Book Review: Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South, by Prathama Banerjee

• DOI: 10.1177/00905917211034426
• Author: Dilip M. Menon
• Date: 01 June 2022
• Published date: 01 June 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(3) 529 –548

© The Author(s) 2021

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South, by Prathama

Banerjee. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020, 288 pp.

Reviewed by: Dilip M. Menon, Centre for Indian Studies in Africa, University of

Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

DOI: 10.1177/00905917211034426

The study of the political is a fraught enterprise. Much thinking on the

political happens in the abstract and with a rugged sense of prolepsis, pro-

ceeding from the belief that there are already existing ideal states in some

places as opposed to others. European analysts of areas called the Third

World, the Global South, and other appellations ask the question: when will

true democracy come to these areas? They ask this question unreflectively

from their own sclerotic institutional and ideological spaces, where politics

has become about elections and government rather than about emancipation,

human belonging beyond narrow ideas of the citizen, and so on. Fortress

Europe, to use the current cliché, has generated little in terms of political

thinking, trapped as it is within ideas of borders, nations, and passports. It

is time for a rethinking of politics and that, too, away from the congealed,

self-congratulatory genealogies of Euramerica and its “mythical space time

of philosophical thought” (5).

There are two fundamental questions that Banerjee raises in her excel-

lent intervention on rethinking the very idea of the political. The first is to

ask what follows from “displac[ing] philosophy itself from being the natu-

ral ground of the political?” (6). The second inquires into the consequences

of relocating the geographical locus of thinking the political. What does

it mean to reflect from the Global South as a “deterritorial intellectual

domain” (3) and mobilize other histories that are, as in this case, only

“contingently Indian” (3)? What would this thinking across traditions allow

us to do? Some of the standard narratives that she questions have a set of

implicit assumptions about the following themes. Is politics an idea or a

practice, a quotidian enterprise or transcendent philosophy; is it multidirec-

tional or teleological? Furthermore, is everything to be considered political

1034426PTXXXX10.1177/00905917211034426Political TheoryBook Reviews

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