7.4 Subaltern

Concept of subalternity

The term "subaltern" describes people or groups who are shut out of power structures and denied a political voice. In postcolonial theory, it's become one of the most important concepts for analyzing how colonialism created (and continues to create) hierarchies that silence certain populations. Understanding subalternity means grappling with a core question: who gets to speak, who gets heard, and whose experiences get written into history?

Gramsci's original definition

Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci coined the term "subaltern" in his Prison Notebooks (1929–1935). He used it to describe groups subordinated within a society's power hierarchy, particularly the proletariat and peasantry in Italy who lacked political representation and were excluded from the ruling class's hegemonic structures.

For Gramsci, the path forward required subaltern classes to develop their own organic intellectuals: thinkers who emerged from within subordinate groups rather than being imposed from above. These intellectuals would help build counter-hegemonic movements to challenge bourgeois cultural dominance.

Spivak's reinterpretation

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak took Gramsci's concept and reshaped it for the postcolonial context, focusing especially on marginalized groups in the Global South under British colonialism in India. Her contributions shifted the conversation in several ways:

• She rejected the idea of a unified subaltern identity, arguing that the subaltern is heterogeneous, fractured by differences of class, caste, gender, and ethnicity.
• She foregrounded gender, drawing attention to the doubly marginalized position of subaltern women who face both colonial and patriarchal oppression.
• She questioned whether Western academics could ever truly "recover" subaltern voices without distorting them through their own frameworks.

Spivak's work made subalternity a far more complex and self-critical concept than Gramsci's original formulation.

Subaltern vs. hegemony

These two concepts exist in direct opposition:

• Hegemony is the ideological and cultural dominance of the ruling class, maintained not just through force but through the consent of subordinate groups. People internalize the values and norms of the powerful as "common sense."
• The subaltern refers to those excluded from this hegemonic power. They lack the institutional platforms to make their perspectives part of the dominant narrative.

The relationship isn't static, though. Subaltern groups resist and subvert dominant ideologies through everyday practices and organized counter-hegemonic movements. The tension between hegemony and subalternity is what drives much of postcolonial analysis.

Postcolonial subaltern studies

Subaltern studies emerged as a distinct field of postcolonial scholarship in the 1980s, dedicated to writing history "from below." The field challenged Eurocentric narratives by centering the experiences of people who had been treated as footnotes in colonial and nationalist histories.

Indian Subaltern Studies group

Founded by historian Ranajit Guha in the early 1980s, this group set out to rewrite the history of colonial India from the perspective of subaltern classes. Their central argument: both colonial and nationalist historiography shared an elitist bias that ignored the agency of peasants, workers, and other marginalized populations.

Rather than portraying these groups as passive masses swept along by elite-led movements, the Subaltern Studies collective recovered evidence of autonomous resistance and political consciousness among ordinary people. Key figures include Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gyan Prakash.

Latin American Subaltern Studies group

Founded in the 1990s by scholars including John Beverley, Ileana Rodríguez, and José Rabasa, this group adapted the Indian model to Latin America's distinct histories of colonialism, neocolonialism, and revolutionary struggle. Key themes include:

• Indigenous movements and their relationship to the state
• Peasant rebellions and their political significance
• The politics of memory and testimonio (first-person testimony as a literary and political form)

The Latin American group engaged more directly with questions about revolutionary politics and the role of testimony as a form of subaltern knowledge production.

Subaltern studies in other regions

The framework has been applied well beyond South Asia and Latin America:

• Africa: Mahmood Mamdani and Achille Mbembe have analyzed colonial legacies and postcolonial power structures, examining how categories like "citizen" and "subject" were used to maintain subaltern status.
• Middle East: Saba Mahmood and Lila Abu-Lughod have studied the agency of women in Islamic societies, pushing back against Western assumptions about passivity and victimhood.
• Southeast Asia: James C. Scott's work on everyday peasant resistance in Malaysia became foundational for understanding how subaltern groups exercise agency without overt political organization.

Representation of the subaltern

The question of representation sits at the heart of subaltern studies. Can marginalized people represent themselves within systems designed to exclude them? And when outsiders attempt to speak for the subaltern, do they help or simply reproduce colonial dynamics?

Challenges of representation

Several problems recur whenever someone attempts to represent subaltern experience:

• Appropriation: Western intellectuals and institutions may claim to speak for the subaltern while actually projecting their own frameworks onto subaltern experience.
• Homogenization: Treating "the subaltern" as a single group erases the real differences of class, gender, ethnicity, and caste that shape individual experiences.
• Mediation: Any act of representation involves translation, selection, and framing. Subaltern voices are always filtered through the discourses and institutions that make them legible to wider audiences.

