Showing papers on "Subaltern published in 2004"

Beyond the Third World: imperial globality, global coloniality and anti-globalisation social movements

Abstract: The increasing realisation that there are modern problems for which there are no modern solutions points towards the need to move beyond the paradigm of modernity and, hence, beyond the Third World. Imagining after the Third World takes place against the backdrop of two major processes: first, the rise of a new US-based form of imperial globality, an economic–military– ideological order that subordinates regions, peoples and economies world-wide. Imperial globality has its underside in what could be called, following a group of Latin American researchers, global coloniality, meaning by this the heightened marginalisation and suppression of the knowledge and culture of subaltern groups. The second social process is the emergence of self-organising social movement networks, which operate under a new logic, fostering forms of counter-hegemonic globalisation. It is argued that, to the extent that they engage with the politics of difference, particularly through place-based yet transnationalised political stra...

Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space

Abstract: When did categories such as a national space and economy acquire self-evident meaning and a global reach? Why do nationalist movements demand a territorial fix between a particular space, economy, culture, and people? Producing India mounts a formidable challenge to the entrenched practice of methodological nationalism that has accorded an exaggerated privilege to the nation-state as a dominant unit of historical and political analysis. Manu Goswami locates the origins and contradictions of Indian nationalism in the convergence of the lived experience of colonial space, the expansive logic of capital, and inter-state dynamics. Building on and critically extending subaltern and postcolonial perspectives, her study shows how nineteenth-century conceptions of India as a bounded national space and economy bequeathed an enduring tension between a universalistic political economy of nationhood and a nativist project that continues to haunt the present moment. Elegantly conceived and judiciously argued, Producing India will be invaluable to students of history, political economy, geography, and Asian studies.

International Institutions Today: An Imperial Global State in the Making

Abstract: The article argues that a growing network of international institutions — economic, social, and political — constitute a nascent global state, whose current task is to realize the interests of an emerging transnational capitalist class in the international system to the disadvantage of subaltern classes in the third and first worlds. The evolving global state formation can therefore be described as having an imperial character. Underpinning the emerging imperial global state is a web of sub-national authorities and spaces that represent, along with non-governmental organizations, its decentralized face. These developments, it is contended, seriously undermine substantive democracy at both inter-state and intra-state levels. Eight possible objections to the thesis that a nascent global state having an imperial character has evolved are next considered and rejected. The concluding section briefly explores the question as to whether international institutions can be reformed, the vision that should inform change, and some concrete proposals in this regard. It argues the case for a complex internationalism in which statist reforms are necessary in the short and medium terms. These reforms can only be brought about by a powerful global social movement.

The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies

Abstract: Chronology 1. Introducing postcolonial studies Neil Lazarus Part I. Social and Historical Context: 2. The global dispensation since 1945 Neil Lazarus 3. Anti-colonialism, national liberation, and postcolonial nation formation Tamara Sivanandan 4. The institutionalisation of postcolonial studies Benita Parry Part II. The Shape of the Field: 5. Postcolonial literature in the western literary canon John Marx 6. Poststructuralism and postcolonial discourse Simon Gikandi 7. From development to globalisation: postcolonial studies and globalisation theory Timothy Brennan 8. Reading subaltern history Priyamvada Gopal 9. Temporality and postcolonial critique Keya Ganguly Part III. Sites of Engagement: 10. Nationalism and postcolonial studies Laura Chrisman 11. Feminism in/and postcolonialism Deepika Bahri 12. Latin American postcolonial studies and global decolonisation Fernando Coronil 13. Migrancy, hybridity and postcolonial literary studies Andrew Smith.

Recognition, Redistribution and Representation in Capitalist Global Society: An Interview with Nancy Fraser

