Showing papers on "Subaltern published in 2006"

Crossbreeding Institutions, Breeding Struggle: Women's Empowerment, Neoliberal Governmentality, and State (Re)Formation in India

Abstract: This article explores the politics and practices of a state-initiated, feminist-conceived empowerment program for rural women in India through the lens of neoliberal governmentality. Structured as a government-organized nongovernmental organization (GONGO), the Mahila Samakhya (MS) program seeks to empower and mobilize marginalized women for self-development and social change. The program's GONGO form and empowerment goals articulate with neoliberal logics of self-care and destatized rule to reshape the postcolonial liberalizing state and governance in India. Neoliberalism and the everyday practices of the MS program construct the Indian state as a distinct and vertically encompassing, if ambiguously gendered, entity. The organization's hybrid form and its employment arrangements and work practices end up reinforcing some of the very social inequalities and welfare-based ideologies that its empowerment focus seeks to challenge. Nonetheless, collaborative governmental projects for subaltern women's empowerment, which involve feminist, activist, and state actors, offer spaces of political possibility as well as risks in a neoliberal context.

The subaltern speak : curriculum, power, and educational struggles

Abstract: The question of whose perspective, experience and history is privileged in educational institutions has shaped curriculum debates for decades. In this insightful collection, Michael W. Apple and Kristen L. Buras interrogate the notion that some knowledge is worth more than others. The Subaltern Speak combines an analysis of the ways in which various forms of power now operate, with a specific focus on spaces in which subaltern groups act to reassert their own perceived identities, cultures and histories.

Crossing borders: development, learning and the North – South divide

Abstract: While the validity of categories like ‘First’ and ‘Third’ World or ‘North’ and ‘South’ has been increasingly questioned, there have been few attempts to consider how learning between North and South might be conceived. Drawing on a range of perspectives from development and postcolonial scholarship, this paper argues for the creative possibility of learning between different contexts. This involves a conceptualisation of learning that is at once ethical and indirect: ethical because it transcends a liberal integration of subaltern knowledge, and indirect because it transcends a rationalist tendency to limit learning to direct knowledge transfer between places perceived as ‘similar’. This challenge requires a consistent interrogation of the epistemic and institutional basis and implications of the North – South divide, and an insistence on developing progressive conceptions of learning.

Between Global Flows and Local Dams: Indigenousness, Locality, and the Transnational Sphere in Jharkhand, India

Abstract: A critical examination of the transnational discourse of indigeneity in the context of adivasi or indigenous peoples' political struggles in India contrasts two Indian indigenous political movements: the “transnational” imaginary of the Indian Council for Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, which is the central organization representing India's indigenous peoples at the United Nations, and the “local” imaginary of the Koel-Karo movement, one of several adivasi movements against displacement that mark the Indian political landscape today. Given that these transnational and very local imaginaries both work in relation to different domains of governmentality, I question why a transnational governmentality involving indigenous peoples produces a static and essentialized discourse of indigeneity that inadvertently undermines local initiatives like Koel-Karo. Rural adivasi populations redeploy elements of colonial and nation-state governmentality forged in relation to them in ways that demonstrate a remarkable flexibility in the imagination of indigeneity. As the neoliberal regime in India has, with a terrifying intensity, contributed to the displacement of adivasis, the question of indigeneity as adivasi identity has to address these different histories of governmentality, the modalities of the politics they have precipitated, and other ways of articulating “local” adivasi movements with transnational alliances. This examination of indigeneity in India concludes by problematizing some of the ways in which contemporary academic discourse has interpreted “governmentality” in relation to subaltern movements.

