Subaltern

A reconstrução diacrónica do conceito de “história integral” nos Cadernos do Cárcere de Gramsci mostra que duas exigências fundamentais da “filosofia da práxis” são articuladas através desta noção: 1) a necessidade de redefinir o materialismo histórico (isto é, uma teoria da história) a partir de uma perspectiva particular: a perspectiva das massas populares na sua luta política pela emancipação; 2) a necessidade de combater a revitalização da hegemonia burguesa proposta por Benedetto Croce através da sua «história ético-política», que Gramsci lê como uma teoria da «revolução passiva». Se a história ético-política baseia-se na exclusão do conflito da história, a história integral mostra que esta premissa não é um elemento teórico, mas uma necessidade política. Em outras palavras, a história integral revela não apenas a “falsidade” da posição teórica de Croce, mas ao mesmo tempo a sua capacidade de produzir uma determinada “verdade”, isto é uma “hegemonia”.

Essa pesquisa apresenta como objeto central os Subaltern Studies. Trata-se de um grupo de intelectuais que se destacou no estudo da história social e política indiana no final dos anos 1970. O que ligou estruturalmente os intelectuais próximos aos Subaltern Studies, em sua fase inicial, foi a tentativa de reescrever criticamente a história colonial da Índia. Nesse sentido, o esforço do grupo correspondeu a uma busca por tentar resgatar a voz nativa silenciada e extrair novas perspectivas historiográficas e políticas não só do passado, mas da própria fraqueza da sociedade nativa. Protagonizados por autores como Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee e Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, se organizou uma série de coletâneas de artigos sobre a história social e política indiana que totalizaram onze volumes compreendidos entre os anos de 1982 e 2000. Amplamente discutidos, os Subaltern Studies passaram a nomear um campo de estudos abrangente, de caráter internacional. Em meio às diversas fontes que confluíram nos “subalternistas” (marxismo, pós-estruturalismo, pós- colonialismo), se busca aprofundar o estudo sobre as apropriações conceituais feitas pelos indianos. Se enfatizará seu percurso de mudanças e tensões intelectuais e se analisará os limites de sua realização teórica – com destaque para a tradução e extensão à experiência latino-americana com os Latin American Subaltern Studies, fundados em 1993.

When the Early Imperial Roman writers imagined the cultural processes taking place in the newly-conquered Gaul, they frequently had recourse to a rhetoric that can appear strikingly similar to some later, colonial narratives of civilizational improvement and the abolition of nefarious ritual life. I will focus on the possible local informants of those Romans who, according to our literary sources (e.g. Pliny, Suetonius), rooted out the Druidic rites from Gaul. How did a Roman administrator recognize the forbidden ‘Druidic’ parts of Gallic ritual life? Who acted as the subaltern middlemen for the Romans in this process, and did they have any influence on the direction of the Roman gaze? This paper seeks to explore whether we might be able to use colonial analogies, particularly from British India, to aid us in distinguishing the knowledge-generation practices of the Roman administrators in the Early Imperial religious ‘middle grounds’ of Gaul.

The nature and field of comparative theology is mapped with particular attention to the tradition associated with Francis Clooney but noting the global and wider context of theology in a comparative mode. There are four main parts. Firstly, mapping the current field and exploring its methodological and theological aspects, with particular attention to global and intercultural theologies, comparative religion, and the theology of religions. Secondly, considering what the deconstruction of religion means for comparative theology and how the term " religion " may be deployed and understood after this. It also takes into consideration turns to lived and material religion. Thirdly, issues of power, representation, and the subaltern are considered, including the place of feminist and queer theory in comparative theology. Finally, an original and constructive discussion on philosophical hermeneutics, as well as the way certain hermeneutical lenses can bring issues into focus for the comparative theologian, is offered. The text notes key trends, develops original models of practice and method, and picks out and discusses critical issues and lacunae within the field.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the notion of decolonizing interpretive research in ways that respect and integrate the qualitative sensibilities of subaltern voices in the knowledge production of anti-colonial possibilities.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws from the decolonizing and post-colonial theoretical tradition, with a specific reference to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s contribution to this analysis. Findings – Through a critical discussion of decolonizing concerns tied to qualitative interpretive interrogations, the paper points to the key assumptions that support and reinforce the sensibilities of subaltern voices in efforts to move western research approaches toward anti-colonial possibilities. In the process, this discussion supports the emergence of an itinerant epistemological lens that opens the field to decolonizing inquiry.
Practical implications – Its practical implications are tied to discursive transformations, which can impact social and material transformations within the context of research and society.
Originality/value – Moreover, the paper provides an innovative rethinking of interpretive research, in an effort to extend the analysis of decolonizing methodology to the construction of subaltern inspired intellectual labor.
Keywords Interpretive research, Post-colonial, Decolonizing, Knowledge production, Subaltern voice