Abstract: Nancy Fraser is a Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, New York, USA, and is considered one of the leading theorists within the 1990s recognition theoretical turn. She works with analyses of contemporary societal developments from a normatively informed position. Her analytical framework is applicable to current, empirical studies of struggles about recognition and she relates them to classic struggles of redistribution. Her thinking is located in the intersection between feminist theory, critical theory and post-structuralism. In Justice Interruptus (1997a) Fraser identifies a shift in the grammar of political claimsmaking, where struggles for recognition are becoming the paradigmatic form of political conflict and struggles for egalitarian redistribution are declining. In her view, however, recognition and redistribution present two analytically distinct but empirically interrelated reasons for struggle in capitalist, post-Fordist societies, namely struggles about socio-economic (re)distribution, and struggles about cultural recognition such as identity politics. Based on this insight, she outlines a new dual theory of justice encompassing both redistribution and recognition in contrast to the liberal canon of, most notably, John Rawls (1971)1 and Charles Taylor (1994).2 Fraser's accomplishments include the prestigious Tanner Lectures at Stanford University and the Spinoza Lectures at the University of Amsterdam, as well as numerous books and articles, of which Unruly Practices (1989), Justice Interruptus (1997a) and Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (2003) are the most notable. This last book was written along with Axel Honneth, the successor of Jurgen Habermas at Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, and the director of the Institute for Social Research (Institut fur Sozialforschung) as the result of an ongoing debate on the concept of recognition its relation to justice, ethics and social theory. Fraser has also been involved in influential debates with several feminists concerning her theory of justice and the uses (and abuses) of post-structuralist theories (Benhabib et al., 1994; Butler 1997; Young, 1997; Fraser, 1997a, b, c). Expounding a feminist critique of critical theory and introducing the alternative concept of 'subaltern counter publics', she has discussed the male bias of the concept of the public sphere with several other representatives of critical theory, including Jiirgen Habermas (Fraser, 1997a). A lot more could be said about Fraser's work and her theoretical enquiries, but why not let her talk for herself. This interview was undertaken in May 2003 when Fraser visited the

Dislocating China : reflections on Muslims, minorities, and other subaltern subjects

Abstract: This text examines representations of social "minorities" and "majorities" in art and public media, their display in popular theme parks, the invention of "folklore" and creation myths, the role of pilgrimage in constructing local identities, and the impact of globalization and economic reforms on different subaltern communities, in the process illuminating the complexity and diversity of Chinese society.

Dis-connections in “American” Citizenship and the Post/neo-colonial: People of Mexican Descent and Whitestream2 Pedagogy and Curriculum

Abstract: In efforts to create “good” and “responsible” citizens, social educators have sought solutions (assimilation, acculturation, etc.) to the “problem” of racial, ethnic, and linguistic diversity in U.S. society (Houser & Kuzmic, 2001). The “greater good” of this neo-colonial endeavor often focuses on maintaining the privileges of the white, upper middle class, whose cultural capital is the model of its hegemonic social normality (Cary, 2001). This article uses a postcolonial and cultural studies lens to challenge this denial of connected citizenship to historically colonized, subaltern groups in U.S. society, since being “American” has historically implied and still implicitly implies being “white” (Ladson- Billings, 2004). The main focus of this article is on Chicana/o educators as they reflect on their K-12 social studies experiences and how these experiences shaped their notions of their citizenship status in U.S. society. The narratives reveal an unequal, denied, racialized, and disconnected mem...

Im/plausible deniability: racism's conceptual double bind

Abstract: Since the ending of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations, the international concept of racism, first initialised in the 1930s, has been inscribed in an unacknowledged conceptual double bind. Western political culture has inherited a hegemonic concept of racism that foregrounds those meanings associated with the anti‐fascist critiques of the Jewish Holocaust, while foreclosing subaltern anti‐colonial critiques centred on Western Imperialism. This can be taken to suggest a divergence within a western tradition of critical thought that in one of its guises occurs between the view that ‘‘race’ thinking’ resembles ideological exceptionality and the contrary view that ‘race relations’ approximates colonial conventions. The present essay explores the extent to which these views are constituted conceptually and dialogically in opposition and divergence. This is defined as racism's conceptual double bind. In other words, the international concept of racism is doubly bound into revealing...

Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia

Abstract: "Contentious Republicans" explores the mid-nineteenth-century rise of mass electoral democracy in the southwestern region of Colombia, a country many assume has never had a meaningful democracy of any sort. James E. Sanders describes a surprisingly rich republicanism characterized by legal rights and popular participation, and he explains how this vibrant political culture was created largely by competing subaltern groups seeking to claim their rights as citizens and their place in the political sphere. Moving beyond the many studies of nineteenth-century nation building that focus on one segment of society, "Contentious Republicans" examines the political activism of three distinct social and racial groups: Afro-Colombians, Indians, and white peasant migrants.Beginning in the late 1840s, subaltern groups entered the political arena to forge alliances, both temporary and enduring, with the elite Liberal and Conservative Parties. In the process, each group formed its own political discourses and re framed republicanism to suit its distinct needs. These popular liberals and popular conservatives bargained for the parties' support and deployed a broad repertoire of political actions, including voting, demonstrations, petitions, strikes, boycotts, and armed struggle.By the 1880s, though, many wealthy Colombians of both parties blamed popular political engagement for social disorder and economic failure, and they successfully restricted lower-class participation in politics. Sanders suggests that these reactionary developments contributed to the violence and unrest afflicting modern Colombia. Yet in illuminating the country's legacy of participatory politics in the nineteenth century, he shows that the current situation is neither inevitable nor eternal.

The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America

Abstract: Book synopsis: As the 2000 census resoundingly demonstrated, the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the United States has all but dissolved. In a country founded and settled by their ancestors, British Protestants now make up less than a fifth of the population. This demographic shift has spawned a "culture war" within white America. While liberals seek to diversify society toward a cosmopolitan endpoint, some conservatives strive to maintain an American ethno-national identity. Eric Kaufmann traces the roots of this culture war from the rise of WASP America after the Revolution to its fall in the 1960s, when social institutions finally began to reflect the nation’s ethnic composition. Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.

The end of the essential archaeological subject

Abstract: Archaeological investigations of identity have successfully challenged traditional accounts of archaeological subjects by splintering social worlds along axes of gender, ethnicity and class. However, in so doing, they have quietly reinscribed an essential archaeological subject as a locus of analysis and as a foundation for contemporary political action. In analytical terms, the crystallization of a limited configuration of social difference constructs archaeological analyses of identity as a tautology in which contemporary configurations are read as universal and enduring rather than as immediate constructions within specific social worlds. In political terms, the tension between a cosmopolitan drive to combat the appropriation of a global human heritage by nationalist interests and an advocative archaeology dedicated to providing subaltern groups with a privileged claim to a sectional past leaves the discipline in an untenable position. The end of the essential archaeological subject requires a closer analytical focus upon the sociopolitical constitution of subjectivity and a stronger resolve to resist all claims to privilege in the present founded upon archaeological pasts. The implications of this move are sketched in relation to the kingdom of Urartu, which ruled the highlands of eastern Anatolia and southern Caucasia during the early 1st millennium B.C.

Citizenship in a time of empire: the World Social Forum as a new public space

Abstract: Under conditions of neoliberal globalization, structural adjustment and the war on terror, the progressive expansion of modern citizenship, both in its substance and geographic reach, is increasingly in question. Yet, popular demands for democratization, rights and participation are exploding worldwide. This article argues for shifts in focus in the study of citizenship from states, institutions and the national scale to cultural practices in civil society at multiple scales in order to discern and theorize emergent citizenship practices under conditions of ‘empire’. The article examines the World Social Forum as a new kind of public space, ‘placed’ but transnational, and giving rise to a transnational subaltern counterpublic. Through its practices, this counterpublic is forging a new paradigm of citizenship.

Alternative Spaces of the “Argentinazo”

Abstract: The ongoing instability in Argentina that emerged from the December 2001 uprising in Buenos Aires (the “Argentinazo”) has been one of the highest profile examples in recent years of reaction to the economic “disciplining” of a country. For enthusiasts, this reaction has been resistance, an upsurge against neoliberalisation by people conscious of what was happening and with alternative conceptions of how things should be (Aufheben 2003; Carrera and Cotarelo 2003; Dinerstein 2002; Galeano 2002; Harman 2002; “IM” 2002; Klein 2003a, 2003b; MAS 2002; Ollier 2003). Subaltern resistances such as those developed by Argentines have been the subject of much geographical writing on resistance in recent years (Castells 1997; Leyshon, Lee and Williams 2003; Pile and Keith 1997; Sharp et al 2000). This paper addresses the range of actions, or “action repertoire”(Tarrow 1998:20–21), of the Argentinazo to examine the extent to which alternative material and discursive “convergence spaces”(Routledge 2003) of political engagement emerged both as resistance to, and articulating a coherent alternative to, neoliberalism.