Putting the Ninth Ward on the Map: Race, Place, and Transformation in Desire, New Orleans

Abstract: In this article, we consider how long-term patterns of resistance to structural violence inform citizens' responses to displacement before and after Katrina. Drawing on Abdou Maliq Simone's (2004) conceptualization of people as infrastructure, we recenter the discussion about the rebuilding of New Orleans around displaced residents, taking the place-making practices of members of a social club as a lens through which to examine the predicament of the city as a whole. Members have been generating alternative ways of thinking about and dwelling together in a restructuring city. Their perspectives are articulated through in-depth interviews, focus groups, and the embodied practices of club members and their followers as they make claims to the city through massive, participatory street processions known as second lines. These distinctive ways of thinking and being in the city—the subaltern mainstream of the second-line tradition—are now being deployed by exiled New Orleanians reconsidering their relationship to home.

Language, literacy, and power in schooling

Abstract: Contents: Preface TL McCarty, Introduction: The Continuing Power of the "Great Divide" Part I: "Taking Hold" of Local Literacies E Rockwell, Indigenous Accounts of Dealing With Writing S Nicholas, Negotiating for the Hopi Way of Life Through Literacy and Schooling TL McCarty, The Power Within: Indigenous Literacies and Teacher Empowerment P Gilmore, DM Smith, Seizing Academic Power: Indigenous Subaltern Voices, Metaliteracy, and Counternarratives in Higher Education R Whitman, Julia's "Story" of Schooling: A Borderlands Account RP McDermott, Commentary on Part I: "An Entry Into Further Language": Contra Mystification by Language Hierarchies Part II: Literacy Practices in Diverse Classroom Contexts G Ladson-Billings, Reading, Writing, and Race: Literacy Practices of Teachers in Diverse Classrooms NH Hornberger, Student Voice and the Media of Biliteracy in Bi(multi)lingual/Multicultural Classrooms JT Remillard, M Cahnmann, Researching Mathematics Teaching in Bilingual-Bicultural Classrooms A Candela, Local Power Construction in a School of Socially Marginalized Students LC Moll, Commentary on Part II: Language and a Changing Social Context Part III: Literacies and Knowledges in a Changing World Order JP Gee, Literacies, Schools, and Kinds of People in the New Capitalism C Ullman, Globalization on the Border: Reimagining Economies, Identities, and Schooling in El Paso CL Cain, (Re)writing Inequality: Language of Crisis Implications in California Education Reform J Cummins, Commentary on Part III: Can Schools Effectively Challenge Coercive Power Relations in the Wider Society? TL McCarty, Afterword: Reclaiming Critical Literacies

Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects

Abstract: Dislocating China: Muslims, Minorities, and Other Subaltern Subjects. Dru C. Gladney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 414 pp.

Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad

Abstract: Acknowledgments vii Note on Usage ix Introduction 1 1. "The Indian in Me": Studying the Subaltern Diaspora 17 2. "Left to the Imagination": Indian Nationalism and Female Sexuality 55 3. "Take a Little Chutney, Add a Touch of Kaiso": The Body in the Voice 85 4. Jumping out of Time: The "Indian" in Calypso 125 5. "Suku Suku What Shall I Do?": Hindi Cinema and the Politics of Music 169 Afterword: A Semi-Lime 191 Notes 223 Bibliography 253 Index 267

Transnational development networks: bringing development and postcolonial approaches into dialogue

Abstract: This paper explores some of the ways in which a dialogue between development and postcolonial scholarship might contribute to the theorizing of transnational networks in contemporary development. It does so through consideration of three inter-related themes: epistemologies, spatialities and ethico-politics. The discussion of epistemologies points to the potential benefit in reworking the analysis of the relationship between structure and agency in networks, whereas the discussion of spatialities focuses attention on the interface between the global and the local. Dialogue between development and postcolonial approaches also creates space for considering the politics and ethics of transnational development networks. In particular, this discussion prompts challenges around how to ethically research subaltern knowledge in transnational development networks, including how to trace the translation and redeployment of subaltern knowledge through networks. Consideration of these themes highlights not just overlaps and disjunctures between development and postcolonial approaches, but opportunities for further dialogue and future research on transnational development networks. To illustrate the points made in the paper, examples are drawn from Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), a transnational network of civil society organizations working with urban poverty.

