Subaltern Studies Research Articles

Rethinking the subaltern and the question of censorship in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks

This article attempts to provide a new reading of Antonio Gramsci's concept of subaltern social groups. Through a philological analysis of Gramsci's complete Prison Notebooks, the article puts into question the widespread (mis)interpretation in subaltern studies and postcolonial literature that Gramsci developed the phrase ‘subaltern social groups’ as code for the word ‘proletariat’ in his Prison Notebooks in order to deceive prison censors. The article first demonstrates how the diffusion of the ‘subaltern censorship thesis’ has limited current interpretations of Gramsci's concept of the subaltern to strictly class terms. Then, through an exegesis of Notebook 25—the thematically organized ‘special notebook’ entitled ‘On the Margins of History. History of Subaltern Social Groups’—the article demonstrates that there is no textual evidence to support the censorship thesis. Finally, through an examination of several notes in Notebook 25, the article provides an extrapolation of Gramsci's concept of subalternity. The article shows that Gramsci's concept of the subaltern is not limited to class relations and that in fact subalternity in the Gramscian sense encompasses an intersectionality of race, class, gender, and religion. For Gramsci, subalternity is constituted through constructions of identity, otherness, and marginality that are reinforced within an ensemble of social, political, and economic relations. In contrast to the current literature, this article attempts to show that Gramsci's concept of the subaltern is more complex than often recognized and that his analysis of subalternity relates to the function of intellectuals, constructions of identity and otherness, historiography, representation, the national popular, coloniality, and political organization. Overall, the article provides avenues to rethink contemporary relations of subordination, marginality, and subalternity from a Gramscian perspective.

REVOLUTIONARY NON-VIOLENCE

As the supreme leader of the Indian national movement for freedom, the success of which in 1947 set off a whole wave of decolonization in the rest of the British Empire, M. K. Gandhi may be thought to have a claim to be regarded as the Father of the Postcolonial. However, the founding figures of postcolonial discourse have hardly taken any note of him, and there is a deafening silence on Gandhi in the various readers, encyclopedias and companions on the subject. My argument is that this is so mainly because Gandhi, as an unwavering believer in non-violence or ahimsa, succeeded in liberating India without at all adhering to the Marxist model of a violent and bloody revolution such as championed notably by Frantz Fanon and uniformly valorized in the postcolonial and subaltern studies discourses. The views taken of Gandhi's precept and practice of ahimsa by Leela Gandhi, Robert Young and Shahid Amin are examined in particular, as well as the attempt to characterize Gandhi as practising discursive violence himself. In conclusion, the difficulty of practising non-violence is underlined, as is also Gandhi's affirmation of ahimsa and truth as the supreme human values.

Deconstructing the Portrayals of HIV/AIDS Among Campaign Planners Targeting Tribal Populations in Koraput, India: A Culture-Centered Interrogation

This article deconstructs the portrayal of HIV/AIDS in the tribal dominated district of Koraput, India, among program planners, service delivery personnel, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), etc. who plan, implement, and evaluate HIV/AIDS interventions targeting tribal communities in the region. Drawing upon postcolonial and subaltern studies approaches, we critically examine the ideological assumptions that circulate in the dominant discursive spaces among campaign planners and implementers who target HIV/AIDS among the tribal population in Koraput, India. Based on our critical examination, we suggest guidelines for engaging with program planners and implementers through health communication pedagogy informed by the culture-centered approach.

Subalternité et histoire globale

Sumit Sarkar, one of the leading Indian historians of his generation, participated in the Indian-British Subaltern Studies Collective that established new standards in the historiography of colonialism in the 1980’s. In this Interview, Deborah Cohen and Urs Lindner ask him about the achievements and oversights of the Subaltern Studies project, the prospects of global history, Marx’s eurocentrism and the problem of religion.

After-Images: Visual Cultures and Subaltern Pasts

In February 1856, the Illustrated London News published a wood-cut print of Sido Murmu, a captured leader of an anti-colonial rebellion in India led by indigenous Santal headmen. Known as the Hul, this movement has been re-visited by exponents of subaltern historiography in an effort to understand insurgent consciousness, and the parameters of ‘minority’ history. Working across these parameters, this article employs a visual and historical ethnographic methodology, in order to question whether the interplay between colonial-era and post-independence representations of the Hul may inform a new understanding both of British scopic regimes and of Santal (tribal) and Adivasi (Indigenous) assertion in India. The concept of ‘after-image’ is used metaphorically, to trace how a seemingly imperialist portrait of Sido Murmu has assumed multiple afterlives. I question how these afterlives intersect with the intangible heritage of the Hul especially in the new state of Jharkhand (eastern-central India), to generate an approach to heterotopian encounters that has applicability in both visual studies and subaltern studies.