Negotiating Diaspora: Jewish Strategies in the Roman Empire

Abstract: The study of the ancient Jewish Diaspora is developing in exciting new directions on the basis of fresh archaeological material and new frameworks of interpretation. The six studies collected in this volume have been composed by an international group of scholars at the forefront of Diaspora studies and explore key features of the cultural dynamics of the Jewish Diaspora. Studies on Jews in Rome (Margaret Williams) and Alexandria (Sarah Pearce) examine the dialectic of local and translocal identities, including a new theory on Jewish Sabbath-fasting in Rome. Through careful analysis of inscriptions in the Balkans (Alexander Panayotov) and Asia Minor (Paul Trebilco), the often ambiguous expression of Diaspora Jews is examined; the Balkan material is here presented for the first time in the English Language. Two essays on the historian Josephus (by James McLaren and John Barclay) examine his crafted reconstructions of Judean history, and indicate his "subaltern" tactics, deploying the tools of the "colonial" culture for the advantage of his own.

Native American gender politics and material culture in seventeenth-century southeastern New England:

Abstract: Scholars have long recognized that European contact had a profound impact on native peoples throughout the Americas. However, subaltern men and women are no longer seen as passive victims in their ...

Men, Women, and Domestics: Articulating Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal

Abstract: INTRODUCTION: THE BHADRALOK, BHADRAMILA, AND DOMESTIC WORKERS IN COLONIAL BENGAL 1. A Genealogy of Servants: Dominance and Subordination in Households of Early Calcutta - Eighteenth through Twentieth Centuries 2. Reconstituting the Household: Defining Middle-Class Domesticity in Colonial Bengal -The Mistress and the Servant 3. Remembering and Writing the Subaltern: Bengali Middle Class Recalls and Represents Domestic Workers 4. Subverting the Moral Universe: Transgression as a Theme in Representing Domestic Workers CONCLUSION

Postcolonial American Studies

Abstract: The heightened climate of xenophobia and compulsory patriotism, as well as the rallying together behind "Western" values by many intellectuals in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, makes painfully clear the necessity of interrogating US culture through the lens of postcolonial studies. Repeated invocations of differences between our civilization and their barbarity, entreaties for a "new imperialism," and calls for reinstating a nineteenthcentury type of colonialism, now with the US replacing Britain and France, are ample proof that the suitability of postcolonial theory to the study of US culture should no longer be a subject of debate.' Hardt and Negri's postulation of the contemporary world as the age of unlocalized, nonimperialist empire is surely being tested (xiv, 134). Nevertheless, although the present moment might warrant a postcolonial understanding of US literature and culture, the relevance of postcolonial analyses to American studies has not always been clear. After all, the master-texts of American studies were consolidating American exceptionalism at the very moment that radical anticolonialist treatises questioning the humanity and universality of modernity were being written by Third World intellectuals such as Aim6 C6saire, Frantz Fanon, and George Lamming. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) is widely credited for having inaugurated the field of postcolonial studies, and with Homi K. Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Benita Parry, Ranajit Guha, and the subaltern studies scholars, the major questions of postcolonial studies were laid out. These questions included the analysis of Western texts as colonial discourse, the investigation of representations of the colonized, the study of forms of resistance to colonization in the literature of the formerly colonized, and issues of neocolonialism, comprador natives, and subaltern representation. Yet despite revisionist histories such as R. W. Van Alstyne's The Rising American Empire (1960) and Carl Eblen's The First and Second American Empires (1967), and later works such as Richard Drinnon's Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (1980), which demonstrated imperialism as central to national identity from the beginning, much of American studies remained remarkably insular, thus reinforcing

Everyday Forms of Compliance: Subaltern Commentaries on Ottoman Reform, 1864–1868

Abstract: The Tanzimat—a series of legal and administrative reforms implemented in the Ottoman empire between 1839 and 1876—has been described by Roderic Davison as a modernization campaign whose momentum came “from the top down and from the outside in.” There can be little doubt about the basic historical veracity of this characterization. Ottoman reform was indeed the brainchild of a small, albeit influential, portion of the imperial bureaucratic elite and its direction and timing were undeniably influenced by foreign diplomatic pressure (in the context of the so-called “Eastern Question”). But by characterizing, correctly, the Tanzimat as a state-led, elitist project, Davison's argument enters an interpretive vicious circle which seems to be more a reflection of twentieth-century political sensibilities than of nineteenth-century realities. A “top-down” political project, according to this argument, is by definition less likely to succeed than a project that has “vigorous popular support.” And, since we know that the project in question ultimately failed to stop the breakup of the empire, it must indeed have lacked such support.