Le Malaise Creole: Ethnic Identity in Mauritius

Abstract: How does one explain the poverty and marginalization of a group that lives in a remarkably successful economy and peaceful society? A native anthropologist, the author provides critical insight into the dynamics of contemporary Mauritian society. In her meticulously researched study of ethnic, gender and racial discrimination in Mauritius, she addresses debates carried out in many developing societies on subaltern identities, ethnicity, poverty and social injustice. The book therefore also offers important empirical material for scholars interested in the wider Indian Ocean region and beyond.

Subaltern strategies and development practice: urban water privatization in Ghana

Abstract: This paper is concerned with subaltern actions providing alternatives to development practice I use Ghana's attempt at urban water privatization to illustrate that Ghana's development practice is characterized by a dependence on foreign sources of capital and expertise that illustrates a psyche and mindset of Eurocentrism associated with the elite and decisionmakers of the country The rationale for water privatization, the how of privatization, and the anti-development opposition to privatization not only demonstrate this dependency but also the extent to which decisionmakers are willing to sacrifice sovereignty and culturally sensitive ways of doing things, to global capital, in exchange for development funds In the state's zeal for Western or Occidental development, subalterns in Ghana have devised hybridities that are post-traditional and Oriental in nature to solve their water problems These development solutions are couched within structures provided to human agency and suggest that development practice should therefore listen to subalterns in terms of how they imagine and solve their problems The concern with subaltern voices shows the relationship between postcolonial studies and development practice

Theoretical approaches to entertainment education campaigns: a subaltern critique.

Abstract: Entertainment education (E-E) is one of the most widely discussed areas in current scholarship on international health communication. In fact, much of the health communication scholarship has been historically dominated by E-E efforts directed at subaltern spaces. This article applies a subaltern studies perspective to interrogate the location of agency of the subaltern participant in the dominant E-E discourse. Based on a critical approach to E-E, the article offers points of departure for studying health communication in subaltern spaces. Subaltern voices point toward alternative definitions of problems beyond the narrow realm of problems defined by the core actors in E-E. Finally, alternative positions are suggested for applying participatory communication in engaging with subaltern participants for problem definition and solution development.

Natives Making Nation: Gender, Indigeneity, and the State in the Andes

Abstract: In Bolivia today, the ability to speak an indigenous language is highly valued among educated urbanites as a useful job skill, but a rural person who speaks a native language is branded with lower social status. Likewise, chewing coca in the countryside spells "inferior indian," but in La Paz jazz bars it's decidedly cool. In the Andes and elsewhere, the commodification of indianness has impacted urban lifestyles as people co-opt indigenous cultures for qualities that emphasize the uniqueness of their national culture. This volume looks at how metropolitan ideas of nation employed by politicians, the media and education are produced, reproduced, and contested by people of the rural Andes-people who have long been regarded as ethnically and racially distinct from more culturally European urban citizens. Yet these peripheral "natives" are shown to be actively engaged with the idea of the nation in their own communities, forcing us to re-think the ways in which indigeneity is defined by its marginality. The contributors examine the ways in which numerous identities-racial, generational, ethnic, regional, national, gender, and sexual-are both mutually informing and contradictory among subaltern Andean people who are more likely now to claim an allegiance to a nation than ever before. Although indians are less often confronted with crude assimilationist policies, they continue to face racism and discrimination as they struggle to assert an identity that is more than a mere refraction of the dominant culture. Yet despite the language of multiculturalism employed even in constitutional reform, any assertion of indian identity is likely to be resisted. By exploring topics as varied as nation-building in the 1930s or the chuqila dance, these authors expose a paradox in the relation between indians and the nation: that the nation can be claimed as a source of power and distinct identity while simultaneously making some types of national imaginings unattainable. Whether dancing together or simply talking to one another, the people described in these essays are shown creating identity through processes that are inherently social and interactive. To sing, to eat, to weave . . . In the performance of these simple acts, bodies move in particular spaces and contexts and do so within certain understandings of gender, race and nation. Through its presentation of this rich variety of ethnographic and historical contexts, Natives Making Nation provides a finely nuanced view of contemporary Andean life.

