Showing papers on "Subaltern published in 1996"

Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest

Abstract: Ecological causes are championed not only by lobbyists or hikers While mainstream environmentalism is usually characterized by well-financed, highly structured organizations operating on a national scale, campaigns for environmental justice are often fought by poor or minority communities Environmentalism and Economic Justice is one of the first books devoted to Chicano environmental issues and is a study of US environmentalism in transition as seen through the contributions of people of color It elucidates the various forces driving and shaping two important examples of environmental organizing: the 1965-71 pesticide campaign of the United Farm Workers and a grazing conflict between a Hispano cooperative and mainstream environmentalists in northern New Mexico The UFW example is one of workers highly marginalized by racism, whose struggle--as much for identity as for a union contract--resulted in boycotts of produce at the national level The case of the grazing cooperative Ganados del Valle, which sought access to land set aside for elk hunting, represents a subaltern group fighting the elitism of natural resource policy in an effort to pursue a pastoral lifestyle In both instances Pulido details the ways in which racism and economic subordination create subaltern communities, and shows how these groups use available resources to mobilize and improve their social, economic, and environmental conditions Environmentalism and Economic Justice reveals that the environmental struggles of Chicano communities do not fit the mold of mainstream environmentalism, as they combine economic, identity, and quality-of-life issues Examination of the forces that create and shape these grassroots movements clearly demonstrates that environmentalism needs to be sensitive to local issues, economically empowering, and respectful of ethnic and cultural diversity

Ecological ethnicity in the making: Developmentalist hegemonies and emergent identities in India

Abstract: Why are certain ecologically exploited regions in middle India also the hotbeds of ethnoregionalism? Why are ethnic groups fighting to stop big dams or to gain control over their land and forest resources, demanding autonomy of governance at the community and regional level? More significantly, why would the resolution of ecological conflict require self‐governance of communities? I explicate these questions by providing an ecological reinterpretation of ethnic movements in middle India, particularly in Jharkhand and the Narmada valley. I show that while ethnicity might be the form in which they are expressed, these movements are firmly grounded in ecological subordination. What is emerging is an “ecological ethnicity” that goes beyond a narrowly defined ethnic politics. Ecological ethnicity derives further impetus when it enters into relations of equivalence with other historical subjects who are also subordinated in different equations of power. Embedded in a relatively autonomous subaltern space, ecolo...

Constructing the Limits of State Violence in Central America: Towards a New Research Agenda

Abstract: This analysis of the historically high level of state-sponsored violence in Central America, typically explained in terms of ‘authoritarianism’ or ‘civil-military relations’, argues for according it a more independent research status Three historic dimensions of state-sponsored violence – the mechanisms by which caudillo violence was displaced upward in the late 19th century, the level of subaltern collaboration with the agents of state violence as a function of clientelist politics, and the intrusion of US military power after 1940 – are proposed The implications for the utility of political culture theory and for a reevaluation of the literature on civil-military relations are developed

The Jíbaro Masquerade and the Subaltern Politics of Creole Identity Formation in Puerto Rico, 1745–1823

Abstract: This Bishop, true incarnation of that French devil named Richilieu, has unleashed madness and barbarism in this city; the political order has been shattered and it is no longer possible to distinguish decent people from the riffraff. This morning they are celebrating the return of Aviles the Child from his trip through the channels and waterways [surrounding the city] ... When festive carnival breaks out before everyone's eyes, the mask turns them all into equals-gentleman and commoner, lady and tramp, master and slave-a dreadful situation that is about to undermine the edifice of State.

