Subaltern

Since entering the critical lexicon, subaltern has ironically returned to its etymological roots. The word derives from the Latin alternus (alternate) and the prefix sub (under). In the language of the late empire, subalternus had emerged in military usage to define mid-level officers, and was incorporated into modern British military discourse. The principle meaning as defined by the OED has been generalized to “of inferior rank”; interestingly, in the study of logic, the term refers to a concept as “particular, not universal”, an interpretation Spivak was to further elaborate. Importantly, within grammatical terms, subaltern is both a noun – an entity representing itself – and an adjective – connoting an ontological link with an Other which defines it.

Most academics – principally the notorious Kindly Ones of Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin – locate the incorporation of subaltern into the critical lexicon within the work of Antonio Gramsci in reference to his studies, beginning in the mid-1930s, of Italian social history. He argued for the importance of the histories of those groups who remained outside of elite political structures whose hegemonic position were constituted a priori as the subjects of and for history. The politically disenfranchised, Gramsci argued, were themselves important historiographical subjects, whose cultures and political motivations (conscious or not) were as influential as those of the elite few. Their history could not be as easily traced, especially using the narrative methodology of conventional historical discourse which limited analysis to the loci of power. The subordinate are (anti)subjects in the sense that their historical trace is sporadic and sometimes contradictory, as their agency and in particular their means of self-representation is by definition circumscribed by those “in” power.

Subaltern entered post-colonial and literary criticism by means of the Subaltern Studies group of South Asian historians, and more principally by Gayatri Spivak who contributed to their publishings. The group’s examination of the subaltern follows Gramsci in believing that academicism was itself tied to hegemonic elitism: “the nominating authority is none other than an ideology for which the life of the state is all there is to history” (Guha 1), with obvious consequences to concepts of nationality and national identity. Spivak sought to problematize subaltern identity in “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which challenged the commitment of the Subaltern Studies group to the capacity of the subaltern subject for self-representation. Citing Foucault, Spivak in “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern” posits the discourse – and thus the means for the actualization of self-identity – of the subaltern as inherently dependent on their subject-position in relation to the hegemonic localization of power: “I remain troubled by anything that claims to have nothing to do with its opposition” (92-3). In the Foucauldian sense, the ‘statements’ of the subaltern – the means by which the subaltern understands its own position – are contained within the power-locus of the elite. Such ‘énonciations’ in discourse by the subaltern are not autonomous from the political project which reinforces hegemonic power structures, but alternately they remain ‘assigned’ within its boundaries. Discourse within conventional terms stemming from Enlightenment rationality requires a homogenous and universalized subject-position from which the ‘function of existence’ of language would allow understanding amongst all the participants. The subaltern subject is ontologically dislocalized and cannot be effectively collectivized, and is therefore incapable of truly authentic self-representation. Shetty and Bellamy further problematize the subaltern by engendering it, as Spivak herself had done in the third and fourth sections of “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, emphasizing the numerous locations where power (or lack thereof) and capacity for representation intersect. The subaltern subject, multitudinous and inherently duplicitous to itself, cannot be condensed to a single experience/event of self-representation, and accordingly Spivak ends her article with the terse statement: “the subaltern cannot speak” (104).

The violence experienced by the subaltern by their lack of self-representability is perhaps not solely the epistemic violence of the act of institutionalized silencing, but also an archival violence in the sense Derrida makes in Archive Fever. The disharmony between a subject’s pragmatic experience and their means for (self) representation is the fracture between memory and institutionalization – itself the process of creating an archive, which is both the historical (and historiographical) trace as well as the codification of law, discourse, and behavioural norms. The inability for self-representation by the subaltern is precisely the site of archival violence as “the place of originary and structural breakdown” and thus the violation of “that which is remembered” (Derrida 14) by elite discourse. In a very real sense the subaltern subject is not textually locatable within the archive of elite discourse, which is itself appropriated (consciously or not) into discourse by the marginalized. Consequently the subaltern is always-already defined as a silenced entity within its own discourse.


Works Cited

Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1996.

Guha, Ranajit. “The Small Voice of History”. Subaltern Studies IX. Ed. Shahid Amin & Dipesh Chakrabarty. Delhi: Oxford U Press: 1996.

Shetty, Sandhya and Elizabeth Bellamy. “Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever”. Diacritics 30.1 (2000): 25-48.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Stanadayini’”. Subaltern Studies V. Ed. Ranajit Guha. New York: Oxford U Press, 1987.

–––– “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. English 3QQ3 coursepack, 1999. Ed. Dan Coleman. 401-23.