Absences and imaginings: the production of knowledge on globalisation and education

Abstract: In his paper ‘Grassroots globalization and the research imagination’, Arjun Appadurai challenges academics to develop ways of researching and engaging with the victims of globalisation. A key objective of Appadurai's is to sketch out the problematic and build up the terrain on which a democratisation of research about globalisation might take place. I argue that in order to proceed in ways that are productive for developing a critical research imagination, we must begin by first interrogating the conceptual tools we use to understand globalisation. I identify three absences that are evident in current approaches by researchers working on globalisation and education which seem to me to be particularly pressing; first, the absence of a critical spatial analytic; second, the absence of subaltern or alternative knowledges; and third, the absence of research reflecting on the altered terrain and politics of democratic representation as a result of global processes. In the concluding section I return to the ide...

Global primordialities: virtual identity politics in online Hindutva and online Dalit discourse

Abstract: This article analyzes the online representations of the identity politics discourse of the elite Hindu nationalist community and the subaltern Dalit community. The assumptions underlying assertions about Hindu and Dalit identity on select Hindu nationalist and Dalit websites are remarkably similar despite deep ideological differences between the two. Developments in the Indian technological and cultural fields in the 1990s have enabled the emergence of a new mode of representing collective identity (‘global primordiality’), which explains the resemblance between online Hindu nationalist and online Dalit discourse. The logic of global primordiality typically finds expression in cyberspace, where the realms of technology and culture intersect. The representational framework of global primordiality is shaped primarily by Hindu nationalists who also occupy a privileged position as elites in the Indian technological field. In its participation in cyberspace, Dalit discourse may tend to mirror this dominant mod...

Mariátegui, the comintern, and the indigenous question in Latin America

Abstract: Victorio Codovilla, the leader of the Comintern's South American Secretariat, instructed Jose Carlos Mariategui, a Peruvian Marxist who had gained a reputation as a strong de- fender of marginalized Indigenous peoples, to prepare a docu- ment for a 1929 Latin American Communist Conference ana- lyzing the possibility of forming an Indian Republic in South America. This republic was to be modeled on similar Comintern proposals to construct Black Republics in the southern United States and South Africa. Mariategui rejected this proposal, as- serting that existing nation-state formation was too advanced in the South American Andes to build a separate Indian Repub- lic. Mariategui, who was noted for his "open" and sometimes unorthodox interpretations of Marxism, found himself embrac- ing the most orthodox of Marxist positions in maintaining that the oppression of the Indian was a function of their class posi- tion and not their race, ethnicity, or national identity. From Mariategui's point of view, it would be better for the subaltern Indians to fight for equality within existing state structures rather than further marginalizing themselves from the benefits of mo- dernity in an autonomous state. Mariategui's direct challenge to Comintern dictates is an example of local Party activists refusing to accept Comintern policies passively, but rather actively engag- ing and influencing those decisions.

Bama’s Karukku: Dalit Autobiography as Testimonio:

Abstract: This essay argues that Dalit autobiographies must be treated as testimonio, atrocity narratives that document trauma and strategies of survival. Using Bama’s Karukku as a case-study, it explores the shift between the generic conventions of individual life-writing and collective biography in this text. It analyses the strategy of witnessing in Bama’s narrative, arguing that she functions as a witness to a community’s suffering, and calls upon readers to undertake “rhetorical listening” as secondary witnesses. This act of recording trauma and witnessing, the essay proposes, is one of subaltern agency.

Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin

Abstract: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS, PREFACE, PROLOGUE 1 ASIA What is Asia? One Asia The Nation as Museum Implicit Hierarchies The Awakening of the East Encountering Nivedita Problematizing the Postcolonial The Complication of Beauty 2 NATIONALISM The Enigma of Silence Swadeshi Samaj Gora's Bharatbarsha Negotiating 'Nothingness' Against Nationalism Reorienting the Orient Crisis in 'Civilization' Grounds of Misunderstanding Discriminating the Modern Homage to the West 'Our History' Countering Tagore 3 COSMOPOLITANISM Asian Cosmopolitans? Reclaiming Cosmopolitanism The Subaltern 'Cosmopolitan' Negotiating Privilege Cultural Property, or Loot? Cosmopolitics of Dress and Language The Cosmopolitan in Exile 4 FRIENDSHIP The Intertexts of Love Beyond Masculinity Homosociality in Context Modalities of Friendship Foreign Friends War and Friendship Epilogue, Notes , References, Index

Digging wells while houses burn? writing histories of hinduism in a time of identity politics

Abstract: Over the past fifty years, a number of approaches to the recovery of the multiple pasts of Hinduism have held the field. these include that of the discipline of History of religions as it is constituted in north america as well as those of the Hindu nationalists, the colonial and post-colonial historians, and the subaltern studies school. None of these approaches have proven satisfactory because, for methodological or ideological reasons, none have adequately addressed human agency or historical change in their accounts of the pasts out of which modern-day Hinduism has emerged. the Hindu nationalist historians hark back to an extended Vedic golden age in which religious practice remained unchanged until the corruptions spawned by the Turkish invasions of the eleventh century. Many Western indologists and historians of religion specializing in Hinduism never leave the unalterable ideal worlds of the scriptures they interpret to investigate the changing real-world contexts out of which those texts emerged. The colonial and postcolonial historians focus on the past two hundred years as the period in which all of the categories through which India continues to interpret itself—including Hinduism—were imposed upon it from without. Adducing examples of Hindu practitioners and thinkers from the colonial period, subaltern theorists and others argue that historical thought is itself alien to the authentic Indian mind. This article suggests a number of interpretive strategies for retrieving the multiple Hinduisms of the past and of the medieval period in particular as that time out of which most modern-day practices of Hinduism emerged. These include an increased emphasis on non-scriptural sources and a focus on regional traditions.

The Long-Duree Entanglement between Islamophobia and Racism in the Modern/colonial Capitalist/patriarchal World-System: An Introduction

