The Dilemma of Subaltern Studies at Duke

In his essay “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History” (1995), Dipesh Chakrabarty formulates the following dilemma: How can the postcolonial intellectual take up the discipline of history when history itself was one of the discourses that rationalized the subordination of the colonial subaltern in the first place? “As long as one operates within the discourse of ‘history’ produced at the institutional site of the university,” Chakrabarty (1995, 285) writes, “it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between ‘history’ and the modernizing narrative(s) of citizenship, bourgeois public and private [spheres], and the nation-state…. One has only to ask, for instance, Why is history a compulsory part of education of the modern person in all countries today, including those that did quite comfortably without it until as late as the eighteenth century?”

I am tempted then to title this paper “The Dilemma of Subaltern Studies at Duke.” Like Chakrabarty’s dilemma, it starts with a question—in a sense it is the same question. If the process of education provided by an elite institution like Duke itself produces and reproduces to some degree the subaltern/dominant relation, how can it be a place where the subaltern can emerge into hegemony? Let me ask this question concretely in relation to three texts that define the space and possibilities of subaltern studies: Ranajit Guha’s magisterial Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India ([1983] 1999), particularly the chapter on territoriality; Antonio Gramsci’s well-known discussion of subalternity and hegemony in the Prison Notebooks (1971); and Florencia Mallon’s recent historical reconstruction of the relation of peasant communities in nineteenth-century Mexico and Peru to the formation of the modern nation-state in those countries, Peasant and Nation (1995), which has been seen as perhaps the most fully realized attempt to date to apply the idea of subaltern studies historiography to a Latin American setting.

Guha begins Elementary Aspects with a critique of Eric Hobsbawm’s idea that peasant banditry is “pre-political,” arguing instead that it should be understood in a different register of politics than the one represented by the state and the legal forms of colonial civil society, a register that Guha calls the “politics of the people.” But he also explains the relation of peasant insurrections to colonial power in terms that imply that there were also limitations to the kind of politics they embody, particularly in the way in which they related to the political-administrative space of the colonial Raj. Guha points out that the rebellions spread in two ways: (1) by relations of consanguinity—that is, through sectarian, ethnic, or blood affinities; (2) by relations of contiguity or “local bond”—the rebellions could leap between one religious, ethnic, or tribal group and another where these were located in close proximity. In both modalities, however, the territoriality of the rebellions remained subnational. This meant that the rebellions could be successful only within this limited territoriality, and that they would eventually be thrown back by the overarching power of the colonial state. They could not move from a position of subalternity to one of hegemony. They remained subaltern in the very act of contesting domination. The reason they remained subaltern is that the space of hegemony was the colonial state.

Though Guha posits in his book the coincidence of the subaltern with “the people,” that identification is in fact precarious, because “the people” constitutes a potentially unitary and hegemonic social bloc, whereas the subaltern designates a subordinated particularity. This takes us back to the aporia Gayatri Spivak (1988) identified in the project of subaltern studies itself between retrieving the presence of a subaltern subject and deconstructing the discourses that constitute the subaltern as such. The problem is compounded by the fact that, as Gyan Prakash (1994, 1480) puts it, “the subalternist search for a humanist subject-agent frequently ended up with the discovery of the failure of subaltern agency...