{"id":90,"date":"2015-02-18T04:47:04","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T04:47:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iilsindia.com\/blogs\/?p=90"},"modified":"2023-10-28T13:25:15","modified_gmt":"2023-10-28T07:55:15","slug":"subaltern-studies-discourse-and-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iilsindia.com\/blogs\/subaltern-studies-discourse-and-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"Subaltern Studies: Discourse and Practice."},"content":{"rendered":"

The term Subaltern<\/em> as an allusion to the works of Antonio Gramsci, a renowned Marxist who is more popularly known for his Prison Notebooks<\/em><\/strong>, refers to any person or group of inferior rank whether because of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or religion. Gramsci used the term to question the received Marxist emphasis on the urban proletariat and economy arguing that the questions of culture and consciousness needed to taken seriously. Influenced by the works of Foucault, subalterns pursue a consistent interest in staging the violence and narrativising the construction of crime; moreover, using the tools of narratology, the new historiography has given attention to plot, character, authority, language, voice and in reconstructing on the basis of fragment available to him, a family \u2018tragedy\u2019 and \u2018death\u2019 out of what had been archived as \u2018crime\u2019 and \u2018murder\u2019. Drawing on the structuralist narratology, Barthesian semiology and Foucauldian discourse ananlysis, some early subaltern works interrogated the rhetorical and linguistic strategies employed by those in power, such as Ranajit Guha\u2019s The Prose of Counter Insurgency<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Veering between the defensive and corrective, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak\u2019s Subaltern Studies: Deconsctructing Historiography<\/em><\/strong> makes the basic premise for subalterns:<\/p>\n

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  1. Subaltern studies breaks out of the standard Marxist modes of productive narrative changing the plot under the rubric of conflation and hence not of transition.<\/li>\n
  2. Subaltern historians perceive their task as making a theory of consciousness.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n