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of popular resistance to dam building in the Narmada Valley, India. Like Indian dam projects more generally, the Narmada projects are characterized by a distributional bias in favor of India's “dominant proprietary classes” and, it is argued, must be understood in terms of the political economy of postcolonial capitalism in India. The article then traces the emergence of popular resistance to dispossession in the form of “militant particularisms” struggling for resettlement and rehabilitation in the dam-affected communities in the riparian state, the transition toward a pan-state antidam campaign—the Narmada Bachao Andolan—embedded in a multiscalar infrastructure of contention, and, finally, the embedding of this struggle in a wider social movement project for alternative development. In conclusion, the author reflects on the strategic lessons that can be drawn from the trajectory of popular resistance to dispossession in the Narmada Valley.

Queerness or rather queer sexuality in India has always been the favourite child of debate and discussions. Queer identity in India has always suffered through the dilemma of to be or not to be. As Dasgupta puts it, " Identities are complicated to begin with and become more complicated when relating them to nation and sexuality ". Given the diversity of India in terms of not only culture but ethnicity as well, Indian sexual identities are the product of " Mulipicitous effects and perceptions of tradition, modernity, colonization and globalization " (Dasgupta, 2011) that are more often in conflict with each other than in a harmonious synthesis. The main argument of this paper is to trace a lineage of queerness in India both in terms of its representation in literature by analyzing The Editor (1893) and The Housewife (1891) by Rabindranath Tagore; Lihaaf (1941) by Ismat Chugtai; and R. Raja Rao's The Boyfriend (2003), and how it prevailed in reality or the societal perception of the same. Providing a literature review by building a bridge in between the ancient and the contemporary India, the paper attempts to trace the missing links of when and how queerness went behind the curtains only to reappear in front of a more complicated, confused and probably a more rigid audience.

As was the case with many newly independent African nations, Somalia was beset by a language problem whose complexity had begun well before independence and the unification of British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland in 1960. With three languages (English, Arabic, and Italian) used as media of communication in government offices and in schools, various Somali administrations struggled to contain the impasse but found no tangible solution. Barely three years after Mohamed Siad Barre seized power in October 1969, he had his military regime introduce the Somali orthography in the Latin alphabet. Based on this milestone, Siad Barre's military rule is highly commended for taking a remarkable step forward in what came to be known as the Somalization project. However, officials of the government and Somali scholarship failed to

This article starts from the observation that the belief in history finds itself radically challenged in contemporary thought and representations, a condition which Fredric Jameson studied through the notion of postmodernity. The aim here is to show that Gramsci’s reflections are particularly valuable, in several respects, for the confrontation of the crisis of modern historicity. First, he conceives of history as a process of struggles, thus managing to grasp its inherent consistency, without denying its openness. Secondly, through the concepts he forges, notably that of hegemony, he analyses the different ways in which the representations of history express concrete historical situations, and in turn produce immanent effects in these situations. Finally, by understanding the link between the crisis of hegemony and the crisis of historicity, he manages to think the possibility for subalterns to regain and enact a specific sense of history.

Somalia is generally thought of as a homogenous society, with a common Arabic ancestry, a shared culture of nomadism and one Somali mother tongue. This study challenges this myth. Using the Jareer/Bantu as a case study, the book shows how the Negroid physical features of this ethnic group has become the basis for ethnic marginalization, stigma, social exclusion and apartheid in Somalia. The book is another contribution to the recent deconstruction of the perceived Somali homogeneity and self-same assertions. It argues that the Somalis, just like most societies, employ multiple levels of social and ethnic distinctions, one of which is the Jareer versus Jileec divide. Dr. Eno successfully portrays another Somalia, in which a mythical homogeneity masks the oppression and social exclusion suffered by some ethnic groups in the country

