Shelley Feldman gives a working paper on ‚In-Situ Displacement: Institutional Practices and the Making of the Hindu Other‘

This paper is focused on developing an analytic, in-situ displacement – being displaced without movement — that can contribute to explaining the particular experiences of Hindus in East Pakistan/Bangladesh who, I argue, cannot be adequately understood by the various approaches proposed for studies of minority groups. Although numerically, and in their political and social positioning, Hindus share many characteristics with other minority communities, their particular relation within the social formation and their history in the country are quite distinct. Thus, as I argue, their positioning can better be understood as constitutive of the project of majoritarian rule. To establish the ground for this claim, I examine court cases brought against Hindus for what they reveal about relations of rule and the social construction of Hindus as others, others who are assumed to be enemies of the state, proxy citizens, and whose loyalty is always questioned. The paper, and the larger project, is framed in the idiom of state formation and moral regulation and recuperates a literature that remains provocative and timely, especially when synergized with new theoretical work on liminality and processes of subjectivation. I encourage you read this contribution as a reflection, rather than what I would consider a draft paper, in hopes that I can engage people in helping to elaborate, and also to assess, in-situ displacement as a productive analytic, especially when embedded in the theoretical architecture of state, nation, and subject formation.