Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA

ISBN-13: 9780415778329 / Angielski / Twarda / 2009 / 230 str.

Gyanendra Pandey

Opis

Deploying the provocative idea of the 'subaltern citizen', this book raises fundamental questions about subalternity and difference, dominance and subordination, in India and the United States. In contrast to other writings on subordinated and marginalized people, the essays presented here devote deliberate attention to diverse locations of subalternity: in the conditions and histories of slaves, dalits, peasants, illegal immigrants, homosexuals, schoolteachers, women of noble lineage; in the Third World and the First; in pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial times. With contributions from a diverse group of distinguished scholars, the anthology explores issues of gender and sexuality, migration, race, caste and class, education and law, culture and politics. The very juxtaposition of different bodies of scholarship serves to challenge common perceptions of inherited histories - claims to American and Indian 'exceptionalism' - and promotes a new awareness, not only of shared histories and shared struggles in the making of the modern world, but of particularities and facets of our different histories and societal conditions that are assumed as being well understood, and hence often taken for granted. Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories will be essential reading for scholars of colonial, postcolonial and subaltern studies, American studies, US and South Asian social science and history.

This book is concerned with the question of changing modes of disenfranchisement, and the historical struggles over them, in the different locations of South Asia and North America. It focuses on the question of how Americanness and Indianness, i.e. Indian and American ‘exceptionalism’, has been constructed. Investigating the roles assigned or allowed to the subordinated and the marginalized in such constructions, the chapters in this book deal with notions of the people/nation/folk and the meanings of concepts such as democracy, politics, difference and equality as articulated in philosophy, history, the media and the law. Another focus is the politics of peasants, slaves, casual labourers, women and sexual minorities in the making of the ‘modern’ state and society. In charting these histories, this book documents the continued subalternization, and the denial of full rights as citizens, to many groups in the democratic societies discussed.
Initiating a conversation across very different world areas, this book stimulates new conversations about each region, and beyond both. The juxtaposition of different bodies of scholarship and differing debates brings about a new awareness, not only of shared histories and shared struggles in the making of the modern world, but of particularities and facets of our different histories and societal conditions that are assumed as being well understood, and hence taken for granted.

Spis treści

1. Introduction: The subaltern as subaltern citizen Gyanendra Pandey  Part 1: Equal but Separate? 2. Can there be a subaltern middle class? Gyanendra Pandey  3. Race, power, and multipositionality: Examples from the lives of black schoolteachers Earl Lewis  4. Recasting the women’s question: the girl-child/woman in the colonial encounter Ruby Lal  5. Casual sex: towards a “prehistory” of gay life in Bohemian America Colin R. Johnson  Part 2: Writing the Subaltern  6. The question of a pre-history Milind Wakankar  7.  Writing ordinary lives M.S.S. Pandian  8. Subaltern city, subaltern citizens: New Orleans, urban identity, and people of African descent Leslie Harris  9. Culture/Politics: the double bind of the Indian adivasi Prathama Banerjee  Part 3: The State and the People  10. Subordination, governance and the legislative state in early colonial India Sudipta Sen  11. Subaltern immigrants: Undocumented workers and national belonging in  the United States Mary Odem  12. Could slaves enfranchise themselves? Rumours, narratives, and arenas of politics in the American South Steven Hahn 13. Democracy and subaltern citizens in India Partha Chatterjee  14. Afterword Jonathan Prude

O autorze

Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, Emory University. A founding member of the Subaltern Studies collective and editor of the Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories book series at Routledge, he is one of the leading theorists and originators of the subaltern studies approach and has published widely in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies.