Showing papers on "Subaltern published in 1992"

Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride? A Reply to O'Hanlon and Washbrook

Abstract: The problem with Prakash, O'Hanlon and Washbrook conclude, is that he tries to ride two horses at once—one Marxist, the other poststructuralist deconstructionist. ‘But one of these may not be a horse that brooks inconstant riders. …’ So, they say we must choose only one to ride on, not both because the two, in their view, have opposing trajectories. One advances historical understanding and progressive change, the other denies history and perpetuates a retrogressive status quo. Posed in this manner, the choices involve more than a dispute over which paradigm provides a better understanding of the histories of the third world and India. At stake is the writing of history as political practice, and the only safe bet, from their point of view, is Marxism (of their kind), not the endless deferral and nihilism of deconstruction and postmodernism. Having set up this opposition, O'Hanlon and Washbrook's either/or logic has no place for the productive tension that the combination of Marxist and deconstructive approaches generates. They are uncomfortable with those recent writings that employ Marxist categories to analyze patterns of inequalities and exploitation while also using deconstructive approaches to contend that Marxism is part of the history that institutionalized capitalist dominance—approaches which argue that although Marxism can rightfully claim that it historicizes the emergence of capitalism as a world force, it cannot disavow its history as a nineteenth-century European discourse that universalized the mode-of-production narrative.

Other Figures in Other Places: On Feminism, Postmodernism and Geography

Abstract: In a recent paper entitled "Travels in the postmodern", Elspcth Probyn uses the metaphors of local, locale, and location to open up a political dialogue between feminism and postmodernism, providing a particularly explicit example of a more general use of spatial figures in contemporary theoretical debate. These spatial references arc not entirely figurative, but allude to our positioning within particular contexts, which both frame and are constructed by our texts. Thus, Probyn's dialogue inevitably raises geographical questions. Moreover, geography is not merely a passive, unnamed party through which Probyn's dialogue is conducted; it is not immune from or in any way 'outside* the situatedness its terminology is employed to articulate. In this context, the metaphorical maps Probyn uses to find her way between the differing terrains of feminism and postmodernism are far from neutral, truthful, transparent representations. In this paper an extension of Probyn\s travels at the boundaries between feminism and postmodernism is sought by introducing a more active, self-critical geographical voice. The often hidden tensions underlying the linkages between geography, postmodernism, and feminism arc explored, and key issues at the interface between critical human geography and feminist deconstruction arc brought to the fore. "The subaltern's situation is not that of an exotic to be saved. Rather, her position is 'naturalized' and reinscribed over and over again through the practices of locale and location. In order for her to ask questions, the ground constructed by these practices must be rearranged .... In rearticulatin g the ground that is locally built around us, we give feminist answers that show up the ideological conditions of certain postmodernist questions."

Author/Izing the Celebrity: Publicity Rights, Postmodern Politics, and Unauthorized Genders

Abstract: The celebrity image is imbued with multiple meanings, mined for its symbolic resonances and, simultaneously, a floating signifier, invested with libidinal energies, social longings, and political aspirations. The celebrity is authored in a multiplicity of sites of discursive practice, generating unauthorized both for the celebrity and for her diverse authors. The law produces the means by which unauthorized identities are both engendered and endangered and existing personality rights do not justify the extent to which these rights are protected. Various examples are explored, showing how subaltern groups rewrite media imagery in subversive but politically expressive fashions. These practices function in an all-encompassing contemporary democracy that recognizes-as political practice-dialogic cultural activities of articulating the social world and authoring politically salient forms of difference.

No aging in India: the uses of gerontology.

Abstract: This paper develops a critique of international gerontology through an ethnography and analysis of gerontological practice in India. The central theme of Indian gerontology — that of an imminent demographic and social explosion of an aging population who will tax the country's slender resources — misrepresents available data and fails to signify the experience of most Indian old people. Narrative and deconstructive techniques are deployed to examine the language of crisis and the complex sources of this misrepresentation. Three sources are explored: local disjunctions of class and gender in India, neocolonial biases in the structure of knowledge on aging central to international discourse, and subaltern strategies within India for subverting Western and elite Indian imperatives of what it means to be old. A variety of textual, ethnographic, and historical materials are examined: Indian and American literature pertaining to the 1982 World Assembly on Aging, a series of sociological texts each entitled “Aging in India,” and four contemporary Indian institutions designed to meet the needs of old people: a social service agency, a geriatric clinic, a retirement community, and an old age home.

