Subaltern Status Research Articles

Children’s History Matters

Abstract In a complement to the 2020 AHR Roundtable “Chronological Age: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (125, no. 2), this AHR Exchange focuses on the history of children and childhood. Sarah Maza presents a critical review essay, highlighting the limiting factors in the expanding field of childhood studies. Children, she observes, produce few sources of their own voices, have limited agency, and as individuals and as a group soon outgrow their subaltern status—they grow up. Robin P. Chapdelaine, Nara Milanich, Steven Mintz, Ishita Pande, and Bengt Sandin—historians representing diverse geographical, theoretical, and methodological perspectives on the history of children and childhood—react to Maza’s observations by bringing up important methodological questions about subjecthood, agency, and modernity. Maza’s rejoinder reflects on these questions and on the possibility of age-based historical agency.

Destabilizing the privilege of the knower to establish forms of solidarity: Reflections on conducting fieldwork with vulnerable communities in India and Romania

In this article, I interrogate the researcher’s role in conducting ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork with vulnerable communities and argue that increased epistemological reflexiveness is needed to support solidarity ties between researchers and participants. In line with critical feminist literature and methodology, I present the inconsistencies of the power relations I entered as a researcher, as well as the systemic inequalities I found operating in the background. Using several vignettes based on my fieldwork with communities labeled as “Gypsy” in Romania and India, I make the argument that power dynamics encountered in the field reveal the researchers’ simultaneous privilege and their subaltern status, creating an epistemological position grounded in the intersection of gender, race/ ethnicity, and class, which in turn could deter from bonds of solidarity. In line with feminist methodologies and intersectionality literature, I argue that the researcher’s gender, race, ethnicity, and class (co)generate epistemological outcomes, and that without critical reflection researchers may reinforce hierarchies of power. Thus, I both adopt and innovate this approach, by showing how as researchers we inhabit concomitantly different and fluctuating positionalities. I end by advocating for reflexiveness on the researchers’ power to create epistemological categories and processes, which may (re)enforce solidarity relations between researchers and communities.

The Transcendental Subaltern

Abstract Was Immanuel Kant Russian? More striking than the fact itself is the length of time it was overlooked: following historian Alexander Etkind’s research on the topic, this paper details Königsberg’s occupation by the Russian Empire, considering the possibilities of reinstating Kant’s thought in the postcolonial tradition, more specifically that of the subaltern (as framed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Taking this colonial context into account via a range of historical records and correspondences, I argue for a postcolonial reinterpretation and re-evaluation of the philosopher’s work, beginning with his famous essay on the topic of enlightenment. In what ways does this pertain to the enlightenment, as Kant sees it, and the way he distinguishes between the public and private spheres? Furthermore, how does Spivak’s reading of Kant overlook the subaltern status that she herself defines?

Sweetened syndemics: diabetes, obesity, and politics in Puerto Rico

Obesity is prevalent in Puerto Rico due to intersecting structural inequalities such as poverty and unemployment. At the same time, type 2 diabetes mellitus is also highly prevalent on the island due to similar structural factors. The role of food access and identity contributes to the ways in which the illnesses interact. The two illnesses furthermore form part of a syndemic in Puerto Rico. The island’s status as a US territory leaves Puerto Rico with limited economic resources from the US government for necessary programs like Medicare. As such, this paper proposes that obesity and diabetes form a syndemic in Puerto Rico. Interviews were conducted with 75 Puerto Ricans, recruited from the Centro de Diabetes Para Puerto Rico. Thirty-six participants had obesity, and an additional 14 were overweight. Sixty-five participants had type 2 diabetes. Study participants perceived that Puerto Rico’s subaltern status deleteriously affected obesity rates due to limited US federal assistance for health insurance and for imported fresh foods and vegetables. Diabetes was due to both weight mismanagement and a lack of healthcare providers. Obesity and diabetes form a syndemic in Puerto Rico through multiple and interacting structural factors, such as crime, unemployment, and a broken healthcare system. Puerto Rico’s economic and healthcare crises leave the island in a difficult situation, unable to support itself and without the resources to improve its situation.

