The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader ed. by Ileana Rodríguez (review)

The Latin Americanist .Winter/Spring 2004 one should examine the bilateral aspects, local circumstances, and the big picture, including nongovernmental organizations. “Rethinking a Relationship” is a proper subtitle to this work. WilliamL. Harris, The Citadel Rodriguez, Ileana, ed. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp. 457. $ 28.95.) When I read my first study that used the term “subaltern,” I wondered why it was necessary to create a neologism for such time-honored concepts as “community studies,” “local politics,” or regional and local history. The LatinAmerican Subaltern Studies Reader helps to answer that question. However, rather than provide a prtcis of some twenty-one quite lengthy, varied, and often difficult essays, I will attempt to outline some of the essential features of what I will call the “subaltern paradigm.” The subaltern approach to Latin American Studies considers itself to be a post-marxist, post-modern, multi-disciplinary movement . It seeks to break away from an orientation on the state and state actors, or on the national social system and its institutions and actors. It seeks to “redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, linguistic, cultural and economic intersections [in] the ongoing process of globalization.” As such, it seeks to “relocate” the “peoples and cultures that have characterized Latin America’s experience.” (xi) Thus, Latin American communities are not simply sub-units of the nation, but distinct socio-cultural entities that interact globally with other communities and nations. The subaltern approach seeks to write “history from below.” Because most of the proponents of the subaltern paradigm are former Marxists they seek to propound a “new humanism,” namely, “a post-revolutionary sympathy with the struggles of the poor at a time when the collapse of socialism had made that posture very unpopular.” (3) Their dissatisfaction with the traditional marxist idea of class as an organizing concept causes them to place greater emphasis on ethnicity, gender, and other components of the “disenfranchised community.” (5) It is this last phrase-the disenfranchised community-that gets us to the heart of the subaltern paradigm. Citing Antonio Gramsci from his Prison Notebooks to the effect that the “subal- Book Reviews 105 tern classes, by definition, are not unified and cannot unite until they are able to become a ‘state,”’ John Beverly argues in his essay argues that it is the exclusion of subaltern groups from such modernizing requirements as education, literacy, a stable income, the nuclear family, etc. that excludes them from full participation in the state. “That exclusion or limitation is what constitutes the subaltern.” (50) Decolonization and nation-building movements, Beverly states, requires the mobilizing of groups around common values, interests, tasks, etc. which they do not share to the same degree. Thus, such movements “suture over” the “discontinuities of ‘the people.’ The deconstructive (italics mine) task of subaltern studies , then, is to “undo the suturing.” (51) In a very real sense the subaltern paradigm turns such traditional concepts as nation building, social modernization, and even multi-culturalism on their heads. “What would it mean,” Beverly asks, “t o create a sense of national belonging in which instead of the many becoming one, the one became many?” (59) One of the major concerns of the subaltern paradigm is that of “ungovernability.” Marc Zimmerman, in his essay, “Rigoberta Menchu After the Nobel: From Militant Narrative to Postmodern Politics,” defines ungovernability as “a situation in which the state systems and apparatuses required to maintain and extend international and local socioeconomicpower relations have to exert such pressure over one or more social sectors or social configurations that oppositions develop.” (111) He goes on to argue that “the growth of the popular movement in which Menchu had played a crucial role was the prime reason for [Guatemalan president] Serrano’s self-coup [auto-golpe],and it would also be a major reason for its failure.” (122) Similarly, Jose Rabassa describes the rebellion in Tepoztlan against the development of an elite residential housing tract and golf course on communal land as an example of the fact (quoting Pablo Gonzalez Casanova) of the “ ‘local’ as the site of resistance to transnational interests and the process of globalization.” (206)k Many of these ideas came...