Subaltern Populations Research Articles

Big-eyed, wide-eyed, sad-eyed children: Constructing the humanitarian space in social justice documentaries

With increased media access to global events, humanitarian advocates within the Western elite have illuminated subaltern populations—those who are cut off from mobility as a result of economics, race, gender, and class. The space in which this subaltern population becomes visible is often the result of Western mediation of events that are defined as newsworthy by mainstream media or of strategic value to private advocacy groups.In this article I explore the neo-colonialism of mediation in the use of images of and produced by children in Born Into Brothels: The Children Of Calcutta's Red Light District (Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, 2004), Invisible Children (Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey, and Laren Poole, 2003), and Shake Hands With The Devil (Peter Raymont, 2004). Despite the intention of the filmmakers, their position of privilege does not consistently provide a perspective from which the representation of the other is acknowledged or challenged.

Globalization, social welfare and civil society in India

This paper seeks to analyze the effects of globalization on Indian civil society. Following a historical analysis, the paper argues that civil society during the colonial and early post-colonial period remained confined to the English educated upper-caste elites. The subaltern populations were excluded from its sphere because of the virtues of modernity and the paternalistic policies of the post-colonial state and ruling elites. The decline of the moderate state and the Congress system in the mid-1970s and the policies of globalization and the rolling-back of the welfare state in the mid-1980s transformed the state–society relationship and brought incongruous implications for civil society in India. The apparatus of the state became pluralized, and several non-governmental organizations and people's movements emerged to take up issues affecting the lives of poor and marginalized. The paper concludes that, although globalization has radicalized civil society activism and expanded its sphere over the past f...

Enabling the Auteurial Voice in <em>Dance Me to My Song</em>

This paper reveals that while the feature film "Dance me To My Song" is listed in Rolf de Heer's oeuvre, its primary author is Heather Rose Slattery, a woman with cerebral palsy who wrote, co-directed and played Julia, the lead character. I assert that in the film Julia is not held up as an object of pity, rather is a fully embodied character, thus defying the "normality drama" (Darke 1998) of disability which aims to "reinforce the able-bodied audience's self image of normality and the notion of the disabled as the inferior Other". Director de Heer seems to be giving credit for authorship where credit is due, for as a result of Rose's tenacity and agency this film is, in two ways, her creative success. Firstly, it is a rare exception to the "normality drama" because in the film's diegesis, Julia is shown triumphing not simply over the limitations of her disability, but over her able-bodied rival in love as well: she 'dances' better than her carer, the 'normal' Madelaine. Secondly, in her gaining possession of the primary credits, and the mantle of the film's primary author, Rose is shown triumphing over other aspiring able-bodied film-makers in the notoriously competitive film-making industry. As with de Heer's other films in which marginalised peoples are given voice, he demonstrates a desire not to subjugate the Other, but to validate and empower him/her.

Orientalizing American Studies

The 1978 publication of Edward Said's Orientalism inaugurating the field of postcolonial theory, and the subsequent explosion of studies of imperialism and colonialism in the 1990s, have been the most important developments for American studies since the multicultural challenge to a unified national consensus two decades earlier. Drawing upon the work of earlier scholars such as R. W. Van Alstyne, Carl Eblen, Robert Rydell, and Richard Drinnon, who had repudiated the idea of American exception from European imperialism, critics such as Amy Kaplan, John Carlos Rowe, and Edward Watts acknowledged their indebtedness to postcolonial studies, albeit to different models.1 Ever since then, there has been a proliferation of studies of colonialism and imperialism as central to American culture. These have ranged from Haunani Kay-Trasks searing indictment of colonialism in Hawaii in From a Native Daughter (1999), to Ed Whites analysis of white settler colonialisms negotiations with different subaltern populations in The Backcountry and the City (2005), to Andy Doolens study of U.S. slavery and republicanism as entangled with imperialism in Fugitive Empire (2005). Works dealing with U.S. cultural and geopolitical investment in the Middle East, different Arab societies, or Islamic nations have understandably been central to analyses of imperialism, given Said s monumental critique of the disciplining and othering of what was deemed the Islamic Orient by the British, French, and then the United States. Particularly since 9/11, with neoconservatives' attempts to revive an old-style Orientalism devoted to excavating the essentials of a singular Islamic society or an Arab mind through the republication of works like Raphael Patais The Arab Mind (1973), the resurrection of

Does the Term “Subaltern” Apply to Colonial California?: “Testimonios” in Context

