ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

CommonsSubscribe to Commons

Fishing Commons and Survival in Capitalist Mumbai

Set Adrift: Capitalist Transformations and Community Politics along Mumbai’s Shore by Gayatri Nair, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021; pp 202, `1,295 (hardbound).

Reinventing the Commons

The article makes a case for the reinvention of the commons in the social sciences. The individual treatment of rights reduces the collective to a mass of persons. Instead the commons acknowledges the inviolate place of humans as part of the cosmos. The marginal and dissenting imagination must invoke the poetry of nature as it engages the current politics and economics. The commons, in its diversity, seeks wisdom through a dialogue of knowledges, moving beyond traditional “publics,” and “time.”

 

Lineage Ownership to Individual Rights

This article details the manner in which the land rights of the Kodava have changed over the past two centuries and the various implications of that. It shows how customary land rights were codified first by the Lingayat Rajas, how this codification was strengthened by the British, and the consequences of a historical transformation from common ownership in a marketless context to individual ownership in an increasingly market-dominated political economy.

Branding Bill

Situating William Shakespeare within the study of brands, this article examines the process and results of Shakespeare-as-brand, which mediates the supply and demand of Shakespearean products whether about his life, his loves, his texts, his editors, and his readers or consumers. Shakespeare as a commons continues to gather cultural capital because of the iterability of the brand in mass/popular forms and media that now possess the maximum cultural legibility (like the graphic novel or Hollywood romance). This is possible even more in the digital age because the Shakespearean page, stage, and image are all available simultaneously on a screen, making Shakespeare an interactive, global archive.

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