Abstract: Any discussion of Islamophobia today has to depart from a discussion about the cartography of power of the "world-system" for the past 500 years. If we understand the "modern world-system" as a global inter-state system organized solely in terms of an international division of labor, Islamophobia would then be an epiphenomenona of the political-economy of the worldsystem and, in particular, of the ceaseless accumulation of capital on a world-scale. However, if we shift the geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge from a North oriented gaze of the world-system towards a South oriented view, we get a different picture of the global cartography of power. From a Southern perspective, the world-system is organized not only as a global interstate system centered around an international division of labor, but includes, not as additive elements but as constitutive of the capitalist accumulation on a world-scale, a global racial/ethnic hierarchy (Europeans/ Euro-Americans vs. non-European peoples), a global patriarchal hierarchy (global gender system and a global sexual system), a global religious hierarchy, a global linguistic hierarchy, a global epistemic hierarchy, etc. (see Grosfoguel 2006). The "package" of entangled power hierarchies of the worldsystem is broader and more complex than what is frequently theorized in world-system analysis. For the sake of economizing space, when we use the term "world-system" in this essay, we refer to the "modern/ colonial European/Euro-American Christian-centric capitalist/patriarchal worldsystem." At the risk of sounding ridiculous, we prefer a long phrase like this to characterize the present heterarchical structure (multiple power hierarchies entangled with one another in complex historical ways) of the world-system, than the limited characterization of a single hierarchy called "capitalist world-system" with capital accumulation as the single logic of the system (Ibid). The latter can lead to an economic reductionist understanding of the world-system, while the former leads to a more complex, non-reductive structural-historical analysis. Islamophobia as a form of racism against Muslim people is not an epiphenomenon, but constitutive of the international division of labor. The first part of this essay discusses Islamophobia as a form of racism in a worldhistorical perspective. The second part is a discussion of Islamophobia as a form of cultural racism. The third part is on Islamophobia as orientalism. The fourth part is Islamophobia as epistemic racism, while the final part is an example of this using the case of European Islamic Philosopher and Theologian, Tariq Ramadan. Islamophobia as a Form of Racism in World-Historical Perspective The challenge for our topic is to answer how it was possible that a religious difference in the pre-modern/colonial world turned into a racial/ethnic difference in the modern/colonial world. In the heterarchical conceptualization of the world-system used here, Islamophobia would be the subalternization and inferiorization of Islam produced by the Christian-centric religious hierarchy of the world-system since the end of the 15th century. The year 1492 is a crucial foundational year for the understanding of the present system. In this year, the Christian Spanish monarchy re-conquered Islamic Spain expelling Jews and Arabs from the Spanish peninsula while simultaneously "discovering" the Americas and colonizing indigenous peoples. These "internal" and "external" conquests of territories and people not only created an international division of labor of core and periphery, but also constituted the internal and external imagined boundaries of Europe related to the global racial/ethnic hierarchy of the worldsystem, privileging populations of European origin over the rest. Jews and Arabs became the subaltern internal "others" within Europe, while indigenous people became the external "others" of Europe (Mignolo 2000). The first marker of "otherness" in the "European/Euro-American Christian-Centric Capitalist/Patriarchal World-System" was around religious identity. …

The Practice of Postcoloniality: A Pedagogy of Hope.

Abstract: This article is a collage of ideas and thoughts born out of a contrapuntal reading of the effects of colonial imagination and postcolonial conditions on educational practice in the Caribbean. It is an article which sustains a pedagogy of hope and which uses the epistemological space of academic writing for conceptualizing postcoloniality as an aspirational project. In the article are presented several narratives which are interwoven into conversations between historical and contemporary cases of critical pedagogy. Three themes emerge. Firstly, diasporic considerations are considered in relation to identity, where issues of translation and Creoleness are discussed. Secondly, educational practice and the Caribbean problematic make the link with the third theme, in which a historical case of professional practice is highlighted. The fourth theme proposes a practice of critical professionalism and juxtaposes that practice with the disposition of the subaltern professional. The article concludes with a claim t...

A History of the Excluded: Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania

Abstract: A History of the Excluded: Making Family a Refuge from State in Twentieth-Century Tanzania. By James L. Giblin. Eastern African Studies. Athens: Ohio University Press and Oxford: James Currey, 2005. Pp. xii, 304, maps, tables, illustrations. $55.00 cloth, $26.95 paper. The "excluded" in this book's title are primarily the colonial generation of Njombe district of Tanzania-commoners who came of age under British rule and told their stories of the past in the 1990s. They were excluded from the political structures and economic systems created under colonialism and modified in the postcolonial state. Giblin's goal is to present a history of this "subaltern" generation from their own perspectives, eschewing the chronologies and categories that are the concern of the professional historian, and which have little meaning for subalterns. The task, then, is to decenter the state and uncover the "rich alternative history" created by the colonial generation through their own forms of storytelling, perceptions of time, and life concerns. The result is a bottom-up history of a region, and indeed a state, told through the lens of family. As much as possible the author seeks to allow this generation to speak for itself, and he therefore is not comfortable imposing the framework of the professional historian on their words. It is appropriate that "family" is the organizing category through which this history is told, since many of the storytellers were members of the author's own extended family through marriage. Their memories of the past were often elicited through family settings that lessened the strictures of formal interviewing. Guided by this perspective, this book gives us an overview of Njombe history from the late nineteenth century to the recent past. Late precolonial history and German and British rule are conflated into a period remembered as one of ongoing warfare and insecurity that first led people to carve out a private sphere as a refuge from violence. In this telling, the Maji Maji war was not a single proto-nationalist conflict, but part of an ongoing period of civil conflict and population dispersal that began in the decades preceding colonialism and lasted for a decade beyond Maji Maji. Chiefs were not unifiers in the face of colonial predations. Rather, they were colonial functionaries who made life precarious by ruling through henchmen known as avasiwoning'ale, plunderers who terrorized villages and inflicted violence. In light of ongoing insecurity that was the core memory of colonial rule, people carved out a refuge in the private sphere of family, a realm where subalterns could create parallel economies, institutions, and networks that enabled them to survive and sometimes to prosper. …