The Pidginization of Luguru Politics. Administrative Ethnography and the Paradoxes of Indirect Rule

Abstract: The analysis of the tensions of empire that characterize indirect rule is usually hampered by the failure to study critically its discourse of representation and the indigenous resistance and accommodation to it. In this article I make that attempt by describing the administrative ethnography of the Uluguru Mountains in Eastern Tanganyika as a pidgin constructed in a specific contact situation (the baraza, or council meeting) by speakers from both the Luguru substrate or subaltern political discourse and the British superstrate language of political and ethnographic representation. [colonial discourse, political anthropology, indirect rule, invention of tradition, African history]

The political unconscious of the human sciences

Abstract: The relationship between knowledge, society, and power has been considerably rethought recently. Few defend the idea that knowledges such as the human sciences are merely representational practices. Instead, knowledge is approached as a social power to be analyzed for its social productivity. Assuming a tight link between knowledge and power, this paper aims to sketch a non-Whiggish framework for narrating the development of human sciences. I underscore how the scientization of social knowledge has, on the one hand, produced subaltern interpretative communities and, on the other hand, how these communities-as the repressed unconscious of the human sciences-have continued to shape and trouble the epistemic and social claims to authority by the human sciences. I wish to make the argument that there is a political unconscious to the human sciences. This refers to ways disciplinary conventions operate, often without the explicit intentions of social scientists, to suppress, if not erase, epistemological and social differences. This is a political willfulness that has been alternatively denied or celebrated as the progress of reason and humankind. However, this assault on difference has never been fully successful, for at least some epistemic and social "others" have flourished in nonacademic social spacessometimes on the periphery, other times in the social center. Indeed, and somewhat ironically, subjugated knowledges and communities of discourse have never ceased actively to shape the formation of the human sciences. They do so in part through their inevitable production-and subjugation-as "other" by the human sciences and in part through their equally inevitable mobilization, from time to time, against their marginalized status in relation to the human sciences. This is a history and political willfulness that should be exposed, not to nourish an ethos of antiscience but to make "us" aware of the self-limiting aspects of Western disciplinary culture and to release "us" from the cultural fixations that often unknowingly inflict social harm and occasion human suffering. This dark side to the progress of science has been veiled in the dominant Enlightenment culture, a case perhaps of the victors writing their own story of triumph. We in the West, particularly in the United States, have absorbed a master Englightenment narrative relating a tale of science superseding myth, truth overpowering fiction, freedom triumphing over bondage, and progress installed in place of a tireless cycle of social advancement and decline. The Enlightenment signifies more than a master narrative; its core beliefs and values are woven into Western institutional practices and legitimations. Of course, this culture has been con

Whose India?: The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and History

Abstract: For centuries, India has captured our imagination. Far more than a mere geographical presence, India is also an imaginative construct shaped by competing cultures, emotions, and ideologies. In "Whose India"? Teresa Hubel examines literary and historical texts by the British and Indian writers who gave meaning to the construct "India" during the final decades of the Empire. Feminist and postcolonial in its approach, this work describes the contest between British imperialists and Indian nationalists at that historical moment when India sought to achieve its independence; that is, when the definition, acquisition, and ownership of India was most vehemently at stake.Hubel collapses the boundary between literature and history by emphasizing the selected nature of the "facts" that comprise historical texts, and by demonstrating the historicity of fiction. In analyzing the orthodox construction of the British/Indian encounter, Hubel calls into question assumptions about the end of nationalism implicit in mainstream histories and fiction, which generally describe a battleground on which only ruling-class Indians and British meet. Marginalized texts by women, untouchables, and overt imperialists alike are, therefore, examined alongside the well-known work of figures such as Rudyard Kipling, Jawaharlal Nehru, E. M. Forster, and Mahatma Gandhi.In "Whose India"? discursive ownership and resistance to ownership are mutually constructing categories. As a result, the account of Indian nationalism and British imperialism that emerges is much more complicated, multivocal, and even more contradictory than previous studies have imagined. Of interest to students and scholars engaged in literary, historical, colonial/postcolonial, subaltern, and Indian studies, "Whose India"? will also attract readers concerned with gender issues and the canonization of texts.