The blood-sucker bird: A woven narrative of exploitation and dependency

One of the most renowned tapestry ventures in South Africa is the Evangelical Lutheran Church Art and Craft Centre, Rorke's Drift, initiated in 1963. Less well-known is the subsequent centre started by its Swedish founders, Ulla and Peder Gowenius, in neighbouring Lesotho. Thabana li Mele, as this initiative was called, opened in 1968, and within two years, 200 villagers wove a range of textiles, including pictorial tapestries. However, this thriving operation would be short-lived, forced to close in 1970, by an ally of white South Africa, Lesotho's Leabua Jonathan regime. Apartheid-era writings have offered limiting representations of these events, and Thabana li Mele's weavers and their works are now all but forgotten. As the author shows, The blood-sucker bird (1969), a tapestry from this centre on which some material has survived, suggests that Thabana li Mele was destined to be more than just a poverty-alleviation initiative. Woven by an unknown woman, this bold artwork articulates Lesotho's subaltern status as a land-locked labour reserve for South Africa's mines. Reminiscent of oral art forms, its symbolic language interrogates the hegemonies that engineered the lives of Basotho communities forced into migrancy and economic dependency on South Africa. The tapestry also yields insight into the creative agency of a marginalised community.

Secular Governance and Islamic Law

In this paper I examine the uses of the concept of minority by contemporary Muslim public intellectuals engaged simultaneously in discussions about the status of Muslims in the West and the place of non-Muslims in the Islamic world. I show how the concept of minority – rendered in Arabic through the neologism aqalliyya – is both problematic and indispensable to the discussions taking place in the transnational spaces of Islamic normative debate. Drawing on Saba Mahmood’s work, I argue that the minority question is both a strategy of modern secular governance and a tool used by a set of actors pursuing different projects. I suggest that the Islamic traditions that are often seen as foundational to the inequalities that shape the life of non-Muslims in the Middle East are in fact more ambiguous in their effects than they may appear at first sight. Although Islamic legal discourse has been predicated on a hierarchy that places non-Muslims in a subaltern status, it also embodies universalist norms that serve to counter some of these inequalities – even if the goals it articulates and the language it deploys are not always immediately intelligible within a modern context.

A paradox of maritime access. Origins and consequences of subaltern relations in a medieval portuary system in Flanders: The case of Hoeke

Although unlimited maritime access was advantageous, medieval seaports and port cities were often incorporated into serving a capital city’s economy by providing merchants with a transport system. Consequently, these outports had a subaltern relationship with that city, as well as tenuous relations of competition and cooperation with neighbouring outports. This article focuses on the hierarchical relations underpinning the subaltern status of Hoeke, one of the smallest cities in the medieval County of Flanders and a minor hub in the portuary system in the Zwin. This city is used as a case study through which to explore the paradox of maritime access and development. The research indicates that arguments of geography are insufficient to explain the development of these portuary systems, utilizing new insights from recent historical research and other academic disciplines. I will demonstrate that Hoeke’s retreat from the waterfront put an end to the paradox of maritime access, resulting in the transformation of the hierarchy in its relations with the capital city.

Hey, baby, ¿Qué Pasó?: Performing bilingual identities in Texan popular music

This study analyzes Spanish-English code-switching in the music of the Texas Tornados, a bilingual-bicultural San Antonio band. Their entire repertoire was transcribed and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively to ascertain the form and functions of code-switching. We found that 39% of songs included language mixing, with English being the most frequent matrix language and Spanish lexical insertions and inter-sentential switches prevailing. Lexical insertions are used to exoticize songs and for humorous effect, while inter-sentential code-switching presents similar ideas in sequence demonstrating high poetic virtuosity. Such artistic use of language represents the subaltern status of Spanish, reflecting the sociolinguistic reality of Texas.

Listening to Bedouin Mothers of Children with Autism.

This article examines how Bedouin mothers in Israel describe, perceive, and interpret their experiences raising a child with autism. Data were collected using semi-structured ethnographic interviews with 18 Bedouin mothers of children with autism, aged 6-16, living in recognized and unrecognized settlements in the Negev. Analysis of the study findings shows how the subaltern status of Bedouin women, which includes their husbands' constant threats of divorce or taking a second wife, makes it difficult for them to be mobile and interact in the public sphere without the presence of a man and creates an experience unique to these mothers, which we call "Exclusion within Exclusion". The Bedouin mothers report not only stigmatization, a lack of social support and loneliness but also structural-cultural characteristics that prevent them from obtaining information and participating in decision-making about the child with autism and that restrict their agency in dealing with and coping with their child's autism. In light of this situation, the discussion highlights the unique connection between local cultural scripts and the phenomenology of autism.