Both Testimonios and Californio Voices describe their documents as testimonios, written accounts of the older, nonAmerican inhabitants of California whose stories were recorded by outsiders for the purpose of writing an American history of the state. Both works refer frequently to the scholarship of Rosaura Sanchez articulated in her Telling Identities: The Californio Testimonios (1995) to position their documents in the discourse between the downtrodden and the exploiter. Testimonios explicitly invokes Sanchez's claim that these are, however mediated, the voices of the (p. xxii). Both of these reviewed works are based on primary documents and provide rich insights not available through the American histories that have used most of these accounts selectively as sources. But do these testimonios the voice of the subaltern and is that term relevant in this instance? Attempting to answer these two questions before evaluating the works should facilitate better appreciation of both Testimonios and of Californio Voices. Sa*nchez begins her discussion of Californio testimonios by asserting that they represent an effort on the part of this subaltern population to counter hegemonic historiography, to construct a collective identity, and to reposition and recenter themselves textually at a time when the physical and social spaces from which they could operate had become increasingly circumscribed

Yoga between Indo‐Aryan Nationalism and Multisited FieldworkYoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy. By Joseph S. Alter. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004.Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts across Cultures. By Sarah Strauss. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005.

Yoga between Indo‐Aryan Nationalism and Multisited Fieldwork<i>Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy</i>. By Joseph S. Alter. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004.<i>Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts across Cultures</i>. By Sarah Strauss. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005.

Um projeto para o Serviço Social crítico

As transformações sociais contemporâneas, operadas pela programática neoliberal sob o comando do capital financeiro, trazem novos desafios ao conjunto de cidadãos e de homens e mulheres que vivem da venda de sua força de trabalho. Os assistentes sociais, individual e coletivamente, não são alheios a esta realidade. A profissão já se caracterizou por enfrentar estes desafios, questionando e problematizando seu papel na sociedade, tentando assumir perfis mais críticos e comprometidos com os interesses dos trabalhadores e dos setores subalternos. Exemplo disso são o "Movimento de Reconceptualização" e a posterior tentativa de definir um "Serviço Social Alternativo" preocupado com o sentido de sua prática, com o processo de conhecimento crítico, com a crítica ao capitalismo e às situações de injustiça social. Os desafios atuais levam a, superando anteriores debilidades, construir coletivamente um projeto ético-político profissional que possa enfrentar com competência e compromisso, no interior das forças sociais progressistas, as condições nas quais vivem os trabalhadores (com e sem emprego) e os demais setores subalternos.

Re-presenting Dalit Feminist Politics through Dialogical Musical Ethnography

Conducting fieldwork among subaltern populations in South India, I have come to define ethnomusicological fieldwork as an experience of dialogical exchange of music and its values. When feminist and Dalit (formerly so-called untouchable) politics are the central practice of the music culture studied, critical dialogue leading to social change by all actors, including the fieldworker, is expected and must be taken into account in the ethnographic process.1 Jeff Titon defines ethnomusicological fieldwork as playing music with other individuals and the "field" as that shared experience.2 This paper explores the negotiation of political ideas and the critique of musical practice as an inherent part of sharing music and creating an intersubjective musical understanding with my Indian collaborators in my study of Dalit liberation theology in Tamil folk music. I define fieldwork as a means to the creation of social change and the field as those relationships that reveal or negotiate the shared values that contributed to that change. Sharing with my Indian colleagues my feminist analysis of the performance practice of their music was an essential step toward gaining their trust in me as an activist, not just a scholar. The [End Page 1] resulting rapport enabled my colleagues to relate to me their understandings of Indian caste and gender politics and thus the meaning of their music's relation to it. In the process of sharing my feminist analysis of women's roles in performance at the seminary where I conducted my ethnography I affected the practice of the music. This brought me face-to-face with the question, Should fieldwork and ethnography be a means to social and musical change? If so, how does the ethnographer theorize this process? I argue that while ethical dilemmas will undoubtedly present themselves through this method of engagement, I have balanced them by a focus in my writing on the agency expressed by my colleagues in this negotiation. I found that those with whom I had a political affinity engaged with the analysis and then consciously chose to change their teaching practice as a result. Those with whom I lacked this affinity chose not to engage with the criticism and continued to practice as before. Since 1993 my ethnomusicological fieldwork in South India has focused on the indigenization of Tamil Christian music.3 Tamils are the primary ethnic and language group of Tamil Nadu, the southeasternmost state of India. Christians make up 6 percent of this population (almost 3 million people), with the first Tamils converting to Protestant Christianity at the turn of the eighteenth century. My original study of Tamil Protestant Christians is an ethnography of the production and transmission of Christian music at the Tamil Nadu Theological Seminary (TTS) in Madurai. While I focus on the transmission of liberation theology in folk music, the study also includes a survey of the history and range of indigenous musical styles, including karnatak (classical), film, and folk, used by the community. At TTS I participated in daily chapel worship, seminars, music classes, recording sessions, and political events while doing intensive interviews about the production and transmission of Christian music. My participation as a student of music and theology engaged me in the politics of liberation theology, caste, feminism, and various social movements that are at the heart of the mission of this seminary and its recent musical productions. Through experiencing the musical theology of the Reverend James Theophilus Appavoo (b. 1940) at TTS I encountered a language, musical style, content, performance, and transmission practice alternative to that used in mainstream liturgies of the Church of South India (CSI). Appavoo is a middle-class Dalit (politicized outcaste) who grew up in an urban area and only turned away from classical music to folk music as a possible means of transmitting liberation theology when he, as a priest, observed firsthand the oppression of rural Dalits. Appavoo's dynamic character as a culture...

