures and the Present by Ranabir Samaddar

Alternative Futures and the Present by Ranabir Samaddar

This book explores the idea that alternatives to our present condition are available in the present, such that a search for alternatives must involve rigorous study of some of its central texts, events, and thinkers.

Through engagement with selected modern thinkers, texts, and events, it imagines a different future from the position of the current postcolonial moment, indicating the possibilities that emerge from the present and which shape contemporary radical thinking.

An invitation to imagine a possible future marked with alternative possibilities of conducting struggles, and living through contentions and social restructuring, it will appeal to scholars with interests in social and political theory, political philosophy, colonialism and postcolonialism, and historical materialism.

Ranabir Samaddar is currently the Distinguished Chair in Migration and Forced Migration Studies, Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India. He belongs to the critical school of thinking and is considered one of the foremost theorists in the field of migration and forced migration studies. His writings on migration, forms of labour, urbanisation, and political struggles have signalled a new turn in postcolonial thinking. Among his influential works are: The Marginal Nation: Transborder Migration from Bangladesh to West Bengal (1999) and Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age (2018). His most recent publications are The Postcolonial Age of Migration (2020), and written in the background of the COVID pandemic, A Pandemic and the Politics of Life (2021).