Homo Proximus:  People, Plethos, and the Democracy Zoo

Pavan Kumar Malreddy, University of Potsdam

This paper argues that the while the notion of “the people” in contemporary political discourses operates as a sliding signifier – having been robbed of it human and social subjectivity – it could be resuscitated through everyday experiences of corporal proximity, movement of communities, bodies, goods and objects that leaves the hands of those who create and consume.

In the spirit of John Berger’s interdiscursivity, this paper draws from his novel King: A Street Story (1999), Franz Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog” (1931), Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), and Wilson Harris’s notion of ‘calypso crowds’ to argue that public spaces – from streets, addas to city squares – serve as sites of political convergence where the notions of demos, plethos, and public sphere are conceived, cultivated, and negotiated. The paper also derives inspiration from William Kentridge’s artwork Shadow Procession (1999), and select photography and documentary work on Latin American migrant caravans. As these examples reveal, it is in transit, being on foot, being caught up in the regimes of waiting – waiting for food, waiting for security cordons to clear, waiting for news, waiting for the transportation to arrive – that social bonds, trust, spirit of a community and the capacity of a new public sphere emerge.

Pavan Malreddy teaches at the Department of English, University of Potsdam. He specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century comparative Anglophone literatures & cultures with a regional focus on East Asia, Africa, and South Asia and with a thematic focus on conflicts, communal bonds, insurgencies, populism, public life, and migrancy. He co-edits Kairos: A Journal of Critical Symposium, and serves on the advisory board of Philosophy, Politics and Critique and The Journal of Alterity Studies and World Literature, among others. His recent books include the co-edited volumes Writing Brexit (2022, Routledge), Violence in South Asia (2020, Routledge), Narratives of the War on Terror (2020, Routledge), and the monograph Insurgent Cultures: World Literatures and Violence from the Global South (Cambridge University Press, 2024). He is currently completing a monograph titled Postcolonial Fever: Anatomy of an Exhausted Paradigm(Routledge, 2026), and an edited volume, Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of the Global South(with Lars Eckstein).