Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism 1483
Subalternity thus emerges in the paradoxes of the functioning of power, in the functioning of the dominant discourse as it represents and domesticates peasant agency as a spontaneous and " pre-political " response to colonial violence. No longer does it appear outside the elite discourse as a separate domain, embodied in a figure endowed with a will that the dominant suppress and overpower but do not constitute. Instead, it refers to that impossible thought, figure, or action without which the dominant discourse cannot exist and which is acknowledged in its subterfuges and stereotypes.
This portrait of subalternity is certainly different from the image of the autonomous subject, and it has emerged in the confrontation with the systematic fragmentation of the record of subalternity. Such records register both the necessary failure of subalterns to come into their own and the pressure they exerted on discursive systems that, in turn, provoked their suppression and fragmentation. The representation of this discontinuous mode of subalternity demands a strategy that recognizes both the emergence and displacement of subaltern agency in dominant discourses. It is by adopting such a strategy that the Subaltern Studies scholars have redeployed and redefined the concept of the subaltern, enhancing, not diminishing, its recalcitrance.
THE SUBALTERN STUDIES ' RELOCATION OF SUBALTERNITY in the operation of dominant discourses leads it necessarily to the critique of the modern West. For if the marginalization of " other " sources of knowledge and agency occurred in the functioning of colonialism and its derivative, nationalism, then the weapon of critique must turn against Europe and the modes of knowledge it instituted. It is in this context that there emerges a certain convergence between Subaltern Studies and postcolonial critiques originating in literary and cultural studies. To cite only one example, not only did Edward Said ' s Orientalism provide the grounds for Partha Chatterjee ' s critique of Indian nationalism, Said also wrote an appreciative foreword to a collection of Subaltern Studies essays. 23 It is important to recognize that the critique of the West is not confined to the colonial record of exploitation and profiteering but extends to the disciplinary knowledge and procedures it authorized-above all, the discipline of history.
In a recent essay, Dipesh Chakrabarty offers a forceful critique of the academic discipline of history as a theoretical category laden with power. Finding premature the celebration of Subaltern Studies as a case of successful decolonization of knowledge, Chakrabarty writes that,
insofar as the academic discourse of history-that is, " history " as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university-is concerned," Europe " remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call " Indian,"" Chinese," " Kenyan," and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called " the history of Europe." In
23 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 36-39; Edward Said, " Foreword," Selected Subaltern Studies, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds.( New York, 1988), v-x.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1994