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

José Rabasa’s Without History: Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History departs from, and advances, the premises of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. Most of the essays were written shortly after the Zapatista uprising in Mexico in 1994, although the final ones tackle events that took place more recently, such as the activities of the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de México (APPO) in Oaxaca, and of the Bolivian Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS). The reader of Without History will thereby encounter a diverse body of analyses of the deployment by modern indigenous politics of pre-Colombian texts, of Western testimonial films on the post-1994 events in Chiapas, of the 1997 Acteal Massacre, and of the legal constitutions of contemporary Mayan peoples who work to define their political autonomy.

The “without history” of the title is meant to call attention to peoples whose present and past existences fall outside the narrative of Western history, that of instrumental reason, modernization, and developmentalism. Rabasa argues that on the margins of modernity lie pre-Colombian and/or subaltern alternative histories, grounded in non-Western, non-capitalist, non-statist communal structures: these formations remain operative today. The continuity between the ancient communalism of the indigenous universe and turn-of-the-century subaltern politics constitutes the main focus of the study. Rabasa stresses that the continuity is not always available through documents. Historical episodes, according to Rabasa, enter the realm of the archive only under the condition that they conform to universal history. Resistances to this narrative hence go unrepresented, without history, though they endure as traces, beneath “the fog of the historical archive” (198).

For Rabasa, in fact, the subaltern need not appeal to outside intellectual paradigms, even if emanating from Latin Americanists. Subalterns are capable of producing their own theories, based on life, experience, and history:

In the case of the Zapatistas, the historical immanence conveys backgrounds and life forms that exist outside a single historical trajectory. In their case, spontaneity would clearly curtail the hegemonic vocation of the intellectual and political vanguard. Who needs the intellectuals . . . if the people instinctively, historically, know their oppression by the mere fact of their subjugation?

(126)

Intellectuals deny spontaneity—a now to which Rabasa repeatedly refers—in order to disavow their own possible superfluousness: if direct sensibility generates knowledge, the intellectual is no longer needed. Without History, appealing to subaltern common sense, thereby unfolds as a critical dialogue with Western thinkers (rather than Latin Americanists) such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, Agamben, Schmidt, Negri, Derrida, Foucault, Spivak, Nancy, Marx, Benjamin, and Gramsci. These individuals, Rabasa intimates, provide important paradigms, yet they ultimately fail to account for the everyday knowledge of the Other (passed down through alternative histories and alternative reasons), hence fall short as theorists of subaltern liberation.

Gramsci, in this account, figures prominently. Rabasa does not deny the obvious importance of this theorist for subaltern studies. Yet Gramsci, in Rabasa’s view, demeans folklore, a metonym for the culture, history, and knowledge of the daily life of the people. Gramsci aligns folk with mere common sense, opposing both to the universal knowledge of the nation. Subaltern emancipation, for Gramsci, arises as development; development, in turn, demands the overcoming of subalternism rather than the revaluation of the subaltern, which Rabasa undertakes.

One might recall, however, that Gramsci’s analyses of folklore concern education, whose purpose is to lead social sectors out of the natural attitude, the thoughtlessness that Gramsci indeed calls common sense, and which results from capitalist alienation. For, within the commonsensical outlook, social divisions and hierarchies, such as that between the center and periphery or between the folk and the national-literary (Gramsci’s term for bourgeois-elite culture), are viewed as the way things are and must be, hence—because natural— immutable. Education, conversely, discloses that the subaltern occupies its place...