Interventions : feminist dialogues on Third World women's literature and film

Abstract: The Intervening Configuration: Gender and Feminist Practice: National Identities, Tradition, and Feminism: The Novels of Ama Ata Aidoo Read in the Context of the Works of Kwame Nkrumah, Nationalism and Feminism in the Writings of Santa Devi and Sita Devi, Mother-Country and Fatherland: Re-Membering the Nation in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days, Race, Gender, and the Caribbean Narrative of Revolution, The Transformation of Nation and Womanhood: Revisionist Mythmaking in the Poetry of Nicaragua's Gioconda Belli, The Censored Argentine Text: Griselda Gambaro's Ganarse la Muerte and Reina Roffe's, Transgressions: Female Desire and Postcolonial Identity in Contemporary Indian Women's Cinema, The Intervening Discourse: Problematizing Transnational Feminist Dialogues: Feminist Critiques of Nationalism and Communalism from Bangladesh and India: A Transnational Reading, Of Tortillas and Texts: Postcolonial Dialogues in the Latin American Testimonial, Writing the Difference: Feminists' Invention of the "Arab Woman", Third World Women's Cinema: If the Subaltern Speaks, Will We Listen?, From Third World Politics to First World Practices: Contemporary Latina Writers in the United States

Subaltern Professionals: acting in pursuit of social justice

Abstract: This paper sets out to explore how we might articulate action research, professional development and the pursuit of social justice. Beginning with the examples of the professional lives of two South African nurses, the author makes the point that our involvement in professional development should not be separated from our concerns and commitment also to social justice. The paper problematises whether the notion of ‘professional’ is necessarily a ‘good thing’, arguing rather that projects of professional development have no inherent taken for granted common good. Rather, professionals have been constructed in dominant discourses as the sole guardians, controllers and repositories of ‘expert knowledge’. An alternative view is then presented. Drawing on the writing of Edward Said, a case is made for replacing ‘professionalism’ with the committed social justice moral stance of ‘amateurism’. On this basis, the author then suggests reconstructing professionals as ‘subalterns’ who might take up a critic...

Subalternity and gender: Problems of post‐colonial Irishness

Abstract: This paper examines the possible relationships between gender and nation in Irish culture, placing Ireland in the context of post‐colonial theory and arguing that Gramsci's notion of the ‘subaltern’ (later adapted by post‐colonial theorists) offers a useful way in which to begin to understand how gender and ‘Irishness’ co‐exist. The paper argues that Gramsci's definition of the subaltern, when translated into a post‐colonial context, implies a critique of the formation of nationalism as a force of liberation and suggests that gender, as an alternative subalternity, tends to be dominated and overwritten by the influence of nationalism. Debates in Irish culture which examine the relationship between gender and nation are discussed and Gerry Adams’ short story ‘The Rebel’ examined as an example of a complex reiteration of the domination of the concept of the nation over gender within subalternity. The paper concludes by offering some thoughts on the nature of gendered‐subaltern post‐colonial reading...

The politics of abuse : The traumatized child in Toni Morrison and Marguerite Duras

Abstract: With the political liberation of various colonies in the 1950s there also came the recognition of the need for a more profound investigation of the dynamics of oppression and subjugation. In particular, cultural theorists began to focus on the psychological effects of colonization and the emotional strategies employed in response to such pressures. Thus, Ashis Nandy drew attention to the way that the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized was constructed as one of "civilizing" parent/"primitive" child (34); Frantz Fanon demonstrated the way that racist attitudes could be internalized and could transcend any obvious issue of skin color (162); and Albert Memmi examined the self-loathing emerging from conditions of oppression, i.e., "injustice, insults, humiliation and insecurity" (16, 19-20). Similarly, literary critics began to show how psychological theory can help to elucidate not merely the artistic depiction of colonized subjects but also the narrative techniques used in politically-conscious fiction. Patrick Colm Hogan, for example, has used Lacan's notions of the socially imposed ego to explore the relations between cultural domination and madness in Bessie Head's A Question of Power, and Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub have explored the way that traumatic responses are significant factors in the recovery and narration of Holocaust memories. My purpose in the following essay is to further this line of research by providing a more detailed analysis of the relationship of trauma to social oppression and by showing how this connection is dramatized in the critiques of colonialism evident in Toni Morrison's and Marguerite Duras's fiction. Although Morrison addresses white American racial dominance in the 1930s and Duras addresses British/French governmental dominance in East Asia during these years, both writers are concerned with the relation between social power and individual psychology and both try to give voice to those who are traumatized by oppressive social and familial forces. In particular I want to focus on Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) and Duras's The Vice-Consul 1966), because both novels introduce a new element into colonialist discourse: they feature as protagonists young subaltern girls not previously represented in the Western literary tradition. For both writers, traumatized children provide not merely poignant metaphors but also concrete examples of the neglect, exploitation, disempowerment and disavowal of certain communities and even entire cultures (e.g., African American or Third World citizens). In this way, these novels encourage us to see "colonialism" as an on-going problem and in doing so they serve to challenge the abstractness which frequently tends to characterize "postcolonial" theorizing. I will demonstrate particularly how these writers challenge the subordination of women and children by testifying to their experience and by engaging their readers in that experience. Trauma is an event in an individual's life which is "defined by its intensity, by the subject's incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization" (LaPlanche & Pontalis 465). Kai Erikson emphasizes that trauma can result "from a constellation of life's experiences as well as from a discrete event - from a prolonged exposure to danger as well as from a sudden flash of terror, from a continuing pattern of abuse as well as from a single assault, from a period of attenuation and wearing away as well as from a moment of shock" (457). Prolonged exposure to threats of violence and ongoing abuse are particularly characteristic of oppressed groups and constitute a pernicious form of trauma, because the constant stress and humiliation are associated with being a person of low socioeconomic status (see Brown 124-25). In The Bluest Eye several of Morrison's characters experience the gradual psychic erosion of which Kai Erikson speaks (457), representing the weakening of whole communities living under an oppressive white cultural dominance. …