These challenges don't mean representation is impossible, but they demand constant self-awareness about who is speaking, for whom, and through what channels.

Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

This 1988 essay is arguably the single most important text in subaltern studies. Spivak's argument is more nuanced than it's often summarized:

• She does not claim that subaltern people are literally unable to speak or act. Rather, she argues that the subaltern cannot speak in the sense of being heard within dominant discourse. The structures of knowledge and power systematically prevent subaltern speech from registering as meaningful.
• She critiques Western intellectuals (including Foucault and Deleuze) for assuming they can transparently represent subaltern interests, when in fact their theoretical frameworks carry their own power dynamics.
• Her central example is the practice of sati (widow self-immolation) in colonial India. The subaltern woman's voice was caught between two competing narratives: the British colonial claim of "saving brown women from brown men" and the Hindu patriarchal claim that the women wanted to die. In neither case did the woman actually speak for herself.

The essay's conclusion is deliberately provocative: "The subaltern cannot speak." This doesn't counsel despair but rather demands that intellectuals confront the structural conditions that make genuine subaltern self-representation so difficult.

Subaltern voice and agency

Despite these challenges, postcolonial scholars insist on recognizing and amplifying subaltern agency. This involves:

• Recovering hidden histories through oral histories, testimonies, and archival work that bypasses official records
• Shifting perspective from seeing subaltern people as passive victims to recognizing them as active agents who negotiate, resist, and transform the conditions of their subordination
• Creating institutional space for subaltern self-representation rather than relying on elite intermediaries

The goal isn't to "give" the subaltern a voice (they already have one) but to dismantle the structures that prevent that voice from being heard.

Subaltern identity and resistance

Subaltern identity is not a fixed category you either belong to or don't. It's shaped by intersecting forces: class, gender, race, caste, geography, and the specific histories of colonialism in a given region. Similarly, subaltern resistance takes many forms, from organized movements to quiet, everyday acts of defiance.

Subaltern consciousness

Subaltern consciousness refers to how subordinate groups understand their own position in society and imagine alternatives to it. Gramsci distinguished between two kinds of knowledge:

• "Common sense": the dominant ideology that subaltern groups absorb from the ruling class, which naturalizes existing power relations
• "Good sense": the critical awareness that subaltern groups develop through their own experience, which can form the basis for resistance

Subaltern consciousness is not a fixed essence. It develops through the tension between lived experience of oppression and the ideological frameworks available to make sense of that experience.

Everyday forms of resistance

Not all resistance looks like revolution. James C. Scott's concept of "weapons of the weak" describes the subtle, everyday tactics subaltern groups use to resist domination:

• Foot-dragging and work slowdowns
• Feigned ignorance or compliance
• Pilfering and sabotage
• Gossip, rumor, and hidden transcripts (what people say when the powerful aren't listening)

These practices matter because they challenge the binary of total domination vs. open rebellion. Subaltern agency operates within the constraints of power, not just against them. People who lack the resources for organized political action still find ways to assert their interests and dignity.

Subaltern and revolutionary potential

Some theorists have gone further, seeing the subaltern as a potential agent of revolutionary transformation:

• Frantz Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) that the lumpenproletariat (the urban poor, the dispossessed) in colonial societies possessed revolutionary potential that the colonized bourgeoisie lacked, precisely because they had nothing invested in the colonial system.
• Other scholars caution against romanticizing subaltern groups as inherently revolutionary. Subaltern agency is real but also constrained, contradictory, and sometimes directed toward goals that don't align with progressive politics.

The tension between recognizing subaltern agency and avoiding its romanticization remains one of the field's ongoing debates.

Subaltern in literature and culture

Postcolonial literature and cultural production have been central sites for representing subaltern experience, challenging dominant narratives, and experimenting with forms that can capture voices traditionally excluded from literary canons.

Subaltern narratives and perspectives

Subaltern narratives are stories and testimonies from marginalized groups that have been excluded from official histories. These include:

• Slave narratives (such as Frederick Douglass's Narrative), which documented the experience of enslaved people in their own words
• Testimonios in Latin America, where individuals narrate their experience of political violence or oppression (e.g., Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú)
• Oral histories from indigenous communities, peasant movements, and other groups whose knowledge was transmitted outside written archives

These narratives don't just add missing stories to the historical record. They challenge the authority of official histories and canonical texts by offering counter-hegemonic perspectives on the past and present.

