Subaltern (postcolonialism)

Subaltern (postcolonialism)

In the critical fields of post-colonialism, the term subaltern identifies and describes the man, the woman, and the social group who is socially, politically, and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure of the colony and of the colonial Mother Country. In describing “history told from below”, the term subaltern derived from the cultural hegemony work of Antonio Gramsci, which identified the social groups who are excluded from a society’s established structures for political representation, the means by which people have a voice in their society.

The usage and the application of the terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the field of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group, a collection of South Asian historians who explored the political-actor role of the men and women who are the mass population — rather than the political roles of the social and economic élites — in the history of South Asia. In the 1970s, the application of subaltern began to denote the colonized peoples of the South Asian Subcontinent, and described a new perspective of the history of an imperial colony, told from the point of view of the colonized man and woman, rather than from the points of view of the colonizers; in which respect, Marxist historians already had been investigating colonial history told from the perspective of the proletariat. In the 1980s, the scope of enquiry of Subaltern Studies was applied as an “intervention in South Asian historiography”.

Yet, as a method of intellectual discourse, the concept of the subaltern occasionally proved culturally problematic, because it remained a Eurocentric method of historical enquiry when studying the non–Western peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. From having originated as an historical-research model for studying the colonial experience of South Asian peoples, the applicability of the techniques of subaltern studies transformed a model of intellectual discourse into a method of “vigorous post-colonial critique”. The intellectual efficacy of the term “Subaltern” eased its adaptation and adoption to the methods of investigation in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, human geography, and literature.