Buried Treasue or Fairy-Tale Verismo ? Framing Sicilian Women's Stories

Fairy-tale studies are made especially interesting by the controversies that inevitably accompany them. Accordingly, Marvels & Tales will publish critical exchanges between readers and authors. Concise, professional responses that augment, develop, or constructively challenge the substance of essays published in the journal may be submitted to the editor. Responses should be submitted as an e-mail attachment or on diskette. They should be limited to one thousand words or less and should contain no footnotes or other apparatus unless approved in advance by the editor. The author whose work is the subject of the response will be given the opportunity to reply. The editor maintains the right to reject or edit any response. From time to time, exchanges about specific topics may be invited. Buried Treasure or Fairy-Tale Verismo? Framing Sicilian Women's Stories Beautiful Angiola: The Great Treasury of Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales Collected by Laura Gonzenbach. Translated and edited by jack Zipes. Illustrations by Joellyn Rock. New York: Routledge, 2004. xxxii + 364 pp. Jack Zipes has found buried treasure. After a career spent detailing the sanitizing of the fairy tale by bourgeois literati, he has discovered a nineteenthcentury collection that preserves, with considerable fidelity, the voices of an indisputably subaltern population: Sicilian peasant women. On this ground, Zipes characterizes Laura Gonzenbachs Sizilianische Marchen as the most important collection of fairy tales, legends, and anecdotes in the nineteenth century, more important perhaps than the Brothers Grimm (xii). When the leading authority in the field puts forward so radical an assertion in so halting a fashion, his unease is evident. The peasant women who speak through the Gonzenbach collection, a remarkable work with a troubled history, outZipe Zipes in their denunciation of economic and gender violence, and Zipes is both greatly enthusiastic and a little disconcerted as he presents the stories for a general readership. When buried treasure is resurrected and rehoused as a great treasury, the lingering smell of the soil can be unsettling. There were good reasons to bury the Gonzenbach collection not long after its 1870 publication. It was unearthed-along with the complex history of its production and reception-by Rudolf Schenda and especially Luisa Rubini, whose magisterial contribution is properly and generously acknowledged by Zipes.1 The collection belongs to the much larger body of Mediterranean folktales collected and published in translation by nineteenth-century northern European scholars, with the original texts lost. Laura Gonzenbach was the daughter of the Swiss consul at Messina and younger sister of Magdalena Gonzenbach, a pioneer of feminism and women's education in Italy. Growing up in the German-speaking colony of textile manufacturers and merchants, she was cared for by Sicilian servants and spent her summers in the countryside playing among the peasants. At the behest of historian Otto Hartwig, who met her in 1860 when he came to serve for five years as chaplain to the Lutheran community in Messina, she began in 1868, at the age of twenty-six, to collect fairy tales. Hartwig was writing a history and expected the tales to provide evidence for his theories of the mixed cultural influences that shaped the Sicilian dialect and character in the Middle Ages. Working among the peasant women in the eastern provinces of Messina and Catania, Gonzenbach found the field so rich that within a year she provided Hartwig with a collection of a hundred stories, sufficient for an autonomous publication. Gonzenbach translated the tales into literary German and provided occasional footnotes with cultural, linguistic, and performance commentary. Hartwig arranged for the Leipzig publication of a two-volume edition of ninety-two of the tales (with two more still in dialect from an as-yet-unidentified Sicilian collaborator, Salvatore Morganti) and wrote a historical preface on the formation of the Sicilian language during the Norman period, recruiting the folklorist Reinhold Kohler to provide comparative notes. …

Cosmopolitanism and nationalism in a globalized world

The disenfranchised subaltern groups of the South disappear from the current Anglo-American cultural studies discourse on globalization as their conditions are made synonymous with the diasporas in the First World centres. However, if we do not take the metropolitan situation as the sole important site of transnationality, but turn our attention to the lives of subaltern groups in the South we will gather a different picture of globalization. The essay discusses the various ways in which cosmopolitanism is presented as offering the means of new forms of belonging and politics that are beyond the confining forms of the nation-state. By proposing to rethink the place of the nation-state within globalization, the essay suggests being less dismissive of the need for nationalism in the Third World, a nationalism that is capable of articulating the will of the excluded subaltern populations.

