class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way’. 5 This subaltern was developed and maintained, these academics argued, in British colonisation, during which the production and dissemination of Indian / South Asian history was controlled by both British administrators and Indian elites working as knowledge agents of the colonising force. This control over the historiography not only silenced voices of dissent and trajectories of dominated classes, it also failed to account for the contributions and struggles of these classes. Ultimately, it created a path by which Indian national identity could never be realised outside of its colonial mould, and could never be articulated, comprehensively, by the Indian bourgeoisie. 6 In other words, Indian history is eternalised through the colonial legacy, and even during attempts to interrupt this pattern, historical excavations reveal reproductions of the same types of knowledge.
This theoretical examination of the subaltern is further, and more closely complicated with the introduction of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’ s seminal work. In her analysis of how the subaltern is situated, her focus moves in narrowly on the Indian female:‘ in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’. 7 Her conclusion that‘ the subaltern cannot speak […] representation has not withered away,’ 8 is not a desperate longing; rather it is a deep call to action. However, the call is not to speak for, speak with, or interpret, but rather to find pathways to let the subaltern speak for itself. 9 While Spivak takes issue with Eurocentric interpretations of how hegemony functions, this paper argues that a First World subaltern – specifically in Flint – is developing now. This could be described as a regression of the originally Eurocentric theory of subalternity, as certain First World spaces, such as Flint, are evolving into near-reproductions of occupied colonial spaces, wherein clear classes emerge as hegemonic and subordinate – and where economic, social and political categorisation reduces the dominated communities not merely to subclasses, but to disposable classes.
5 Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies, Volume VII( Noida: OUP India, 1994), 103. 6 El Habib Louai,“ Retracing the Concept of the Subaltern from Gramsci to Spivak: Historical
Developments and New Applications,” African Journal of History and Culture 4( 2012): 6. 7 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,“ Can The Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg( Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 275. 8 Ibid., 308.
9 Louai,“ Retracing the Concept,” 7.
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