This course will explore both the influential historiography of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group and the related scholarship on subalternity across a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary arenas – American studies, in particular, but also, women’s studies, Latin American studies, media studies, and Anthropology – that is either explicitly or implicitly in dialogue with the work of the group. I intend for our reading and conversations in the course to engage both Americanists and students in other fields with interests in subaltern cultures, practices, histories.

Subaltern Studies emerges in the 1980s as a collaborative project in South Asian historiography. The group’s founding members are Marxist historians working (primarily) on peasant insurgencies under the Raj, who confront the problem of a historical record in which the peasants never appear as the subjects of insurgency. So they find themselves trying to un-write sanctioned histories (colonial and nationalist), in order to think the contours of subaltern subjectivity. In so doing, they realize that their project is not fully amenable to the terms of a Marxist analytic because – the problem boils down to this – the colonial subaltern cannot be thought within the framework of capitalist class relations, except as a pre-political subject, which is precisely the position to which official historiography consigns her. Although the writing of the group is uneven in its citation of post-structuralist theory, Gayatri Spivak is surely right when she argues in 1988 that the !
group derives from post-structuralist thought a theory and a practice of supplementation that displaces a singular narrative of capital and its historical subjects, so as to follow the trace of subaltern subjectivity. Subaltern studies, then, is about the non-elite; about communities without access to the means of cultural mediation (print and other technologies); about epistemological violence and the responsibility of the investigator to what goes missing from the archive; and about the limits of the political (what counts as political agency).

Our aim in this course will be three-fold: First, to work through some of the defining scholarship of Subaltern Studies in the 1980s; second, to trace some of the subsequent shifts, re-orientations, and other developments in group members’ work, as they respond, among other things, to the changing organization of capital and the changing position of subalterns within new regimes of accumulation; and third, to sample from the voluminous corpus of subaltern-focused work in American studies and other arenas of left-oriented scholarship in the U.S. academy, in order to ask how (and to what effect) the issues and methods of Subaltern Studies are extended, elaborated, elided, or rethought.

Reading for the course will most probably include the work of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gyan Prakash, Sumit Sarkar, Gayatri Spivak, Wahneema Lubiano, Lisa Lowe, Mike Davis, Hortense Spillers, Walter Mignolo, John Beverley, Aihwa Ong, Saba Mahmood, Ella Shohat, and Robert Stam. I am still thinking about a couple of literary texts, films, or videos that might serve as touchstones for the critical conversation. Written work for the course will include a number of short responses, a research presentation, and an option either to revise an already-drafted essay in this context of this class, or to write (from scratch) a final 10-12 page essay.