Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History (review)

Since its New Year's Day uprising in 1994, volumes of ink have been spilled about the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico. This attention points to the significance of the Zapatista struggle in its own context as a struggle for national liberation and indigenous autonomy. It also speaks to the impact of Zapatismo on transnational anti-capitalist and radical social justice organizing. But academic attention is not a simple barometer of sociopolitical significance. While Zapatismo is and has been tremendously significant on its own terms and within its own context, as well as in spaces and places far beyond those borders, it has also been read in ways that celebrate some of its more consumable dimensions—its slogans, its spokesperson, and its symbolism—that are too often divorced from the realities of a living movement in struggle. When radical struggles for social transformation are taken up primarily as objects for intellectual contemplation, divorced from the life they actually live as movements of people directed toward social change, their elements are isolated from the living body of the movement itself. In such circumstances, the real significance of such movements is lost, and systems of power, domination, and exploitation are left largely unconsidered and unchallenged. In this book, José Rabasa walks the difficult line that demarcates the theoretical richness capable of broadly informing the sociopolitical from the theoretical play that signals a retreat from it, largely—but not always—with success.

In a series of 12 essays, Rabasa explores the complex intersection of subaltern studies, historiography, and the Zapatista insurgency, attempting to mine the intersection for the possibilities it offers with respect to subverting dominant claims to truth and the hierarchies of power they support. There is much in this collection of essays that is productive and critically provocative; through them, Rabasa brings Zapatismo and indigenous histories into productive dialogue with a body of critical theory (primarily post-structuralist, autonomist, and post-Marxist in orientation) in a way that reveals the utility of such encounters. Indeed, such cross-fertilizations have become commonplace in recent years. Equally laudable is Rabasa's ability to weave together contemporary indigenous struggles in Mexico with a close, critical examination of histories and representations of Mesoamerican resistance to and encounters with European coloniality. At its best, Without History offers glimpses of an arc stretching across centuries and tracing not merely the resistance of indigenous peoples in the face of massive violence and exploitation, but also their enduring will to live and be otherwise embodied by these subaltern struggles. And yet, Rabasa's work is not entirely successful in navigating through the dangers I sketched briefly above, most notably when it divorces social change struggles from the living sociopolitical and cultural realities that individuals inhabit and seek to reshape.

Rabasa's examination of subaltern studies, history, and the Zapatista insurgency frequently shrinks from a concrete, explicit, and engaged consideration of the political into acts of textual and rhetorical deconstruction. There is a disciplinary critique in the book that parallels this move and also sheds critical light on its consequences in Rabasa's indictment of anthropology as colonialism's past and current handmaiden, frequently uttering its name in the same breath as the colonial work of missionaries. Rabasa presents a telling caricature of anthropology as nothing more than a discourse "of the West" that "assume[s] the privileged position of explaining the life forms of the rest of the world, a concept of the world as the rest of their own creation" (p. 122). Rabasa's critique has been made numerous times by others and is not entirely incorrect, as there are dynamics within anthropology's history that have replicated the very power dynamics he invokes here. More interesting, however, is that much contemporary anthropology does not fall into this stereotype at all. In fact, as anarchist and anthropologist David Graeber argues in Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire...