AHR Forum Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism
GYAN PRAKASH
To NOTE THE FERMENT CREATED BY Subaltern Studies in disciplines as diverse as history, anthropology, and literature is to recognize the force of recent postcolonial criticism. This criticism has compelled a radical rethinking of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and Western domination. Of course, colonialism and its legacies have faced challenges before. One has only to think of nationalist rebellions against imperialist domination and Marxism ' s unrelenting critiques of capitalism and colonialism. But neither nationalism nor Marxism broke free from Eurocentric discourses.' As nationalism reversed Orientalist thought, and attributed agency and history to the subjected nation, it staked a claim to the order of Reason and Progress instituted by colonialism. When Marxists turned the spotlight on colonial exploitation, their criticism was framed by a historicist scheme that universalized Europe ' s historical experience. The emergent postcolonial critique, by contrast, seeks to undo the Eurocentrism produced by the institution of the West ' s trajectory, its appropriation of the other as History. It does so, however, with the acute realization that its own critical apparatus does not enjoy a panoptic distance from colonial history but exists as an aftermath, as an after-after being worked over by colonialism. 2 Criticism
I am grateful to Frederick Cooper and Florencia Mallon for their comments and suggestions. Although I have not followed their advice in every instance, their careful and critical readings were helpful in rethinking and rewriting the essay.
1 In calling these accounts Eurocentric, I do not mean that they followed the lead of Western authors and thinkers. Eurocentricity here refers to the historicism that projected the West as History.
2 Elsewhere, I elaborate and offer examples of this notion of the postcolonial. See my forthcoming
" Introduction: After Colonialism," in Gyan Prakash, After Colonialism Imperial: Histories and Postcolonial Displacements( Princeton, N. J., 1995). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak speaks of postcoloniality in similar terms. " We are always after the empire of reason, our claims to it always short of adequate." Spivak, " Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value," in Literary Theory Today, Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan, eds.( London, 1990), 228. While literary theorists have been prominent in forcing postcolonial criticism onto the scholarly agenda, it is by no means confined to them; the work of Subaltern Studies historians must be considered an important part of the postcolonial critique. For other examples of historians ' contribution to this criticism, see Colonialism and Culture, Nicholas B. Dirks, ed.( Ann Arbor, Mich., 1992); Confronting Historical Paradigns: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America, Frederick Cooper, Allen F. Isaacman, Florencia E. Mallon, William Roseberry, and Steve J. Stern, eds.( Madison, Wis., 1993); Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India( Cambridge, 1990); and Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule( Ithaca, N. Y., 1988). The essays by Frederick Cooper and Florencia Mallon in this issue of the AHR also mention a number of historical works that have contributed to the current postcolonial criticism.
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