The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Memory Politics by Stavroula Pipyrou

Reviewed by: The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Memory Politics by Stavroula Pipyrou Nicholas Doumanis (bio) Stavroula Pipyrou, The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Memory Politics. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2016. Pp. ix + 246. Cloth $59.95. There are two small corners in Italy where indigenous Greek-speaking communities survive. One is located inland within the heel of Italy (Apulia), and the other, which is slightly smaller but better known, is found just beneath the toe in Calabria. Among a handful of villages there—a century ago there were as many as 12 but now there are 5 at best—live people known as the Grecanici, who still speak a local Greek dialect (Grecanica) and regard it as their mother tongue. As with their counterparts in Apulia, the people of the southern Aspromonte area appear to be a remnant of what centuries ago was a much larger Greek-speaking presence in Southern Italy. In The Grecanici of Southern Italy: Governance, Violence, and Minority Politics, anthropologist Stavroula Pipyrou offers a painstakingly researched [End Page 223] ethnography. Given Calabria's limited communion with the broader Greek-speaking world further east, the mere existence of the Grecanici is an issue that fascinates many. Thankfully, Pipyrou does not burden the reader with such trite questions as: are the Grecanici Greeks? Are they, as some Greeks believe, "brothers" who have suffered "the suppression of the Italians" (64)? According the book's author, the Grecanici are autochthonous Calabrians, whose faith is Roman Catholicism and whose language, Grecanica, is only used as an everyday language by an ever-shrinking number of elderly people. Grecanica's imminent extinction as a living language, however, is a source of deep concern for a much larger community that includes the descendants of Grecanica speakers, many of whom nowadays live in the regional capital Reggio. Despite the symbolic violence of the state (particularly governments since Berlusconi's time), which has played mere lip service to the interests of minorities, and despite the prejudices of other Calabrians, who have looked down on them as mountain yokels, the Grecanici not only treasure their ancestral language and culture but also value it for its political worth. Pipyrous's ethnography is not about the culture, per se. Instead of treating the reader to an in-depth account of the Grecanica folklore, song, dance, customs, and language, the book interprets the social and political dimensions of their struggle for cultural retention with a view to examining how power is negotiated in everyday life and within voluntary associations. It investigates what the community's struggle reveals about how fellow Grecanici kin and immediate family relate to one another. Relatedness and its functions is one of Pipyrou's key themes, as it is through the utilization of a dense patchwork of social networks that the Grecanici can achieve personal and communal ends that are otherwise unattainable. They were once counted among the poorest people in one of Italy's poorest regions. Although the Grecanici are no longer impoverished, memories of la miseria and discrimination are often invoked in the struggle to preserve their cultural identity. Since the 1960s, however, when Italy formally recognized the status of minorities, Grecanici have inverted their subaltern status to create a place for themselves "in contemporary politics through minority claims" (4). Associations have sprung up since the 1960s in order to manage the questione Grecanica, primarily to preserve a culture that is regarded as endangered, but also to utilize what has become an asset that has given them access to national and international forums. Here they can voice their concerns, and sometimes their efforts find traction. Pipyrou demonstrates how actors call on relationships (blood, friendships, godparenthood, clientististic friendships, mafia, church, political parties, and global organizations) to assert claims and effect desired outcomes. As such, The Grecanici of Southern Italy is about [End Page 224] governance, which Pipyrou distinguishes from government, since it more accurately relates the range of institutions (such as the state, the church, the N' drangheta [the Calabrian mafia], families, and civic associations) and noninstitutional actors that must play a part in decision-making and resource management. The author also notes the agonistic nature of governance, which...

Who Speaks for Whom? Parliamentary Participation of Women in the Post-1991 Ethiopia

The claim that women are half the sky is more than a cliché when it comes to real political representation and rendering true women agency. Ethiopia has embarked on the recognition of women empowerment and representation, and indeed has achieved substantial changes in light of the statistical share of women in lower parliamentary houses. Although this is a token much praise among academics, however, in light of its sustainability and what their presence in these houses constitutes and the real power of representation and women agency, there is a lot not yet achieved. This is because their representation is not cognizant of the realization of their real capabilities and free women agency to stand for themselves and not because of an obligation imposed on the political parties through mandatory legislation. This study based on the secondary literature survey of women parliamentary representation in Ethiopia contends that the subaltern status of women, despite substantial statistical presence in lower parliamentary houses, which is also the result of absence of strong political parties’ competition, has not been significantly changed that they still cannot speak for themselves.