Critical Pedagogy and International Studies: Reconstructing Knowledge through Dialogue with the Subaltern

Abstract: The emerging trend and pressure for higher education to internationalize the curriculum, meet the challenges of globalization and prepare students for global citizenship is identified as the ‘global turn’ in education. The notion of knowledge production in a global context raises epistemological questions regarding the community of knowing subjects and institutions who participate in and structure such knowledge systems. Critical pedagogy offers a theoretical framework in which we can imagine students and teachers engaging in dialogue with knowing subjects of other cultures and locations with the aim of creating a global community of knowledge production. Challenges to such dialogue as articulated by subaltern studies are viewed as critical in considering the politics of knowledge claims and imagining the possibility of democratic practices and discourse in global and international knowledge construction.

Culture, US Imperialism, and Globalization

Abstract: The return of what was once termed gunboat diplomacy in the first decade of the twenty-first century as part of the "new global order" endorsed repeatedly and abstractly by George H. W. and now George W. Bush's regimes could not have occurred without the prior work of culture. In what follows, I make a simple, important point: US cultural production, the work of what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno termed "the culture industry," conditioned American citizens to accept the undisguised militarism and jingoistic nationalism now driving US foreign policy (Horkheimer and Adorno 122). In its inevitably globalized forms, the US culture industry continues to produce the deep divisions between local resistance and subaltern imitation so characteristic of colonial conflicts from the age of traditional imperialism to the neo-imperialisms of our postindustrial era. And the culture industry today does its work in ways that encompass a wide range of nominally different political positions, so that in many respects Left, liberal, and conservative cultural works often achieve complementary, rather than contested, ends. In this respect, little has changed since Horkheimer and Adorno argued in 1944, "Even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system" (Horkheimer and Adorno 120). As the US military raced toward Baghdad, there was considerable criticism of the "embedded reporters" allowed to report the war under the special conditions imposed by the Pentagon and Department of Defense. Most of the criticism assumed that such reporting was biased or censored. When a Newsweek photographer was caught doctoring on his laptop a photograph of an encounter between Iraqi civilians and US military personnel, his firing seemed to vindicate the news magazine of prejudice. Antiwar activists circulated two photographs of Iraqi demonstrators tearing down a monumental statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, Baghdad: The first was a familiar photograph in the news of demonstrators beating on the sculpture's foundation and then, with the help of an Abrams tank,

Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje

Abstract: "Hybridity" has become a popular concept among scholars of critical race theory and identity, particularly those studying Chicano identity. Some scholars claim that hybridity-premised on multiplicity and fluidity-represents a new approach to subjectivity challenging the idea of a stable and unified subject. In "Patrolling Borders," I argue that scholars are mistaken in their belief that "hybrid" or "bordered" identities are inherently transgressive or anti-essentialist. By constructing a genealogy of Chicano hybridity (i.e., mestizaje) I show how Chicano nationalists produced a politicized subjectivity during the Chicano Movement that emerged as the basis for recent notions of hybridity put forward by writers like Gloria Anzaldua. By tracing the historical construction of mestizaje, I show how hybridity continues to be a discursive practice capable of comfortably co-existing with dreams of privileged knowledge, order, and wholeness. "Perhaps there is no identity so perfect, so seamless, so well-fitted to her that she could wear it, be it, perform and live it without resentment, without sadness, without yearning, without guilt, hatred and even violence" (Honig 1993: 183). "A 'border' is always and only secured by a border patrol" (Johnson and Michaelson 1997: 1). Over the past few years, the notion of hybridity has become increasingly popular among scholars of identity, particularly those engaged in critical race theory, feminism, and Chicano/Latino studies. These fields share a common concern with the discursive practices of marginalized groups and subjectivities. As such, the focus on hybridity represents an attempt to legitimatize and give voice to groups or individuals who lack power in society and create theoretical space for alternative epistemologies and epistemic frameworks. Given these interests and concerns, it is no surprise that scholars have identified connections between postmodernism and theories of the hybrid subject (see Appiah 1991; Fregos and Chabram 1990; Spivak 1989; and Perez-Torres 1995). Postmodernism, after all, challenges the hegemony of dominant discourses and their claim to what K. Anthony Appiah (1991: 342) describes as a certain "exclusivity of insight." In postmodernists' writings, subjectivity is problematized so that every subject position is understood as embedded in networks of power and history Yet many postmodern theorists also have a political commitment to giving voice and legitimacy to subjugated and subaltern forms of knowledge. The postmodern approach to theorizing, then, confronts this challenge: How do we legitimate and include marginalized subjects and their claims without essentializing them? How do we remain attentive to difference yet maintain the capacity to challenge and critique the experiences of those whose identities are not necessarily our own? How do we grapple with inequality while also creating the necessary space for contestation? Added to this is the realization that the problem of privileged knowledge claims is not a problem for identity politics only. While these issues and questions are certainly at the forefront of feminist and Third World scholarship, they also animate the terrain of political theory and democratic theory, because at its best, democratic community presumes the possibility of mutual transformation, a transformation forged through dialogue and debate. But if citizens treat their respective experiences as a form of privileged knowledge-as a kind of "uncontestable evidence"-then democratic politics is seriously constrained. The danger of the essentialist impulse is that: It treats some citizens as inherently incapable of the shared understanding necessary for turning strangers into democratic interlocutors. And how can we engage in political deliberation if the claim to experience seeks to locate itself beyond the reach of contestation and challenge? The use in Chicano/Latino studies of the hybrid1 represents an attempt to negotiate this problem. …

Mothers/fighters/citizens: violence and disillusionment in post-war El Salvador.

Abstract: This article explores post-war El Salvador as characterised by disillusionment in the nation's neoliberal rebuilding project. A key part of my argument is that this disillusion-ment is gendered. Specifically, I focus on a spectrum of gendered experiences and responses to social and inter-personal violence in El Salvador's recent history. Is there a relationship between wartime political violence, continued processes of exclusion (i.e. education, healthcare, housing), and post-war waves of domestic violence, youth violence and ‘random’ violence? While some scholars posit questions regarding Salvadoran toler-ance to violence through time, I tackle this question by focusing on emerging criticisms of El Salvador's post-war reconciliation. I privilege a focus on the everyday and people's ambiguities as they deal with political change and a neoliberal economy that marginalises the rural sector. In particular, I argue for placing many rural women's stories of gender-based violence, their assertions of an embodied vulnerability and daily insecurity, within a political economic understanding of the contradictions of El Salvador's peace and nation-building project. Through a series of ethnographic examples based on seventeen months of research in a former warzone, I suggest that a daily and gendered violence is rendered invisible. My aim is to theorise a range of women's and men's losses and to impart the urgency of their narratives that problematise assumptions of what constitutes pain, sorrow and the challenges of war-torn life. This is an attempt to write outside privileged texts that ask subaltern women to speak in a collective voice and articulate their past loss and future hopes. In doing so, I discuss methodology and historicise my own fraught positioning as an international witness/researcher at a very particular moment of El Salvador's transition to democracy.

Gittin' to Know Y'all : Improvised Music, Interculturalism and the Racial Imagination

Abstract: Among the vanishingly small number of texts that explicitly address constructions of race in experimental music, those produced by improvisors stand out, including work by Malcolm Goldstein (1988) and Wadada Leo Smith (1973), and Anthony Braxton's massive three-volume Tri-Axium Writings (1985), an effort which, while in dialogue with such texts as LeRoi Jones’ Blues People (1963), John Cage’s Silence (1961) and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Texte (1971), extends considerably beyond these texts, both in length and in range of inquiry. This general erasure of race seems at variance with experimental music’s presumed openness, its emphasis upon resistance, and its excavations of subaltern and marginalized histories of sound. The primary direction of my analysis, then, concerns the ways in which not only music scholars, but also musicians themselves, have either confronted or avoided engagement with issues of race in experimental music. I seek to identify some uninterrogated tropes concerning process, history and methodology that, when brought to light, do seem to embody coded assumptions about race, ethnicity, class, and about the possibilities for artists to move across, transgress and possibly erase borders. As critical tools in advancing my theorizing, I wish to return to the terms “Eurological” and “Afrological,” which I used in a previous essay (“Improvised Music”) to historicize the particularity of perspectives developed in culturally divergent environments. These terms refer metaphorically to musical belief systems and behavior that, in my view, exemplify particular kinds of musical “logic.” The terms refer to social and cultural location, rather than phenotype (skin color); they are theorized here as historically emergent, and must not be used to essentialize musical direction in terms of ethnicity or race.