Reception, Identity, and the Global Village

Reception, Identity, and the Global Village

Maya History and Agency in Colonial Yucatan

Conquistador. MATTHEW RESTALL. Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1998; xvi + 254 pp. The World: Yucatec Culture and Society, 1550-1850. MATTHEW RESTALL. Stanford CA: Stanford university Press, 1997; xiv + 441 pp. Over the last two decades students of Mesoamerica have increasingly turned their attention to theorizing indigenous agency and intentionality. This is perhaps most evident in the number of ethnohistorical studies that seek to recover native voices long excluded from the historical record and that offer a counterpoint to accounts which privilege Spanish expansionism at the expense of noting the active role Indians played in the development of colonial society. For the region, such revisionist historiography has been largely confined to reading agency between the lines of Spanish colonial documents. While this work has provided a valuable antidote to one-sided accounts of Spanish conquest, it remains at best only a partial and distorted view of indigenous protagonists. Here I review two recent books by Matthew Restall that add a much-needed complement to such work. conquistador and The world are both well-written ethnohistorical accounts of colonial society in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico. In the introduction to The world Restall characterizes his larger goal (if the reader will permit such a conceit) as to the Maya (p. 10). Indeed, his research is based on some 1600 Mayan language documents and he extensively cites sources, thus representing voices by letting the speak for themselves. Yet it is important to note that this is representation in Raymond Williams' dual sense of the word: a re-presentation that attempts both to make present for the reader events that occurred in the past and to use those events to symbolize the larger processes of which they are a part- In both books Restall is very much present as our guide and interpreter, and it is as much his as voices that we hear throughout the texts. Ironically, although he is narratively giving voice to a particular subaltern population (the Yucatec Maya), his documentary evidence forces him to focus on a sample of mostly older and relatively wealthy individuals. Even given the corporate nature of communities, which Restall emphasizes, we are left with an unclear picture of the nuances of intra-community relations. But Restall seems well aware of the limitations of his data, and he is able to deftly tease from the documents a surprisingly rich view of everyday life. The world is a tour de force through 300 years of history spanning the Yucatan peninsula. Based largely on documents written by the in their native tongue, Restall is able to include revealing descriptions of mundane as well as extraordinary events. The book's four parts are organized topically, as are the chapters within them. Chapters are short and readable, and the organization is, for the most part, logical. Part I (Identity and Organization) introduces the book's thesis that the cah (indigenous community, pl. cahob) is the primary nexus of self-identity and political organization. Second in importance to the cah (and yet subordinated to it) are localized patrilineal groups known as chibalob (sing., chibal); cah leaders (batab) are drawn from prominent chibalob. Together, the cah and the chibal provided not only common references for self-identification but also act as vehicles for individual and collective political maneuvering within the colonial system. In Part 11 (Society and Culture) Restall is at his best in reconstructing quotidian experience and practical worldview. In chapters on gender, class, and religion, he reveals not only normative patterns but also subtle resistance to Spanish impositions. In this regard the chapter on sexuality is especially noteworthy. Organized around an anonymous 1774 petition to Spanish authorities protesting the reportedly lewd behavior of local priests, the chapter demonstrates the deftness of satire and punning while partially revealing autochthonous norms of acceptable behavior. …

Entre el ocio y la feminización tropical: ciencia, élites y estado-nación en Latinoamérica, siglo XIX

Foucault's thesis that modernity is characterized by forms of discipline that normalize and control individual conducts and subject positions does not hold for nineteenth-century Latin America. Although the region witnessed a painful and gradual strengthening of the state, it also witnessed the development of weak cultural systems to create national communities out of heterogeneous populations. This cultural debility of the élites can be partially explained by the international intellectual context in which they lived. A dominant Anglo and European view of the "tropics" as places that caused emasculation and sloth contributed to the creation of discurses within the emerging Latin- American states that emphasized rather than healed class and racial divisions. In fact gendered representations of the body of subaltern populations were at times useful to justify aggressive policies of colonization and forced labor systems.