Governmentality and Counter-Hegemony in Bangladesh | Rifat Mahbub, PhD

Abstract: Perhaps a mere coincidence, yet I consider it a great intellectual benefit that while reading S.M. Shamsul Alam’s Governmentality and Counter-Hegemony in Bangladesh, I was reading Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire and Shaheen Akter’s Talash. This simultaneous reading is beneficial since the texts, although in different forms and genres, interrogate the contested histories of Bengali nation, nationality, and the state, Bangladesh. Alam’s main focus is the state. Divided into ten chapters, the book intricately taps Bangladesh’s journey from the post-imperial “two nation” condition to its present democratic status into a neat theoretical framework. The theoretical framework, called “Governmentality and Counter-Hegemony” creates a dialogue between maverick political theorists, Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci.