Text

theses

This dissertation proposes a theory of the common beyond the modern figure of Man as primary agent of historical transformation. Through close reading of Medieval debates on poverty and common use, contemporary political theory and political speeches, legal documents, and protests in public spaces, it complicates current debates on the common in three ways. First, this work contends that the enclosures of pre-modern landholdings, a process the unfolded in connected and yet distinct ways in Europe and the colonies, was entangled with the affirmation of the European white man as proper figure of the human entitled to appropriate the labor of women and slaves, and the material world as resources. Second, it engages contemporary theorists of the common such as Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Although these authors depart from the prevalent assumptions of modern liberalism (in that they do not take the individual right to appropriate nature as the foundation of political community), their formulation of common is still grounded in Marx's view of labor as the primary force making the world. As a counterpoint to this position, this dissertation draws on feminist and science studies to bring into relief the entanglements of human and other-than-human entities (including water, soil, and technological infrastructures) that constitute the common. Finally, it examines connections and divergences between Western notions of the common-as-resources and contemporary indigenous communal politics in Latin America that unsettle the divide between nature and politics. Ecologies of the Common mobilizes the pre-modern past and indigenous forms of life obliterated by Western narratives of development as living forces that might generate the future of the common as mode of living together in the ruins of capitalism.

ETD_7529

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Miriam Tola

doi:10.7282/T34F1T21

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.