Behind the veil: The many masks of subaltern sexuality

Abstract: European women in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century India were usually banished from public or political activity by colonial patriarchy, but if politics is also enacted in various non-governmental arenas, it is evident that the domestic parlor, the kitchen, the servants' quarters, and other physical spaces that colonial women managed would also become spaces where colonial ideology was constructed and modified. This paper explores the construction of a bourgeois domestic ideology as an alternative voice within colonialist patriarchy, and at the inscription of the subaltern female body as a metonymic text of subaltern conspiracy and treachery. A bourgeois ethnographic tradition of looking at the subaltern female body finds articulation in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's (Halsband, 1965) Letters from the Levant (1716–1718). Keeping this tradition in mind, this paper will look specifically at the ethnographic body criticisms of Mrs. Kindersley, Mrs. Eliza Fay, and Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood. The “public” eastern woman appeared in many cultural contexts in the east, but in this paper she essentially signifies the eastern dancer — the nautch or tamasha girl — whose profession was frequently and unhesitatingly associated with sex work, and the Indian female domestic servant. The “private” woman, on the other hand, was the inhabitant of the zenana or the harem (the women's quarters). The profession of the dancing girl — an entertainment enjoyed by English and Indian observers — was interpreted to indicate the dancer's diseased and atavistic sexuality. However, while the public and private spheres were supposedly demarcated as secret and private in the case of the women's residential quarters, and shamelessly and spectacularly promiscuous and public in the case of the theatricl performance, in reality the narratives suggested a complicity between private and public subaltern sexual conduct and inclinations, the only difference in the case of the harem or zenana being a greater degree of masculine oppression and feminine self-censure. The strip-tease-like gradual discarding of the veil in the tamasha or nautch and its middle eastern equivalents appeared to be only the fully eroticized expression of the languid gestural language in the zenana or harem. Thus, one of the monolithic indices this body discourse achieves is a proclamation of the universal rampancy of subaltern female sexuality, destroying the patriarchally imposed distinction of public and private upon which western protofeminism constructed itself.

Legacies of Quebec Women's "Écriture au féminin": Bilingual Transformances, Translation Politicized, Subaltern Versions of the Text of the Street