Subaltern as a literary trope

The subaltern has become a recurring figure in postcolonial literature, representing the marginalized subject who resists or subverts the dominant order. Some examples:

• The "coolie" or indentured laborer in Caribbean literature
• The "mestiza" or mixed-race woman in Chicana literature (as theorized by Gloria Anzaldúa)
• The "Dalit" or formerly "untouchable" figure in Indian literature

These figures often function as more than individual characters. They serve as entry points for exploring broader structures of colonialism, racism, caste oppression, and gendered violence.

Subaltern and popular culture

Subaltern expression also operates through popular culture, where marginalized communities create, reclaim, and transform cultural forms:

• Reggae in the Caribbean drew on Rastafarian spirituality and anti-colonial politics
• Hip-hop in the United States emerged from Black and Latino communities as a form of storytelling, protest, and cultural assertion
• Bollywood in India, while often reinforcing dominant norms, has also served as a space where subaltern aspirations and identities find expression

Subaltern popular culture frequently involves the subversion of dominant cultural forms and the creation of hybrid forms that express identities and aspirations not represented in mainstream culture. At the same time, these forms are always at risk of being co-opted and commercialized by the very power structures they challenge.

Critiques and limitations

Subaltern studies has been enormously influential, but it has also attracted serious critiques. Engaging with these critiques is part of understanding the field, not a reason to dismiss it.

Essentialism and homogenization

Critics argue that subaltern studies sometimes treats "the subaltern" as a unified category, flattening the real diversity of experiences within marginalized populations. There's also a risk of romanticizing subaltern resistance as inherently authentic or pure, which ironically reproduces colonial-era stereotypes (the "noble savage," the "revolutionary masses"). A more rigorous approach recognizes that subaltern identity is always intersectional, contextual, and internally differentiated.

Neglect of gender and intersectionality

Feminist scholars have pointed out that early subaltern studies focused heavily on class and colonialism while underplaying gender. The experiences of subaltern women, who face overlapping oppressions (colonial, patriarchal, caste-based, racial), were often treated as secondary. Spivak's work addressed this gap, but the critique pushed the field toward a more fully intersectional framework that accounts for how multiple forms of marginalization interact.

Subaltern studies and Western academia

There's an uncomfortable irony at the heart of subaltern studies: a field dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices is largely housed in elite Western universities. Critics raise several concerns:

• The institutionalization of subaltern studies may depoliticize the struggles it claims to represent, turning lived resistance into academic theory.
• Subaltern communities themselves are rarely the primary audience for, or participants in, the scholarship produced about them.
• The field risks reproducing the very power relations it critiques if it doesn't actively involve subaltern communities in knowledge production.

This critique calls for more reflexive, collaborative approaches that move beyond studying about the subaltern toward working with subaltern communities.

Contemporary relevance

Subaltern studies continues to offer useful analytical tools for understanding marginalization and resistance in the present, even as the specific conditions it addresses have shifted.

Subaltern in the age of globalization

Globalization has reshaped subalternity in significant ways. Neoliberal economic policies and new forms of imperialism have intensified the marginalization of groups like migrant workers, refugees, and indigenous peoples facing resource extraction on their lands. At the same time, globalization has enabled new forms of subaltern solidarity: transnational advocacy networks, digital activism, and cross-border social movements connect subaltern struggles that were previously isolated from one another.

Subaltern and new social movements

Movements like the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and indigenous land defense movements can all be analyzed through a subaltern studies lens. These movements share several features relevant to the field:

• They mobilize identities and grievances rooted in structural marginalization
• They create new forms of knowledge and political practice (horizontalism, prefigurative politics, intersectional solidarity)
• They raise the same questions about representation, voice, and co-optation that subaltern studies has always grappled with

Rethinking the subaltern today

The concept of the subaltern remains productive precisely because the conditions it describes persist. But applying it today requires updating the framework:

• A more intersectional understanding of how class, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and citizenship status interact to produce subalternity
• A more transnational perspective that traces how global economic and political systems create subaltern populations across borders
• A more reflexive practice among scholars, demanding honest engagement with the politics of who produces knowledge about whom and for what purpose

The enduring value of subaltern studies lies not in providing final answers but in insisting on a set of questions that dominant frameworks tend to ignore: whose voice is missing, why is it missing, and what would it take to change that?