Intercultural PhD supervision: exploring the hidden curriculum in a social science faculty doctoral programme

ABSTRACTInternational knowledge markets rely heavily on a ready supply of highly mobile doctoral students, many of whom are from the global South, to bring in revenue. The supervision of these PhD students, however, can reproduce neo-colonial knowledge relations, often in subtle ways. In settler nations, international PhD students may find that they are assigned subaltern status in their university departments and this can have a significant impact on their learning. This paper explores the experiences of a group of international PhD students in a social science faculty in a New Zealand university during the first two years of their doctoral studies. It examines how they responded to the displacement of their cultural values and priorities, the way they navigated intercultural engagements with supervisors, and their ensuing relationships with indigenous and ethnic allies in the faculty. Despite considerable pressure to conform to the dominant modes of academic knowledge production that characterise universities in settler nations, it is concluded that international students find ways of speaking out, often in highly coded forms, that complicate their subaltern academic status.

Developing subalternity: side effects of the expansion of formal education and mass media in Guaribas

Abstract This article investigates the social impact of the Zero-Hunger Program (Programa Fome Zero) in its pilot-community, the village of Guaribas in Northeast Brazil, particularly with respect to the expansion of public education and mass media. I attempt to show how the PFZ development project went beyond the delivery of financial aid, basic infrastructure, and economic technology in Guaribas, and sought to reform its beneficiaries' conducts, capacities, aspirations, and psychological dispositions. To that end, PFZ's concerted effort included workshops, the extension of public schooling, as well as increased exposure to mass media artefacts and pedagogical soap-operas. This enterprise, however, generated adverse "side-effects" such as the devaluation of local knowledge, the decline of farming, the aggravation of intergenerational conflict, the substantial emigration of the younger generations, and Guaribanos' increasing internalization of subaltern status in relation to other national communities.

Boko Haram and the discourse of mimicry: a critical discourse analysis of media explanations for Boko Haram’s improved video propaganda quality

The Nigeria-based violent non-state actor Boko Haram is increasingly reported on in the news media in relation to the Islamic State, another, more prominent, violent non-state actor. In particular, these comparisons have been drawn within the context of reports on Boko Haram’s recent improvement in video propaganda quality. While the associations with the Islamic State are often warranted, there are broader social consequences when colonial power relations are brought into play. Borrowing an approach from critical discourse analysis, 16 online English-language news articles were read through a postcolonial lens in order to analyse the structural relations of dominance that arise when discussing African non-state actors. The analysis revealed that among the corpus of articles, nine developed a discourse of mimicry, which serves to deny Boko Haram full agency, relegate them to a silenced subaltern status, and ultimately to diminish the sense of threat posed to the dominant geopolitical security paradigm.

“An all-weather, all-terrain fighter”: Subaltern resistance, survival, and death in Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti

Victor Li’s theory of necroidealism draws our attention to the tendency in literary works and writings by Subaltern Studies historians to romanticize the dead subaltern so that in death he or she emerges as an “exemplary, heroic symbol of resistance”. In these works, the “ambiguity of struggle” of the living subaltern contrasts sharply with the idealized heroism of his or her dead counterpart. The eponymous protagonist of Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti is an untouchable, lower-class Christian woman in contemporary Pakistan who is determined to survive and surpass her subaltern status but dies a brutal death, following which her father makes a case for her canonization. This article is an in-depth analysis of the depiction of Alice’s multifaceted subalternity and the strategies of resistance that she deploys as well as an evaluation of the portrayal of her death to demonstrate that the novel unequivocally rejects an idealization of both subaltern life and death.

From Counter to Hegemonic: Re-Mapping Ideology in Latina/o Life Writing from the War on Terror

This essay maps how life writing by Latin American immigrant and US born or raised Latina/o soldiers in the War on Terror illuminates the troubling ideological contours of an ongoing subaltern move from the margins to the center. Latin American and Latina/o Studies continue to be animated by contestatory claims to subaltern, oppositional, and counterhegmonic status predicated on such life writing genres as testimonio . By analyzing a new wave of life writing war genres that illustrate varied Latin American-cum-Latina/ocum-G.I. performances of hegemonic power, this essay seeks to de-center contemporary discourses about the purportedly inherent oppositional nature of Latina/o life writing, and to call for new paradigms in Latin American and Latina/o Studies.

