Can We Think of a Plastic Subaltern? Denaturing Marginality and Resistance in Dalit Narratives

ABSTRACT Following Ranjan Ghosh’s The Plastic Turn and employing it in the light of other thinkers on plasticity—James Martell, Clayton Crockett, and Catherine Malabou—the article connects the notion of plasticity with new materialist thinking and object-oriented ontology. Critiquing the idea of “nature” in dualistic thinking of the human consciousness versus the world around, plastic, as an artificially generated material, can become a way of thinking that all matter is constructed. The article attempts to denature the question of the subaltern subject from the assumptions of autochthony and think of it in terms of plasticity. Resistance then would be imagined as a plastic formation that is informed by the naturalized materiality of subaltern Dalit identities and the possibilities of plastic becoming/unbecoming beyond such determinations. The article facilitates thinking of Dalit identity as contaminating objects like plastic (as opposed to other, more valued pure materials like wood or metals) that seeps in and contaminates every thought and being.