Constructing and disseminating subaltern public discourses in China

Abstract: What is the democratic potential of the Internet? Using subaltern public spheres as the theoretical framework, the Internet is expected to empower the subordinated social groups and extend the inclusiveness of democracy. Rear- Window to Movies is a Chinese online discussion group, which focuses on the topic of movies. I used this case to answer my research question: How does the online discussion group function as a subaltern public sphere? My research found that the online discussion group supported the concept of subaltern public spheres instead of a unitary public sphere. The online subaltern public sphere provided a safe discursive space for the subaltern public, who was movie fans from the underdeveloped middle class in China.The subaltern public used online spheres to exchange their opinions and critically debated on issues that they were interested in.They successfully constructed their own discourse, which is different from the market discourse and counteracts the domination of the state d...

The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery

Abstract: In the wake of Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993), the "dead silence" that follows Fanny Price's question about "the slave trade" to her uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram, in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park has come to dominate critical interpretations of Austen's engagement with slavery, colonialism, and empire. The critical fascination with Austen's description of "silence" stems from the centrality of silence and speech to 1980s and '90s theories of imperial and racial domination. Gayatri Spivak asks "can the subaltern speak?"; Toni Morrison, in a quotation Said uses as an epigraph to chapter 1 of Culture and Imperialism (3), remarks of "the presence of Africans and their descendants" in the nineteenthcentury U.S. that "silence from and about the subject was the order of the day. Some of the silences were broken, and some maintained by authors who lived with and within the policing strategies" (50-51); Said himself maintains "that the universalizing discourses of modern Europe and the United States assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of the non-European world" (50). Following such views, politically engaged critics have set about addressing the injustices of the past by working to reveal and break such silences. With regard to these political models of interpretation, however, the apparent relevance of the "silence" Austen describes may be deceptive. I would argue that a momentary silence in the conversation of a Baronet's family should not be too readily equated to the "silencing" of "subalterns" themselves, however tempting the symbolism. Indeed, should a young English woman - even a dependent niece - speak out on slavery and break a post-prandial silence, it would not necessarily mark her as resisting the progress of empire. Critics, I contend, have too readily equated silence to complicity and speech to resistance.1 In the case of Mansfield Park, such an equation ultimately masks the specific ways in which Austen's novel imagines slavery and lends its support to the enterprise of empire. While I accept the need for literary criticism to examine the effects of empire and to contribute to the history of imperialism, I will nonetheless argue that Said and those who follow him misread both the silence in Mansfield Park and its cultural moment. The first section of this essay considers Said's methods in interpreting Mansfield Park, including his commitment to an ideal of interpretation as breaking the silences of the past, dependent on the model of "the colonial

Constitutions and Empires

Abstract: The answer to the question, "What comes after the linguistic turn?" appears to be, at least in part, "the imperial turn." As scholars across a range of disciplines begin to agree that the nation-state is a single distorted lens through which to view modern history, "empire," in all its political, economic, and cultural dimensions, commands new critical attention. Within sociolegal history, the turn to empire is especially promising. Building both on a wellestablished preoccupation with legal administration in older imperial history and on sophisticated new studies of legal culture in colonial settings, historians of law and empire can hope to move beyond the limitations of either tradition. The administration of empire, long a topic of imperial histories, becomes a subject of cultural analysis; colonial studies, for some time focused on cultural hybridity, subaltern movements, and the origins of national culture, broadens to include the constellation of legal processes spanning imperial formations.