Saving the Enemy

The growing number of female suicide bombers in the Muslim world has recently received a lot of attention by academics and journalists in the West. This developing literature has tended to understand these women as victims or pawns of Islamic patriarchy. This article offers critical review of the causal accounts of female suicide bombing in order to show how these discourses of victimization reify a masculinist justification for American empire. This narrative of empire produces Islam as a religion/culture of patriarchy and, thus, reads Muslim women as needing rescue from their religion and their men in order to validate military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Working from the post-colonial insights of Gayatri Spivak, this article argues that female suicide bombers reflect a subaltern status in the war on terror. As such, these conceptualizations of the causes of female suicide bombing proffer a narrative of masculine rescue against the barbaric force of Islamic patriarchy, rendering the war on terror as a homoterritorial war over masculine dominance in the region.

Historyka. Studia Metodologiczne ed. by Klemens Kaps and Jan Surman (review)

Reviewed by: Historyka. Studia Metodologiczne ed. by Klemens Kaps and Jan Surman Iryna Vushko (bio) Historyka. Studia Metodologic zne. 2012. Vol. XLII: Postcolonial Galicia: Prospects and Possibilities / Guest Editors: Klemens Kaps, Jan Surman . Kraków: Polish Academy of Sciences, Kraków Branch and Jagiellonian University, Department of History, 2012. 233 pp. ISSN: 0073-2777X. Was East-Central Europe a colony? Who was colonizer and who was colonized? Is postcolonial theory applicable to the study of East-Central Europe? These are some of the questions raised in a recent issue of Historyka, Studia Metodologiczne. Klemens Kaps and Jan Surman, young scholars of nineteenth-century Galicia, served as the guest editors of this issue of Historyka. Colonialism, Kaps and Surman explain, has been widely discussed by scholars of literature and culture of Eastern and Central Europe, but so far has attracted little attention from historians of the region. Historians of colonialism have typically focused on European colonies in Asia and Africa and paid less attention to continental empires. The editors address this gap in scholarship in two ways: first, by placing Galicia within the discussion of colonialism; and second, by bringing together historians and specialists in literature and cultural studies. The issue includes an introduction by the editors, eleven articles, a review article on the "state of the art" of Russian studies in the United States, and several book reviews. The collection first appeared online and is now available at http://historyka.edu.pl/en/article/art/historica-2012-29. All of the articles online are published in the original languages as written by the authors (English, German, and Polish). The printed version of Historyka presents all texts in Polish translation. In my review, I analyze the print collection, focusing on several substantive articles and their place within the general scholarship of East (East-Central) Europe and Galicia. I refer to the original titles of the articles written in English. Translations of Polish and German titles for the purposes of this review are mine. In the introduction, the editors suggest approaching Galicia as a palimpsest of sorts because of its multinational character. They produced this issue in an attempt to address the history of Galicia as a Habsburg province from the vantage point of "cultural marginalization and the 'colonial imaginary' - the perception of one's own colonial position and the feeling of a 'civilizing mission' as determinants of the cultural dependencies" (P. 9). Several authors address the relationships between nationalities in the province by reconstructing the [End Page 350] matrix of empire and colonial rule. The notion of subalternation - sub alternacja - appears in several texts and refers to the subaltern status of one group in its relationship to the other. In her "Stefan Żeromski's Ashes as a Postcolonial Narrative," Ewa Thompson analyzes the novel Ashes by one of the leading Polish novelists of the nineteenth century. Żeromski tells the story of a Polish nobleman espousing the ideology of "Sarmatism" and his interaction with an Austrian bureaucrat symbolizing the modern and, in the Polish view, foreign state. Żeromski's novel, Thompson explains, reveals a typical colonial encounter: the nobleman refusing to comply with the norms of the new state, and the bureaucrat resorting to force as a means of imposing these norms. The complex system of subordination and domination in Galicia is the subject of Danuta Sosnowska's text titled "Limitations and Possibilities of Postcolonial Criticism." Sosnowka tests the applicability of postcolonial theory to the study of Galicia. She finds that the relationships of Poles with neighboring peoples were sometimes "schizophrenic." On the one hand, they were driven by a feeling of superiority or even messianism toward Ruthenians and Lithuanians, but at the same time they experienced an inferiority complex regarding the rest of (Western) Europe. Polish-Ruthenian relationships, Polish messianism, and Ruthenian subalternation are the subjects of Burkhard Wöller's article, "Civilization Mission or Alienation: The Annexation of Red Rus Under Kasimir III in the Colonial Discourses of Polish and Ruthenian Historians in Austrian Galicia." Wöller shows how several Polish writers and intellectuals - among them, Karol Szajnocha, Henryk Schmitt, and Michał Bobrzyński - justified Poland's occupation of the Red Rus (Rus' Czerwona) back in the fourteenth century by...