The Celebrity Image and Cultural Identity: Publicity Rights and the Subaltern Politics of Gender

Abstract: Who authors the celebrity? Where does identity receive its authorization? I shall argue that the law constructs and maintains fixed, stable identities authorized by the celebrity subject. In so doing, however, the law also produces the possibility of the celebrity signifier's polysemy. The celebrity image1 is a cultural lode of multiple meanings, mined for its symbolic resonances, and, simultaneously, a floating signifier, invested with libidinal energies, social longings, and political aspirations. Focusing upon cultural practices that engage, reproduce, ironize, and transform the meaning and value of celebrity personas to assert alternative gender identities, I shall argue that the celebrity is authored in a multiplicity of sites of discursive practice, and that in the process unauthorized identities are produced, both for the celebrity and for her diverse authors. Through its prohibitions the law produces the means by which unauthorized identities are both engendered and endangered. I will very briefly summarize the legal doctrine of publicity rights2 and argue that the rationales traditionally offered for recognizing and protecting rights to the celebrity persona cannot be supported and do not justify the extent of the protections legally afforded celebrities, their estates, or their assignees. The social and cultural value of the celebrity image will then be addressed.

Fictive Foundations: National Romances and Subaltern Ethnicity in Latin America

Abstract: Miguel Taimal, former governor and local historian of the indigenous community of Cumbal, Colombia, once shared with me his version of Columbus' arrival in America.' Columbus ventured across the ocean in search of territory, he told me, because Spain was suffering a land shortage. After six months of sailing, the land-starved sailors threatened mutiny. Suddenly, they saw a light shining: their ship had reached land. Columbus' crew first set foot on American soil with Law 89 of 1890 in hand; that is, they arrived carrying copies of the post-Independence law that specifies the nature of indigenous landholdings in Colombia.2 Hardly a version of the Spanish invasion as we would tell it, don Miguel's tale compresses time and space, inserting such known quantities as turn-of-the-century Indian law and Colombian national territory into a story that should have taken place several centuries before, in the distant Caribbean. The storyteller thus reintroduces indigenous people into national history, seeking the roots of nationality in the colonial period, instead of the nineteenth century. Don Miguel's account is reminiscent of the history told by many of his Cumbal neighbors.3 Like them, he conflates recent legislation and the colonial-era documentation that legitimizes indigenous communal landholdings and provides evidence for indigenous historians. But in an unusual twist, his Spaniards are ambiguous characters who, like today's Indians, are starved for land; his Columbus has the unlikely honour of granting Colombian Indians protectionist legislation. The narratives of don Miguel and others like him provide subject matter for local historical writing. One example is a mimeographed magazine, the Chasqui Cumbe or Cumbe Post that was written in 1986 by two young political activists, Efr&n Tarapues and HelI Valenzuela.4 The first (and only) issue of the magazine was historical in focus, calling for the elucidation of data hidden in archives:

The Subaltern Speaks

Abstract: Review of Babouk by Guy Endore. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Woman and language in darkest Africa: The quest for articulation in two postcolonial novels

Abstract: The paper focuses on issues raised by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and on ways in which two recent novels, The Expedition to the Baobab Tree (Stockenstrdni) and The Whales in Lake Tanganyika (Hagerfors) employ the same model of the journey of exploration in order to break down phallo- and eurocentric concepts of language in an attempt to arrive at a new articulation of Africa. In Heart of Darkness Marlow crosses the limits of language in his confrontation with the Other (Kurtz, and Africa, both of which have a female dimension) and has to invent a ‘new’ language, post facto, to explain his discovery to the Woman who awaits him at the other end. In the Stockenstrdm text, the narrator and central personage is already female, but she is illiterate; and in order to articulate her body, in which her journey is subsumed, an implied narrator may have to narrate on her behalf, in a language which first has to liberate itself from the processes of bondage and appropriation to which the slave woman has been subjected all her life. In The Whales in Lake Tanganyika an interiext arises from the dialogue of this narrative with H.M. Stanley's historical journal; and this projects the diarist Shaw as the deconstructor of male and European dichotomies. Shedding conventional langitage, linearity and 'reality’, his diary becomes the translation of an inaccessible ‘new’ language which is the only way in which Spivak’s 'subaltern’ can attain speech to articulate the femininity implicit in Africa.

