Not "Studying the Subaltern," but Studying with "Subaltern" Social Groups, or, at Least, Studying the Hegemonic Articulations of Power

Providing a brief history of this text will help contextualize it for the reader. It is the revised version of a position paper that I presented at the conference “Cross-Genealogies and Subaltern Knowledges,” held at Duke University, 15–17 October 1998.¹ Significantly, this conference was principally a meeting of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, to which a few colleagues who were not members of the group, and who do not even frame their work within ideas of “subalternity,” were invited to contribute. I was one of these few.2 I found the invitation motivating and tried to prepare a paper that stimulated debate and that could prove useful to a dynamic and valuable intellectual project. Such an interest underlies this text and helps reveal its character. It seems to me that Nepantla’s reviewers’ comments on my article followed a similar vein and further informed my present elaboration of the subject. Reading those commentaries and writing this revised version have led me to the following conclusion: Our approaches, though different, share something very important in that they both focus on culture and power; both are motivated by a certain “power sensibility,” or attentiveness toward the issues of power inherent to social experience, as well as to our own practices as intellectuals. This conclusion explains precisely why my article exhibits a certain tone of self-reflection and personal narrative.

In light of these aspects of the paper’s history, I have decided to devote it to a critique of the idea of “studying the subaltern,” a central element of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (LASSG), enunciated in their founding statement (1993, 110). Considering the founding statement’s general orientation, as well as the work of most LASSG members, one can assume that “studying the subaltern” does not entirely define the project’s character. Nevertheless, it is a critical aspect of the statement, and, in my view, is ethically, politically, and epistemologically problematic, demanding criticism. In fact, this goal should not remain in the founding statement of such an intellectual project, because it is reminiscent of the area studies tradition. However, this idea’s presence in the statement is not an accident. The notion of “studying the subaltern” and the legacy behind it reflect the institutional context of the group’s inception. It is not incidental that the group emerged from the U.S. university context and is devoted to studying cases in a particular “region” or “area” of the world outside the United States: Latin America. It seems to me that regardless of the group’s critical orientation, these circumstances have contributed to an acritical maintenance of the area studies tradition. Foucault’s L’ordre du discours (1980 [1971]) is suggestive here because it emphasizes how mechanisms of control and the delimitation of discourses oblige us to consider the institutional context of the production of this particular discourse, thereby helping us explore both its biases and possible ways of transforming it.

Current debates about new approaches to area studies, which began in the United States about five years ago, have helped produce the general understanding that area studies (both in the United States and in Western Europe) have been historically marked by the interests of imperial or other forms of transnational and international dominance. As we know, this predicament did not originate during the cold war, but existed before and was intensified by it. Further, the cold war’s end has factored prominently in current revisions of area studies’ established conceptions, and much of the debate—as well as most of the current proposals to reshape area studies—emerges from this historical situation. Although some of these revisions accomplish more than merely dismantling certain effects of cold war politics, most of them do not effectively challenge more enduring globally established power relations. For...