The Postimperial Meets the Postcolonial: Russian Historical Experience and the Postcolonial Moment

This article attempts to elaborate on the Russian case in the context of debates on postcoloniality. It opens with the case of Slavophiles of the 1830s-40s, which shows that a colonial situation can be identified as an acute epistemological problem regardless of the actual colonial experience. The discussion continues with the case of Eurasians of the 1920s-30s, which illustrates that a colonial situation can be experienced regardless of the actual figure of the colonized, and that a postcolonial theory can espouse deeply conservative scenarios of emancipation and have a hidden restorationist agenda. The next case is the Soviet experiment highlighting that even when the figure of the colonized and oppressed is objectively present, the most powerful political intervention cannot change the structural relationships of domination and control. Soviet postcoloniality essentially shows that the colonial situation tends to reproduce itself, only changing hegemonic discourses and identifying different hegemons and subalterns, or their different combinations. Finally, the authors turn to "post-Soviet postcoloniality," which, unlike the South Asian subaltern studies project that aspired to bring back historical agency and subjectivity to the most oppressed categories of the colonized, serves the goal of claiming essentially subaltern status for the nation as a desirable historical position of zero agency and hence zero responsibility. The authors conclude that the colonial situation will continue to reveal itself in "unexpected" and "paradoxical" examples for as long as the preceding "imperial situation" is not "disenchanted" and deconstructed. The last part of the article introduces the concept of "imperial situation." The authors contend that an imperial situation (instead of the essentialized "empire") can emerge (or be identified) not only in empire but also in modern nation-states, which will not turn them into "empires." However, this identification can provide an impetus to a local school of postcolonial analysis and explain its "unexpected" emergence in the absence of any formally recognizable "colonial situation." Настоящая статья представляет собой попытку осмыслить российский исторический и современный опыт в контексте дискуссий о постколониальности. Первый раздел, посвященный славянофилам, показывает, что колониальная ситуация может быть осознана как острая эпистемологическая проблема независимо от наличия реального колониального опыта. Во втором разделе речь идет о евразийцах, чей опыт свидетельствует, что колониальная ситуация может "переживаться" независимо от наличия реальной фигуры колонизированного. Рожденная в таких условиях постколониальная теория может предполагать глубоко консервативные сценарии эмансипации и нести в себе скрытую реставрационную программу. Далее авторы обращаются к советскому эксперименту, который демонстрирует, что даже при наличии колонизатора и колонизированного субъекта, радикальная политическая интервенция не способна изменить структурные отношения доминирования и контроля. Советский опыт свидетельствует, что колониальная ситуация стремится к самовоспроизводству, лишь меняя гегемонные дискурсы и выдвигая новых гегемонов и субалтернов или их новые комбинации. Наконец, авторы обращаются к постсоветскому опыту. В отличие от юговосточной субалтерной теории, направленной на возвращение исторической и политической субъектности наиболее угнетенным категориям колонизированных, постсоветская постколониальность характеризуется тем, что нации заявляют о собственной субалтерности ради отказа от исторической субъективности и ответственности за прошлое. Авторы делают вывод, что колониальная ситуация продолжит проявляться в "неожиданных" и "парадоксальных" вариантах, если анализу и деконструкции не подвергнется предшествующая "имперская ситуация". Последний раздел статьи вводит понятие "имперской ситуации". Авторы указывают, что "имперская ситуация" (вместо эссенциализированной "империи") может быть идентифицирована не только в империях, но и в национальных государствах, что не превращает их в империи. Однако это объясняет как возникновение местной школы постколониального анализа, так и ее "неожиданное" возникновение при формальном отсутствии "колониальной ситуации".

Italia barbara: Italian primitives from Piero to Pasolini

Historians of discourse formation have demonstrated how, in the decades following the Risorgimento, Italy was fashioned as the internal ‘other’ of a new, industrial civilization that had surpassed the Mediterranean one of old. In the geopolitical map of Western Europe, Italy occupied the most distant and different territory; its proximity to Africa and the Near East, its heterogeneous racial make-up, including ‘Arab blood’, and its predominantly unchanged rural economy confirmed its status as the primitive within. The essays gathered in this special issue of the Journal of Modern Italian Studies enrich the pervasive view of Italy's subaltern status by examining the ways in which the dichotomies of the progressive and backward, western and the non-western, northern and Mediterranean, were often reinforced, but also interrogated or collapsed by Italian ethnologists, artists, art historians and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.