Uprising’s Dialectic Pedagogy

Abstract

This essay revisits the 2013 Hefazat-e-Islam protests in Bangladesh, a religion-based social movement that infused activism in a people that were rather shying away from activist tendencies, and seeks lessons thereof. The first angle of inquiry looks into the Gramscian counter-elite that acts against the hegemony of the powerful as well as the powers-to-be in Bangladesh during that period and compares analytics with the autobiographical experiences of Nelson Mandela in South Africa. The wider lens developed helps to explain why despite initial success—evident in the speedy formation and flare-up of the movement among various social strata in Bangladesh—the Hefazat gave way to the traditional, and the demands for alternative cultures petered out. The second string recognizes the movement as social activism, observing how protests from mundane, Scottian, ‘everyday resistance’, turn into mass revival.

Keywords

• Bangladesh
• Hefazat-e-Islam
• hegemony
• mass activism
• popular resistance