Toward a New Literary History

The past twenty years witnessed a dramatic transformation in Arabic literature studies in the United States. In the early 1990s, the field was still almost exclusively a satellite of area studies and largely bound by Orientalist historical and epistemological paradigms. Graduate students—even those wishing to focus entirely on modern literature—were trained to competence in the entire span of the Arabic literary tradition starting with pre-Islamic times, and secondary research languages were still rooted in the philological tradition of classical scholarship. The standard requirement was German, with Spanish as a distant second for those interested in Andalusia, but rarely French, say, or Italian or Russian. Other Middle Eastern languages were mainly conceived as primary-text languages rather than research languages. Philology, traditional literary history, and New Criticism formed the methodological boundaries of research. “Theory”—even when it purported to speak of the world outside Europe—was something that was generated by departments of English and comparative literature on the other side of campus, and crossings were rare and complicated in both the disciplinary and the institutional sense. Of course, one branch of “theory”—postcolonial studies—made its way into area studies much faster than the more eclectic offshoots of continental philosophy, for obvious reasons. From nationalism studies to subaltern studies, from Benedict Anderson to Gayatri Spivak, the wave of postcolonial critical theory that swept through U.S. academia in the 1980s and 1990s sparked an uprising in area studies at large and particularly in the literature disciplines. One of the first casualties of this uprising was the old historical paradigm itself: narratives of rise and fall, golden ages, and ages of decadence. Slowly but surely, scholars began to question the entire epistemological edifice through which Arabic literary history had been constructed by Orientalism. It was through the postcolonial theory of the 1980s that Arabic literature came to a broader rapprochement with poststructuralism: Foucault, Derrida, Ricoeur, Jameson, and White, to name a few of the major thinkers who began to transform the field in the late 1990s.

The Philosophy of History

AbstractWritten in memory of the Indian historian Papiya Ghosh, this article tries to establish a dialogue between two different fields, Philosophy and History, and to see how the History of the past can be reassessed in the light of the modern developments of philosophy. The author analyses the raison d’être of History, which is to Humanity what the personal memory is to the individual. Facts are selected and interpreted as they mirror the historian’s biases and choices (that are never neutral), i.e. his/her personal philosophy, external pressures but also the evolution of the society. All meet a mainstream ideology that must be overcome or, at least, taken into account. Marxism and gender studies for instance re-examined whole parts of History and shed new light on wide aspects for-merly neglected by scholars. Inversely certain trends of Indian historiography such as subaltern studies provide a distorted vision of colonial society and tend to promote cultural nationalism while putting aside universal values that bring human beings together. The historical narrative changes and must change, however, not only according to newly discovered facts but also accord-ing to the evolution of ideas and human values.

Adult learning in political (un-civil) society: Anti-colonial subaltern social movement (SSM) pedagogies of place

Through a selective deployment of conceptualisations from subaltern studies, in particular the concepts of political (un-civil) society and an autonomous domain (or a people's politics that suggests the plausibility of dominance without hegemony), this article distinguishes a subaltern social movement (SSM) formation and related anti-colonial SSM pedagogies of place in rural eastern India (Orissa), from Euro-American cartographies of social movements and learning and their varied liberal-capitalist and/or collective-socialist political commitments to modernisation, industrialisation, development, globalisation and progress. The historical resilience and contemporary proliferation of SSM pedagogies in the age of empire is instructive for similar trans/local movements and anti-colonial and anti-capitalist projects of adult learning in imperial and colonial societies implicated in a politics of capitalist hegemony. The propositions advanced here are based on the author's practical and research involvements with Adivasi (original dweller) and Dalit (untouchable out-castes) SSMs since the early 1990s and a funded research engagement (2006–2009) pertaining to ‘Learning in Adivasi social movements’ in India.

Review: Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History, by José Rabasa

