Under Construction @ Keele 2017 Under Construction @ Keele Vol. III (3) | Page 11

deployment of services to a space that is ever more in need. 1 The most visible
example of the city’s failure to meet its obligations is the recent water crisis. In April
2014, Michigan governor Rick Snyder made the historic decision to switch the water
supply for Flint from the Detroit Water Treatment Department to the Flint River.
Despite intense concerns over contamination, primarily regarding industrial waste
from the now-sclerotic manufacturing sector, the Flint City Council approved the
switch in an overwhelming 7:1 vote. As a result, tens of thousands of residents of the
city are now enduring the consequences of lead poisoning. While the governor and
city officials are contrite and quick to suggest solutions, they refuse to acknowledge
the more insidious element of the switch: the creeping racism of environmental
action in the subaltern American Third World.
Subalternity, originally developed by imprisoned Italian dissenter Antonio
Gramsci, is a political, social and economic condition in which a group is effectively
shut out of active participation in society, with no clear unity or active engagement in
resistance to hegemonic structures that control discursive direction and deploy
oppressive control over language and accumulation of social power. In his Prison
Notebooks, written while he was incarcerated, Gramsci argues that those resisting
Fascism under Mussolini ‘[were] incapable of uniting the people around itself, and
this was the cause of its defeats and the interruptions in its development’. 2 The
condition of subalternity is only broken, Gramsci continues, when a ‘permanent’
victory is won – anything less is operating under the hegemonic oppression
controlled by the discursively embedded ruling class. 3 Perhaps the most important
insight Gramsci developed is the understanding of the consciousness of the
subaltern class, or rather, the consciousness that struggles to unify and transcend
the master-slave paradigm maintained by social hegemony. 4
It is this consciousness that catalysed the Subaltern Studies Collective in the
1980s. This group, composed mainly of Indian and South Asian scholars, was
frustrated at the theoretical (and Eurocentric) framing of hegemony and post-colonial
narratives. The subaltern, according to Ranajit Guha, is ‘a name for the general
attitude of subordination in South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of
Victoria Morckel, “Why the Flint, Michigan, USA Water Crisis is an Urban Planning Failure,” Cities,
62 (2017): 24.
2
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Electric Book Company, Ltd.,
1999), 204.
3
Ibid., 207.
4
Ibid., 132.
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