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