Abstract: The experimental feminist writing that developed in Quebec in the 1970s and 1980s -- l'ecriture au feminin -- is an example of avant - garde creative work that has had political impact. This article traces the effects of this ecriture: bilingual writing by bilingual authors who were "tuned in" to early feminist texts, translation practices which highlight and openly discus feminist interventions in translated texts and the streetwise writing of younger women of the 1990s. The idea of translation links the different sections of the article: it is a trope for women's writing as a movement from private to public discourse, and an expression of Canadian women's attempts to communicate across the language gap. It refers to the creative and visible work that actual interlingual feminist translation has become and, in the last section, stands for the work of creative writing. Just as ecriture au feminin made a visible splash in the 1970s literary production in Quebec, its impact has been to trigger and make visible other types of Canada's women's textual production.The experimental writing by women -- "ecriture au feminin" -- that flourished in Quebec in the late 1970s and early 1980s had a profound effect on the literary environment of its time, developing a political significance well beyond that of many other avant - garde literary movements. A feminist approach to writing that foregrounded gender in every aspect of language and textuality was characteristic of writers such as France Theoret, Nicole Brossard, Louky Bersianik and many other Quebec women of the period. Yet these women not only authored challenging experimental texts, they were also public speakers, journalists, teachers, playwrights, publishers and even filmmakers who were thus able to bring their ideas into a more public forum than many other avant - garde writers. By the mid 1980s they were exerting a marked influence on Anglo - Canadian writing and translation, and their continued energetic participation in the literary and socio - cultural scene of Quebec set an example for the next generation of Quebec women writers, particularly in regard to their capacity for effective interventions. In the following study I trace the transfer of Quebec's ecriture au feminin into other contexts, from a short introduction to this radical feminist writing practise, to its "transformance" into bilingual English - Canadian writing and its effects on translation proper, and ending with an analysis of a new generation of Quebec women writers as subaltern feminist translators of the "text of the street."My emphasis on translation as a central aspect of the transfer process of the 1980s and the creative process of the 1990s stems from the immensely important role that actual French - English translations have played in making the experimental Quebec texts of the 1970s available to anglophone readers, and on the increasing importance that translation theory has acquired in contemporary discourse on cultural transfer. The work of "feminist" translators of ecriture au feminin, and the theoretical texts devolving from these translations by writers such as Barbara Godard and Susanne de Lotbiniere - Harwood, have helped underscore and broaden our knowledge that language is descriptive as well as prescriptive, a carrier of both innovative ideas and traditional ideologies, and a powerful, polyphonic tool to which every woman writer or translator potentially has access. The bilingual English/French writing projects of the 1980s carried out by Lola Lemire Tostevin, Gail Scott and Daphne Marlatt/Nicole Brossard will serve as examples of the cultural transfer of ecriture au feminin into English Canada, while the ostensibly socio - critical texts of such 1990s authors as Anne Dandurand, Claire De, Flora Balzano and Helene Monette will illustrate how the translated "text of the street" can be read as a trope for a gendered subaltern approach to writing in the 1990s. "Feminist" translation practices and theories derived from the actual work of translating Quebec's ecriture au feminin will link the two sections. …

Class, Caste, and Performance in "Subaltern" Feminist Film Theory and Praxis: An Analysis of "Rudaali"

Abstract: Rudaali elaborates on the ambivalences that arise in representing the gendered subaltern, particularly the difficulty of balancing feminist consciousness with the popular appeal that is characteristic of many Indian women's feature films. This essay examines Third World feminism from a subaltern perspective, particularly from the cinematically constructed perspective of a low-caste Indian woman who simultaneously internalizes, resists, and subverts the hegemonic discourses of her world. It analyzes Rudaali (The crier, 1992), a film by Kalpana Lajmi, one of a handful of Indian women filmmakers. The study looks at the intersection of traditional modes of performance with class and caste structures in the Indian context as well as with feminist issues; in particular, it elaborates on the ambivalences that arise in representing the gendered subaltern. I argue that the representation of the protagonist's attitudes toward the structures that oppress her as ambivalent has verisimilitude yet is problematic. Further, the representation of a gendered subaltern by a text that only has the tools of the dominant structure and is attempting to mediate feminist consciousness and realism with popular appeal leads to a necessary ambivalence in narrative and subject construction. I have argued elsewhere that such an ambivalence is characteristic, perhaps inevitable, in almost all Indian women's feature films.'

Writings on South Asian history and society

Abstract: Subaltern Studies IX carries forward the Subaltern agenda of searching for the voices and agency of the subaltern, enlarging the focus to include contemporary issues of gender, oppression, and lumpenization in metropolitan modern India.