A conversation: subaltern studies in South Asia and post-colonial anthropology in Africa

Abstract

Subaltern Studies emerged at the end of the 1970s among a collective of English and Indian historians of South Asia, and developed into a creative and malleable reworking of knowledge(s). Importantly. the subalternists contributed to an interdisciplinarity that displayed a commitment to the recovery of subaltern or ‘indigenous’ histories and knowledges. The idea of identity-based knowledge is necessarily decentred in a transnational enterprise such as Subaltern Studies, and concomitantly, geographical spaces, although relevant, are no longer central in determining power relations. However, changes of practice, globalisation and shifting localities, and critical awareness do not make the marginalities at the heart of the apparatus of knowledge production and its global division of labour disappear altogether. As a corpus of knowledge intellectual cohesiveness has never been a main concern for Subaltern Studies and here lies its main strength for South African anthropology. The project should be viewed as an evolving dialogue, one that privileges creative possibilities of a mutually constitutive ‘conversation’.