Book Review| August 01 2011 Review: Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History, by José Rabasa José Rabasa. Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. 368 pp. Samuel Jaffee Samuel Jaffee University of California, Irvine. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos (2011) 27 (2): 471–474. https://doi.org/10.1525/msem.2011.27.2.471 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Samuel Jaffee; Review: Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History, by José Rabasa. Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 1 August 2011; 27 (2): 471–474. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/msem.2011.27.2.471 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentMexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2011 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Caring, Teaching, Knowing: Spivak, Coetzee and the Practice of Postcolonial Pedagogies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Colin MacCabe, ‘Foreword’, in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1988), p.xviii. 2 Donna Landry and Gerald Maclean, ‘Introduction: Reading Spivak’, in The Spivak Reader, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds Landry and Maclean (New York: Routledge, 1996), p.7. 3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘“Draupadi” by Mahasweta Devi’[1981], in In Other Worlds, p.180. 4 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Explanation and Culture: Marginalia’[1979], in In Other Worlds, p.103. 5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Finding Feminist Readings: Dante – Yeats’[1980], in In Other Worlds p.15. 6 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of a Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.183. 7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching’, Diacritics, 32.3–4 (2002), pp.18–19. 8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ethics and Politics’, p.25. 9 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ethics and Politics’, pp.25–26. 10 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ethics and Politics’, p.27. 11 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Ethics and Politics’, p.29. 12 Peter Randall, personal correspondence (11 May 2006). 13 J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1974). 14 J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (London: Secker & Warburg, 1999), p.9. 15 J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.38 and12. 16 J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.4. 17 J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, p.146. 18 J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace, pp.218–219. 19 J.M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (London: Secker & Warburg, 2003), p.154. 20 J.M. Coetzee, Age of Iron (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990), p.20. 21 J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man (London: Secker & Warburg, 2005), p.44. 22 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), p.50, 58, 221, 347 and 432; Michel Foucault, The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1988), pp.189–232. 23 Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics, p.14, 76, 9, 178, 84 and 11. 24 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text from the Third World’[1987], in In Other Worlds, p.241. 25 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp.39–40, 25–26 and 48. 26 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (Cape Town: University of Cape Town, 1992), p.7, 21, 1, 12 and 17. 27 Michel Foucault, ‘The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom’, in The Final Foucault, eds James Bernauer and David Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp.1–20, cited in Spivak, Thinking Academic Freedom, p.10. 28 USAID, Partnership to Transform South African Education: American Support 1986–2009: Executive Summary (Johannesburg: 2009), p.5. 29 Department of Basic Education, Report of the Task Team for the Review of the Implementation of the National Curriculum Statement (Pretoria: 2009). 30 Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics, p. 94. 31 Statement by the Minister of Basic Education, Mrs Angie Motshekga, MP on the progress of the review of the National Curriculum Statement (6 July 2010), < http://www.education.gov.za/dynamic/dynamic.aspx?pageid = 310&id = 10245> [15 January 2011]. 32 State of the Nation Address by His Excellency J.G. Zuma, President of the Republic of South Africa, at the Joint Sitting of Parliament (11 February 2010), < http://www.info.gov.za/speeches/2010/10021119051001.htm> [15 January 2011]. 33 Department of Basic Education, Delivery Agreement for Outcome 1: Improved Quality of Basic Education (2010), p.4. 34 Equal Education, Equal Education Annual Report 2009 (2010), p.3. 35 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’[1985], in In Other Worlds, pp.197–221 (p.211). 36 Doron Isaacs, ‘Education without Content: OBE was as Bad in Theory as in Practice’, Cape Times (22 July 2010), p.9. 37 Doron Isaacs, ‘Education without Content’, p.9. 38 An exposition of this understanding of habitus and hexis is given in Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp.72–95. 39 Doron Isaacs, ‘Education without Content’, p.9. 40 Equal Education, Annual Report, p.3 and 8. 41 Michel Foucault, Hermeneutics, p.134, 57 and 117.

Economic Growth and Sustainability: A view from China

Lau Kin Chi is an Associate Professor teaching Cultural Studies at the Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She is co-chair of Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA), a forum and network of activist scholars in Asia. She has been involved in various global projects, and is member of the Board and International Coordinating Committee of PeaceWomen Across the Globe. She is also Board Member of China Social Services and Development Research Centre (CSD), and former associate director of the James Yen Rural Reconstruction Institute (YIRR). Her books include Colours of Peace: Stories of 108 Women in China; Resurgent Patriarchies: Challenges for Women's Movements in Asia; Beyond the Financial Crisis: People's Responses and Alternatives in Action; The Masked Knight: Collection of Writings of Sub-Commander Marcos; Subaltern Studies.

After Europe—an introduction

In the 1980s a group of mostly younger historians, coalescing around Ranajit Guha, launched Subaltern Studies. Originally conceived as a project to be sustained over three volumes, it outgrew its o...

Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality

Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality RAMON GROSFOGUEL UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Can we produce a radical anti-systemic politics beyond identity politics? 1 Is it possible to articulate a critical cosmopolitanism beyond nationalism and colonialism? Can we produce knowledges beyond Third World and Eurocentric fundamentalisms? Can we overcome the traditional dichotomy between political-economy and cultural studies? Can we move beyond economic reductionism and culturalism? How can we overcome the Eurocentric modernity without throwing away the best of modernity as many Third World fundamentalists do? In this paper, I propose that an epistemic perspective from the subaltern side of the colonial difference has a lot to contribute to this debate. It can contribute to a critical perspective beyond the outlined dichotomies and to a redefinition of capitalism as a world-system. In October 1998, there was a conference/dialogue at Duke University between the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group and the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. The dialogue initiated at this conference eventually resulted in the publication of several issues of the journal NEPANTLA. However, this conference was the last time the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group met before their split. Among the many reasons and debates that produced this split, there are two that I would like to stress. The members of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group were primarily Latinamericanist scholars in the USA. Despite their attempt at

