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The Eternal Subaltern? History, Power, and the Ambivalent Role of Identity Politics

Presenter:

· Hanna Werner Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt (Erfurt, Germany)

Timeslot:

07/26 | 16:30-16:50 UTC+2/CEST

Abstract

More than any other ‘school’, the Subaltern Studies Collective has emphasized the importance of writing a ‘history from below’, of looking at the margins rather than the elites to understand the complex dynamics of postcolonial societies. The Marxist approach predominant in the first two volumes edited by the Collective soon came to be replaced by a (western educated) postcolonial scholarship informed by a Foucauldian reading of power/knowledge. This shift was criticized by many for its focus on western discourse creating a new ‘orientalism’ and leading to a loss of empirical significance for India. Whether such criticism is justified in individual cases or not, what remains crucial for social theory today is the positioning of the subaltern subject. Depending on the theoretical point of departure, such positioning entails very different consequences regarding the role and agency of the defined subaltern. Proponents of identity politics have emphasized the importance of strategic essentialism, of using cultural difference in order to fight against marginalization caused by the very same. These strategic essentialisms, however, often fall short of the original anti-essentialist agenda of the Collective. The essentialisation of cultural difference, whether for strategic purposes or not, always entails the risk of reducing historical subjects to mere objects of their own identity politics. The main aim of this paper, thus, is to recall the anti-essentialist agenda of Subaltern Studies, the lacing of critical historiography with ethnographic rigor, and not least to resume the conversation with (Marxist) identity critics that has been lost somewhere along the way.