Intellectuals and Their Others: What Is to Be Done?

Diaspora 9:2 2000 Intellectuals and Their Others: What Is to Be Done? Misha Kokotovic University of California, San Diego Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. John Beverley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. John Beverley's Subalternity and Representation is an impressive work of synthesis that maps the contours of the last twenty years of Latin American literary and cultural criticism in unusually lucid prose. Through a wide-ranging discussion ofhistory, political economy , literature, and mass culture in the Americas (North and South), Beverley identifies the stakes in contemporary Latin Americanist theoretical debates by situating these debates in sociohistorical context while also engaging, from a Latin Americanist perspective, current trends in cultural theory in the North American academy. The essays that make up Subalternity and Representation are organically linked to a degree unusual in a collection of what is, for the most part, previously published work. Moreover, Beverley tackles a host of complex issues with a level of clarity admirable in a field cluttered with an arcane jargon it generates at several times the rate it produces genuinely new ideas. His central theme is the problematic relationship of the progressive academic to the oppressed peoples about and on behalf of whom she or he writes. If academic knowledge, he argues, "is a practice that actively produces subalternity ... in the act of representing it" (Subalternity 2), how can the politically committed scholar represent the subaltern within the academy without being complicit in the reproduction ofthe very relations ofdomination and subordination such representations are meant to oppose? Because Beverley's attempt to address this question engages in an ongoing set of debates, some definitions and unpackings of key concepts are in order, beginning with those that appear in the title itself. Representation is to be understood here in both the political and the mimetic senses of the term, that is, as "speaking for" and as "speaking about." Beverley traces the genealogy of this double meaning of representation through Gayatri Spivak's influential essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" back to the distinction in Marx between Vertretung and Darstellung.1 In the first sense, "speaking 287 Diaspora 9:2 2000 for," an individual or group represents the political interests of others, while in the second, "speaking about," a given reality is mimetically described, or re-presented, in oral, written, or visual form. The distinction is an analytical one, for in practice the two forms of representation may occur together. "Speaking for" may, and frequently does, involve "speaking about" the represented party. The subaltern, in turn, is a term drawn from Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Beverley, more scrupulous than most in acknowledging the history of the critical vocabulary he employs, notes that Gramsci's "recourse to the terminology of 'subaltern classes' or 'subaltern social groups'" may be an example of his "use of euphemisms so as not to alarm the prison censors unduly." Ifthis is so, then "'subaltern' should be read as peasants and workers, just as 'philosophy of praxis' should be read as Marxism, or 'integral' as revolutionary. And there, for many persons who consider themselves Marxists, the matter of the subaltern should properly end" (Beverley, Subalternity 12). For Beverley, who still identifies with the Marxist tradition, the matter nonetheless does not end there, for in Gramsci, he argues, the term "subaltern" is not simply a code word for workers or peasants but also incorporates a recognition of the determinant (and not merely superstructural) role of culture in social conflicts. Beverley refers here to the well-known Gramscian critique ofvulgar Marxist economism, and he relies on Gramsci to argue that the production and reproduction of relations of domination and subordination is not a simple reflex or effect of economic or political structures but passes through culture, understood in the broad, anthropological sense ofthe word. This, he notes, is in keeping with a growing "culturalist" trend in much contemporary social science. The term "subaltern" does not come to Beverley directly from Gramsci, however, but from the Indian subcontinent, via the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group (SASSG) of (mostly) historians, in particular Ranajit Guha, who founded the group and its publication series, Subaltern Studies: Writings on Indian History and Society...