On Cruelty and Care: Motherhood and the politics of de/renationalisation

Professor KumKum Sangari

The uneven temporal relation between distant dystopias and contemporary polities, between fictive and real future imaginaries, can provide an entry into the dislocations, displacements and de/renationalisations of the figure of the mother, a figure caught in the crisis of futurity. Some near-future dystopic fiction emerging from Pakistan and England in the 1980s and 1990s resonates, retrospectively, with contemporary misogynist and sectarian social imaginaries centered on fertility and motherhood in contemporary India. Both revolve on common axes of the total or partial extinction of women, de- or renationalisation, social reproduction and/or care, local/global surveillance, the enclavization and underclassing of minorities, eco-destruction, and the production and/or repression of heterogeneity. Ironically, they also open up questions of human/nonhuman subsistence and unconditional care in a neoliberal era.