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Nepantla: Views from South 1.1 (2000) 45-58



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Position Papers

Cross-Genealogies in
Latin American and South Asian
Subaltern Studies

Ileana Rodríguez


The question of “cross-genealogies,” which was the theme of the Fifth Latin American Subaltern Studies Conference organized by Duke University, begs a definition of the term genealogy. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genealogy as origins, lineage, ancestry, progeny, and pedigree. Situated within the semantic field of the copula, the term generates a series of questions that transcend disciplinary and cultural boundaries. As a metaphor for the production of knowledges and cultures, it brings to mind the rift between legitimacy and illegitimacy as much as it establishes all kinds of hierarchies in the status of their production. “Cross-genealogies” as the copula puts us up against the notion of bastard fields, orphans, and outcasts, as well as bringing with it all the aspects of the hybrid introduced by the hyphen. Despite these two points of disturbance the term introduces, cross-genealogies can be used to discuss the impact of subaltern experiences and agency on the production of elite knowledges. It is in this sense that I will be using the term in this essay.

In line with this idea of knowledge as a product of the copula, I wish to address three propositions that will enable me to discuss the relevance of cross-genealogies to subaltern studies. The first proposition is to decenter the metaphor of the copula, which ties knowledge production to the mandates of the natural sciences based on the principles of social Darwinism, and replace it with the notion of gender—in other words, to denaturalize the fields of knowledge and discuss their production as disciplines and scholarship, field competence, the formation of esprit de corps, productivities, and hegemonies.1 The second proposition is to use the [End Page 45] metaphor of the copula to show that “counterpoetics” and subaltern studies are bastard fields that only produce a type of pseudoknowledge—fiction, an anthropological type of culture at best, rather than science or philosophy.2 The corpus of this pseudoknowledge, which comes from the collective wisdom expressed in songs, dances, speech, and sketches, either lacks a bibliographical genealogy honored by history, or is endowed with adverse (colonial/imperial/global) bibliographies. The third proposition concerns the notion of local knowledge.3 Essentially, local knowledge is nothing less than the power to produce and reproduce localities, reliable local subjects, and neighborhoods, which in turn translate into the possibility of creating and then of enriching a genealogy.

These three propositions clearly illustrate the attempts of inclusion (or the idea of crossing, or grafting, as in the hybrid) of the subaltern, or subaltern knowledges into knowledge. In fact, if there is a point subaltern studies insists in making, it concerns rendering evident the contribution of subalterns to knowledge. One of the more productive avenues subaltern studies takes is to expose the paradoxes subaltern presence creates when subaltern experience and agency is bypassed or misinterpreted. Subaltern experiences have the power to obscure or render transparent certain areas of social interaction. This is particularly evident when the categories of knowledge become fluid. For instance, at the beginning of this century, the recomposition of societies created by modernization and the ensuing changes in the nomenclature of analysis destabilized the viewpoint of the elite. The population could no longer be neatly divided into workers and peasants. Both groups had been collapsed into the new, undetermined, and unruly category of the masses. A direct by-product of this change in the composition of the socius was a disorientation of the social sciences. The consequence was the production of equivocal or paradoxical forms of knowledge born out of the exclusion of both a degendered subaltern and his/her desires and capacity for mobilization in the creation of his/her own local knowledge to produce his/her localities.4

Thus the paradoxes of knowledge spring from the overlooking of subaltern subjectivity and agency, or the conspicuous absence of what we are calling here cross-genealogies. I would argue that the paradoxes of...

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