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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