Maritime Labour, Circulations of Struggle, and Constructions of Transnational Subaltern Agency: The Spatial Politics of the 1939 Indian Seafarers’ Strikes

Abstract

This paper explores the relations between maritime labour, the circulation of struggles between different sites, and constructions of transnational subaltern agency. It does this through engaging with the interconnected strikes of Indian merchant seafarers in ports and ships across the British Empire in the Autumn of 1939. These strikes broke out after the outbreak of the Second World War and were in part mobilised against the racialised inequalities which structured maritime labour. The paper foregrounds the relations between practices of blockading ships in ports through refusing to crew them and the circulation of the strikes between ships. I argue that this combination of spatial tactics shaped transnational forms of networked subaltern agency (Balachandran 2012, Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c. 1870−1945). To engage with the dynamics of subaltern agency through the strikes the paper explores the relations between trajectories of organising, the circulation of demands, and the formation of solidarities.

Beyond the Chokepoint: Blockades as Social Struggles

“…1 In contemporary struggles, blockades are direct interventions deployed across a diverse array of movements to disrupt or control infrastructures, human mobility, or capitalist supply chains. Though often framed as distinct from strike actions, blockades can be deployed as part of picket lines (Armstrong‐Price 2016; Featherstone 2021; Kelliher 2021). What sets blockades apart from strikes is that they are more frequently waged against infrastructures whose primary function is to circulate rather than produce capitalist commodities.…”

“…Moving away from articulating the chokepoint as a magic bullet for organising, authors in this Symposium nuance our understanding of their practice in broad historical and geographical scope. Beyond their obstruction of flows, blockades are powerful because they build networked forms of anti‐racist and subaltern agency (Featherstone 2021); act as sites for the material, political, and affective critique of infrastructure (Maharawal 2021); demand a right to the housing while disrupting real estate capital pathways (Arcilla 2022); assert the sovereignty of Indigenous lifeworlds (Bosworth and Chua 2021); disrupt military and state‐sponsored circulations (Davis 2021); reveal the white supremacist underpinnings of infrastructure (Savitzky and Cidell 2022); and establish models for alternative agrarian futures (Gilbert 2022). Authors also caution against romanticising such forms of resistance, arguing that we should examine how blockades act as regimes of governance (Davis 2021); become targets of settler‐state securitisation (Bosworth and Chua 2021) and anti‐protest legislation (Savitzky and Cidell 2022); and are a condition of possibility (rather than the certainty) of coalitional politics (Danyluk 2022).…”

“…These reshape worker, slum dweller, Indigenous, and other activist subjectivities into those of militants, insurgents, and caregivers. Featherstone's (2021:1) analysis of the complex circulation of anti‐colonial and anti‐capitalist port strikes among militants in the late 1930s shows how subaltern agency is shaped in and through “relations between trajectories of organising, the circulation of demands, and the formation of solidarities”. Seafarer grievances were shaped and reshaped by transnational linkages in the years prior to the 1939 Indian seafarers’ strikes, preparing the solidarities necessary for the strikes to function.…”

“…They do not easily transcend the social histories of class, racial, or gendered hierarchies, nor do protestors organically agree on unified demands. As Featherstone (2021) reminds us, such solidarities cannot be assumed to appear on the blockade, they have to be constructed , particularly in, through, and as spatial power. By opening a space for otherwise disconnected publics to relate to each other in new configurations, blockades shape and transform the possibilities for capacious solidarities.…”

Archipelagic geographies, civil society, and global development

“…Cumbers et al (2008), for example, describe 'imagineers' as key individuals for sustaining global justice networks, embodying the social relations through which the network mobilises its communicative, financial, and knowledge-based resources across geographic space. While detailing these inequities of power, perhaps most importantly relational thinking articulates the ways in which these relations are generative of (new) forms of power and agency that can challenge pre-existing arrangements and spatial categories (Featherstone, 2008(Featherstone, , 2015(Featherstone, , 2021Kinkaid, 2019).…”