Subaltern Resistance in Latin America: A Reply to Tom Brass

Abstract: The valorization of peasants and/or forms of cultural or ethnic difference by subaltern studies that Tom Brass critiques has to do with the relation of Marxism and modernity. Is Marxism essentially a historicism based on the imposition of a normative model of modernity, in which peasants are destined to disappear under the aegis of the ‘development of the forces of production’, or does it point rather to understanding and mobilizing, in whatever form they may take, the contradictions produced by both colonialism and capitalist modernity? Lenin argued that in the stage of capitalism he identified as Imperialism, the ‘national question’ displaced the contradiction between capital and labour within individual capitalist nation-states as the main contradiction; the argument of subaltern studies is that in the new stage of capitalism, if indeed it is correct to speak in those terms, the question of peasants and difference may likewise be a ‘main’, as opposed to secondary contradiction.

Meera's Medieval Lyric Poetry in Postcolonial India: The Rhetorics of Women's Writing in Dialect as a Secular Practice of Subaltern Coauthorship and Dissent

Abstract: The debate around secularism, and what constitutes secular practice both intellectually and politically, is one of the most significant sites in postcolonial theory. Given the contemporary political climate of postcolonial societies, as religious fundamentalism becomesmore andmore entrenched and reinvents itself through alliances with the forces of globalism, on the one hand, and nationalism, on the other, it is crucial that an open and wide-ranging debate take place about the heterogeneous meanings that are assigned to the term secularism. In what follows, we explore the secular practices and ideas that have historically accumulated and been formulated around the figure of Meera, the sixteenth-century Indian woman poet (1498–1546). Edward Said’s important contribution to the secular debate explores the notion and practice of what he calls secular criticism. His term secuThis essay wasmeant to be included in ‘‘Critical Secularism,’’ a special issue of boundary 2 (vol. 31, no. 2 [Summer 2004]), edited by Aamir R. Mufti, but, because of space limitations, publication was deferred until this time. Ed.

Reading subaltern history

Abstract: “My mother picked up the bloody foetus with some straw and threw it away. Even after that the pain in Chandra’s belly continued to increase and she died when it was still 4 or 5 dondoes left of the night . . . I administered the medicine in the belief that it would terminate her pregnancy and did not realize that it would kill her.” (Qtd. Guha 1987: 136) In the Bengali year 1255 (1849 ce), a young widow becomes pregnant during an (illicit) affair with her brother-in-law; he demands that her natal family eliminate the problem. During the abortion arranged by her mother and sister, Chandra dies. Her relatives are arrested and their statements are taken down. The depositions are later archived and anthologized with other documents at Viswabharati University. “How is one to reclaim this document for history?” (Guha 1987: 138). In his compelling essay, “Chandra's Death,” Ranajit Guha poses the question integral to Subaltern Studies, the influential school of Indian historiography he helped to found in the early 1980s. The question encapsulates the collective's contestatory framework: how is Indian history to be written outside the historically dominant frameworks, first of colonialism and, later, of elite nationalism?

Between elite hysteria and subaltern carnivalesque: the politics of street-food in the city of calcutta

Abstract: Deriving from the recent discussions on paideia (spiritual exercise), which links knowledge with mores and manners, this article argues that the expurgation of certain extreme tastes from the genteel Bengali palate, in the course of 'nationalist' reform in the 19th century, demonstrates the operation of a certain 'civilizing process' coterminous with the wider process of westernization. Positing a homology between this and the suppression of the carnivalesque in Europe, it further shows that through the well-known process of the 'return of the repressed', the marginalized elements are re- configured in a new category of anti-food - street-food - consumed by marginal sections of the population. In sum, the historic process of disavowal of the extreme tastes leads to the formation of a new symbolic economy.