Marginality in the Margins: Robert Duncan's Textual Politics

Abstract: major preoccupation of much postmodern cultural theory is its almost theological interest in transgression. Violation, cross-dressing, abjection, subversion, and infection have become tropic alternatives to various forms of totalized discourse. In its attempt to undermine hierarchies implicit in binary structures, postmodernism searches for the occluded or effaced term (writing, the subaltern, the semiotic) whose marginality contests the authority of Sign and Subject. Far from simply inverting the poles of the Saussurian model in a kind of negative theology of the signifier, recent theory has focused on the space between poles as a kind of fractal landscape where heterogeneity and eroticized play reign. At stake in much of this discussion is a spatial metaphor-whether in the form of a map, a body, or a text-whose autonomy is challenged by the existence of an unspecified outside, or hors-texte. A recent museum lecture series, announced as "Rethinking Bor

Subaltern Consciousness and the Historiography of the Indian Rebellion of 1857

Abstract: My interest in the 1857 rebellion is more than academic. It has to do partly with the story of how my great-grandfather Baba Karaak Singh was awarded a jagir (an estate and its revenues) by the British for "loyalty," in the midst of a "contagion" of betrayal and treachery by mutinous sepoys (soldiers) and disaffected landlords, magnates, and peasants. Faithful to his masters, the old man, so the family legend goes, rode like the wind on a dark and moonless night to bring to the officer in charge details of the secret military plans of the rebels. My great-grandfather's name does not appear in any official roll-call of heroes or villains, pre-independence or post-independence; he was too minor a figure, too insignificant to be deserving of such notice by history. But he was remembered very well by his children and their children for the ill-gotten land that he left them, which grew sugar-cane that share-croppers planted and harvested and paid one-third as revenue to him, and the freshness and sweetness of which my mother could still taste in her mouth years later when she spoke of Baba Karaak Singh and his family jagir. So much for innocence. But I tell this story less as a confession of complicity by inheritance than as an explanation of the initial enthusiasm with which I read in the early 1980s the first essays in Indian social history by a group of post-independence historians in Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, the first volume of which appeared in 1982 under the general editorship of Ranajit Guha, Australian National University, Canberra. "The historiography of Indian nationalism," Guha states in the first essay of the volume, "has for a long time been dominated by elitism--colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism" ("Historiography of Colonial India," Subaltern Studies I, 1)-an elitism which saw the making of the Indian nation, predominantly, as the achievement of ruling-class ideas, institutions, and personalities.

The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic

Abstract: In a well-known argument, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Marxist-deconstructionist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raises complex questions about the ways in which scholars, writers, and historians from the Western elite aspire to give "voice" to the colonial subjects, the third world subalterns, of their first world societies. Are there techniques by which such authors might allow subaltern subjects to represent themselves with maximum authenticity? Or must even well-meaning Western writers, no matter what their literary strategies, be doomed instead to reproduce simplistic versions of their own culture's "others"? Babouk , a 1934 work just republished in Monthly Review Press's "Voices of Resistance" series, is an early example of an effort to negotiate this tension in the form of an experimental novel. In this case, the Western author and colonial subject are positioned in the text to speak from distinct but complementary perspectives. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website , where most recent articles are published in full. Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Writings on South Asian history and society

Abstract: Nation, community, religion, and language are the main themes which run through the writings in this volume of Subaltern Studies. Sudipta Kaviraj identifies some of the narrative modes though which the nationalist consciousness in India imagined a historical past for the nation. He then discusses how such an imaginary institution of India impoverished the earlier "fuzzy" sense of community and put in its place fixed and "enumerable" communities. Partha Chatterjee looks at the way the new middle class of Calcutta constructed the figure of Sri Ramakrishna. A glimpse at this zone of religious beliefs, straddling the domains of the public and the private in the nationalist consciousness, tells us a great deal, he says, about "the subalternity of an elite." Continuing his studies on the theme of "dominance without hegemony," Ranajit Guha discusses the use of caste sanctions in the Swadeshi and Non-cooperation movements. Analyzing the forms of disciplining the masses even as they are brought into nationalist politics, Guha pays particular attention to the writings of Tagore, Gandhi and Nehru on the techniques of mobilization. Saurabh Dube does a detailed reading of a twentieth-century text on the myths of Ghasidas and Balakdas, the gurus of the Satnami Sect. The result is a rich portrayal of the dynamics of dominance and subordination. Using a set of twelfth-century Judaeo-Arabic documents from Cairo, Amitav Ghosh does an imaginative reconstruction of the careers of a Jewish merchant in Mangalore and his Indian slave. In the process he makes several important comments on medieval trade, intercultural communication, and relations of bondage. Intervening in the Subaltern Studies discussions of community and religion, Terence Ranger offers a number of insights from the history of Zimbabwe into the dynamic connections between small and large solidarities. This has important implications for the role of religion in the construction of community from the local to the national level. Upendra Baxi takes up two earlier essays by Ranjit Guha and Shal Amin to make a critical analysis of the place of law in the study of subaltern activity and consciousness.