Some Time between Revisionist and Revolutionary: Unreading History in Dalit Literature

This essay considers questions of Dalit historicity in terms of narrative time. Largely a product of the last two decades, Dalit (“untouchable-caste”) literature in Hindi is often read as an uncomplicated expression of Dalit consciousness, an ethnographically revelatory body of writing. I suggest that Dalit literature might be read differently, as coding a distinct meaning of the historical. he model of narrative time configured in Dalit writing poses a problem for critics of postcolonial and subaltern studies because it challenges underlying assumptions regarding the “historical”—assumptions largely inherited from studies of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, in which subjects are defined by their place in history. Unlike the bildungsroman, Dalit texts posit a model for the narrative construction of the subject that does not rely on the category of historical knowledge and the historical event. By introducing the termsevent-fulnessandunreading,I argue that the Dalit text challenges the putative relation between history and the narrative recovery of self. Dalit writing therefore creates a realism whose origins lie not in the bourgeois historicism of the European novel but in the humanism of a protest literature.

Imperial narratives displaced by Indian subaltern identities in early amateur films

This article analyses how representations of Indian people in colonial amateur films from the 1920s challenged and displaced imperial narratives. It explores how conventional visual colonial rhetoric allowed typological (mis)representations of Indian people, and how these can often voice a suppressed collective history outside the films' customary early twentieth century imperial narrative on race and indigenous traditions. It discusses how British and Indian amateur filmmakers employed visual tropes of colonial discourse on race and identity when constructing, controlling and (mis)representing Indian identities as ‘criminal’ tribes, ‘savage’ colonial subjects, members of esoteric groups, and as members of the imperial elite. Most British amateur filmmakers modelled their records after colonial picture postcards of India or ethnographic and travelogue films, and supported Britain's ‘civilizing’ imperialism by portraying Indian people within a ‘primitive’ romanticised colonial locus. Some Indian amateur filmmakers often employed the journalistic style of British actualities (newsreels) across their entire collections and especially when recording state visits and durbars. Drawing on theoretical perspectives borrowed from the subaltern studies framework, this paper investigates issues of Indian racial and gender agency in four colonial amateur films, and argues that the visual (mis)representation of several Indian subaltern identities ultimately cancels conventional imperial narratives. The research corpus includes missionary films, ethnographic travelogues and home movies made by Anglican missionaries, British ethnographers and freemasons and Maharajahs in the late 1920s. These examples belong to film collections held by the British Film Institute, the Centre of South Asian Studies (University of Cambridge) and the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum.

Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History. By José Rabasa. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Pp. x, 358. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $28.50 paper.

Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History. By José Rabasa. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Pp. x, 358. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $28.50 paper. - Volume 67 Issue 4

Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History. By José Rabasa. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Pp. x, 358. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $28.50 paper.

Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History. By José Rabasa. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010. Pp. x, 358. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $28.50 paper. - Volume 67 Issue 4

This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil

This Land Is Ours Now: Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil

‘BEEN TO THE NATION, LORD, BUT I COULDN'T STAY THERE’

This essay takes as its case study the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma's 2007 vote to disenfranchise approximately 2,800 Cherokee Freedmen (African-Cherokee descendents of slaves once held by members of the Cherokee Nation) in violation of the treaty the Cherokee Nation signed with the United States in 1866 to end the Civil War. Arguing that indigenous sovereignty and political status is incommensurable with the ‘internal’ to the United States, the essay provides a genealogy of ‘internal colonialism’ in order to track how it has emerged as descriptor within postcolonial theory for indigenous peoples' relations with the United States. In order to place indigenous critical theory into conversation with subaltern studies, the essay argues that disaggregating processes of racialization from colonization makes the ongoing settler colonization of indigenous nations visible in conversation with subaltern studies at the same time that it reveals the persistent racisms that have continued to inflect Cherokee nationalism.

Premesh Lalu's Post-colonial Push: Is it Time to Dismantle the Discipline?

In The Deaths of Hintsa, Premesh Lalu argues that South African history remains trapped by colonial modes of thinking. As a necessary consequence, he claims that the field needs a post-colonial moment, suggesting that historians engage with a deconstructionist strand of subaltern studies so as to sever the field from colonial epistemologies. In this essay, I review the book and then locate Lalu within a broad overview of South African historiography in order to offer a critical response to his proposals. I highlight radical and social historians because I think that they have more to offer the field today than Lalu is willing to admit. In a final section, I briefly explore Jonathon Hyslop's idea of an epistemological middle ground and Clifton Crais's engagement with subaltern studies. Both scholars provide useful alternatives to Lalu's work. I conclude that South African history does not need Lalu's post-colonial moment because it would privilege creativity at the expense of coherence and promote dismantling at a time when we may want to seek some stability.