Alejandro Alvarez Situated: Subaltern Modernities and Modernisms that Subvert

Abstract: Alejandro Alvarez's professional trajectory forces us to rethink the traditional modes of reading and writing the history of international law. Alvarez was central to the development of modern international law. He also happened to be a Latin American international lawyer. Should we interpret his work and life against the background of the intellectual and political history of Europe? Are the contexts that relate to the crisis of the European balance of power or the rise of nationalism the only ones that explain the emergence of a modern international legal discourse? This article situates Alvarez's scholarship within the intellectual, economic, and political history of Latin America. Interpreting Alvarez in the context of a genealogy of modernist Latin American thinkers illustrates the extent to which his work was part of a broader regional effort to appropriate European cultural artefacts in ways that granted them both a cosmopolitan and a distinctively Latin American character. Alvarez's modernism reinvented the meaning and uses of international law as a strategic foreign-policy tool in the interest of Latin American countries, a reinterpretation that contributed also to the construction of a Latin American identity and thought.

Childhood and Youth

Abstract: Histories of youth and sexuality have overwhelmingly examined processes of categorization and regulation by adults rather than the experiences of young people themselves. This is to a large extent a function of the types of record preserved for posterity. Archive collections mostly contain the papers of official institutions and notable individuals: the writings of adults rather than items produced by children. Constituted as legal dependants within the modern Western state, children have been positioned as a subaltern group; the historical record suggests they have been silenced and subjugated to a disciplinary regime. The nature of their being — and of ‘appropriate’ forms of education, training and development — has been defined through the written word of others, in particular those ‘experts’ who have made their indelible mark through ‘the will to know’.1

Judas and his Phallus: The Carnivalesque Narratives of Holy Week in Catholic Philippines

Abstract: On the eve of Easter Sunday, or what is called Black Saturday in Catholic Philippines, a secluded barrio in the Visayan province of Antique comes alive with a ritual involving an effigy of Judas and his phallus. As one of the country's main sources of Overseas Contract Workers, Antique is a specific illustration of the truism that third world countries like the Philippines consist concurrenty of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies. This paper examines the Judas ritual as a carnivalesque trope, in which folk and modern literature, colonial apparatuses, popular culture, and the agency of the subaltern intersect. I read the plaza, in which the Judas ritual is enacted, as the locus of struggles for power between the dominant and the oppressed. Finally, I read the narratology of Judas' phallus in adjunction with other texts across historical periods and insular boundaries so as to unmask the codes of ideological regulation.

Alejandro Alvarez Situated: Subaltern Modernities and Modernisms that Subvert

Abstract: Alejandro Alvarez's professional trajectory forces us to rethink the traditional modes of reading and writing the history of international law. Alvarez was central to the development of modern international law. He also happened to be a Latin American international lawyer. Should we interpret his work and life against the background of the intellectual and political history of Europe? Are the contexts that relate to the crisis of the European balance of power or the rise of nationalism the only ones that explain the emergence of a modern international legal discourse? This article situates Alvarez's scholarship within the intellectual, economic, and political history of Latin America. Interpreting Alvarez in the context of a genealogy of modernist Latin American thinkers illustrates the extent to which his work was part of a broader regional effort to appropriate European cultural artefacts in ways that granted them both a cosmopolitan and a distinctively Latin American character. Alvarez's modernism reinvented the meaning and uses of international law as a strategic foreign-policy tool in the interest of Latin American countries, a reinterpretation that contributed also to the construction of a Latin American identity and thought.