Uno spettro si aggira per il mondo globalizzato: lo spettro di Antonio Gramsci. Sono in tanti a evocarlo: intellettuali sovversivi e filosofi rapper, compassati analisti politici e acuti studiosi di fenomeni culturali. Sopravvissuto alla disfatta dei suoi commentatori ufficiali, l’autore dei Quaderni del carcere continua a godere di una popolarità che sfiora il trionfo postumo.
All’incrocio tra rigore argomentativo e narrazione disinvolta, Michele Filippini esamina gli orientamenti dei tanti gramscismi. Dai linguaggi ribelli delle comunità afroamericane alle strategie egemoniche dei think tank neoconservatori, dalle riflessioni sul postcolonialismo alle pieghe della mass culture, da sinistra a destra, da destra a sinistra, viene fuori un ritratto inedito e sconosciuto del comunista sardo. Un’immagine lontana anni luce dalla liturgica iconografia in bianco e nero del profondo Novecento.
Cosmopolite, metropolitane, profetiche, cinematografiche, radicali, reazionarie, distorte, allucinate, paranoiche, ma sempre e comunque pop, le interpretazioni considerate in queste pagine compongono le visioni di un Gramsci globale.

Le voci subalterne citate si combinano con la storia. Hanno il potere di confermarla, smentirla o, più spesso, arricchirla di particolari. Portare al centro della narrazione storica chi ne è solitamente ai margini non è opera facile; tantomeno se il tempo ha seppellito i testimoni. Il fatto che alcune delle vite dei sudditi dell’Impero siano state registrate senza filtri, aiuta a comprendere il vivere subalterno in colonia, ma non soddisfa la richiesta di una ricostruzione della vita quotidiana, delle interconnessioni sociali e familiari: il sottoposto racconta, attraverso la biografia personale, la storia che subisce. L’autobiografia, anche affiancata alla storiografia classica e post-coloniale, spiega la gerarchizzazione razziale, il ruolo dell’indigeno nella colonia, ma non dona un quadro esaustivo ed unitario di gruppo sociale subalterno o di figura identitaria del colonizzato.

Marginalisation is basically a political activity of socio-cultural exclusion inside or outside the communities. When this multilayered marginalisation takes place between two communities, for example, an individual belonging to the upper caste/class marginalises a lower caste/class individual in the public space, it is called an inter-community marginalisation. It is more obvious and can be found everywhere. But, it also occurs within a community where no such hierarchy exists between individuals. It is a more subtle and acute form of intra-community marginalisation which is psychologically damaging to the individuals of that community. When this intra-community marginalisation occurs in an indigenous social context, it is worth exploring as it insists on the basic conflict between the individual and his or her ethnic community. So, the conflict between an individual and the collective within a particular community is to be explored in literary texts to trace the roots of exploitation. To bring out my point I will focus on intra-community marginalisation in some specific Indian indigenous social contexts as represented in three short stories ('Bayen', 'The Hunt', 'Dhouli') written by Mahasweta Devi.

The subaltern has frequently been understood as a figure of exclusion ever since it was first highlighted by the early Subaltern Studies collective's creative reading of Antonio Gramsci's carceral writings. In this article, I argue that a contextualist and diachronic study of the development of the notion of subaltern classes throughout Gramsci's full Prison Notebooks reveals new resources for " refiguring " the subaltern. I propose three alternative figures to comprehend specific dimensions of Gramsci's theorizations: the " irrepressible subaltern " , the " hegemonic subaltern " , and the " citizen-subaltern ". Far from being exhausted by the eclipse of the conditions it was initially called upon to theorize in Subaltern Studies, such a refigured notion of the subaltern has the potential to cast light both on the contradictory development of political modernity and on contemporary political processes.

Political scientists struggle to explain why citizen engagement generally, and turnout at elections specifically, keep declining, despite considerable research on this problem. This article explores how attention to class understood as a lived experience might refocus this research in more productive ways. Political scientists are having diffi- culty accessing nonvoters—the group they need to talk to—because they make too many assumptions about who this group is and how nonvoters understand politics and the world. By contrast, this article argues that “just asking” people about elections and voting is more complicated than it might appear. It adumbrates the many ways in which classed assumptions on the part of researchers interfere with designing research instruments, gaining access to the population under study, and interpreting what the groups are saying with their responses. Finally, the article draws on Gramsci, Bourdieu, and political ethnography to set out possible alternatives to the current approaches.

The anthology Subaltern Perspectives in Indian Context: Critical Responses is a volume of twenty two well explored research articles and an interview taken with famous Dalit author Sharankumar Limbale. The book tries to touch almost all subaltern groups like workers, peasants and women. Authors have applied their well-sharpened insight to delve into common challenges faced by these derogated and devalued class of people. As a whole, the book may serve as storehouse of materials for students, scholars and researchers alike.

Although scholars of Somali Studies have engaged themselves in examining the Somali society from several perspectives, colonial and early Somali writers mainly observed the Somali people as homogenous, egalitarian and nomadic pastoral. Themes on multi-ethnicity, multiculturalism, and linguistic diversity were ignored as topics that sully the myth of the selfsame ideology colorfully embroidered in the official historiography. The notion also deluded pioneering Somali scholars from critically studying their people and analyzing colonial writing; at least not beyond the western scholars' knowledge boundary. Accordingly, the Horn of Africa was exemplified as a unique African nation where citizens enjoy equality and share an all-in-one identity: culturally, ethnically, historically, and linguistically. Contrary to that notion, though, the everyday social situation makes the primordial ideology of selfsameness unsustainable. To establish the evidence, this essay discusses about how the Bantu Jareer agrarian community, a section among the different groups of subalterns in the country, views its environment and social space within the boundary of deeply offensive segregation by an extremely suppressive Somali society.

In this article it is an attempt to analyses the origin and history subaltern studies series and makes a conceptual framework to analyze what is subaltern means? And how does subaltern can speak or can’t speak. Apparently it is the powerful orthodoxy versus oppressed in relation to history or story writings which mostly were previously of elites and Britisher and the authentic credibility to oppressed who actually helped were denied.

This text, published in the 30th anniversary edition of Qui Parle, consists of a response to the question "Who Speaks" osed by the editors to many authors who published in Qui Parle over the years including Bacchetta. In it she reflects upon QTPOC in Paris by transforming the question into "who is not being heard" and how that not being heard is unfolding, and the statement "speaking (here-now). As it reflects on subaltern speech, it  distinguishes this particular not-being-heard from Spivak's very insightful not-speakingness (in "Can the Subaltern Speak?"), among other things.

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest has proved to be an invaluable source of critical controversy in regard to race, gender, and class inequalities. Expanding the common scholarly view that treats these issues in isolation, this essay scrutinises those characters subordinated to a hegemonic power under the unifying concept of the subaltern, as developed by Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks. The present analysis of the circumstances, attitude, and resistance of all individuals in the “brave new world” of the island reveals subjection to be mostly inescapable, power to function through repression, and subversion to be generally doomed to failure, hence establishing subalternity as an almost permanent position.

How and why did a labor union organizer from Goa, a former Naxalite student cadre from West Bengal, and a Jesuit priest from Tamil Nadu end up as spokespersons for adivasi rights in contemporary Jharkhand? What caused their political discourse to shift from tribal/adivasi  to indigeneity? Might indigeneity be an ideology for these activists?

To answer these interrelated questions, this paper analyzes the oral histories of three leading indigenous rights activists in Jharkhand, formerly south Bihar. In these self-narratives, I focus on the ways in which these middle-class activists have crafted their political ethics with reference to “indigenous communities” in India and beyond. I argue that “indigeneity” functions in Jharkhandi activist discourses as a marker of a distinctive post-materialist turn in bourgeois politics. The defense of the indigenous or primitive speaks to deep-seated existential crises among bourgeois activists, who seek to simultaneously transcend the modern domains of state and capital as well as locate an authentic space of political ethics and critique in imagined adivasi collectivities. 

By acting as patrons of “primitive” peoples  who purportedly avoid lying, the state, and the money economy, indigeneity activists assume vanguardist roles in ways that satisfy, firstly, the bourgeois critique of electoral democracy in post-Mandal India and, secondly, the post-Naxalbari desire for an independent left outside the existing communist party alternatives. These twin sources of the Jharkhandi activist’s self may be often complementary, but, at the same time, there are very real tensions between them. As the three activist tales in this paper demonstrate, independent left activists, for example, often takes bourgeois politics in contemporary India as their ideological point of departure; the bourgeois celebration of the individual is, similarly, at odds with the leftist quest for post-capitalist collectivities. Nonetheless, these tensions come to the fore most clearly when we consider the limited popular support enjoyed by these activists, especially when ordinary adivasi men and women refuse to assume what Michel Rolph-Trouillot (2003) famously called the “savage slot.” 

This kind of rejection, in fact, further fuels the existential crises that propel indigeneity activism in Jharkhand today insofar as it prompts the unending bourgeois search for a “purer,” more ethical self that claims to be the antithesis of politics yet aspires to a total politics that suffuses every individual belief, act, and idiosyncrasy. This paper thus sheds light on the politics of the anti-political and the modernity of anti-modernism in contemporary India. """