Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Post-Contemporary Interventions) - Hardcover

Beverley, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822323826 ISBN 13: 9780822323822

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

The term “subalternity” refers to a condition of subordination brought about by colonization or other forms of economic, social, racial, linguistic, and/or cultural dominance. Subaltern studies is, therefore, a study of power. Who has it and who does not. Who is gaining it and who is losing it. Power is intimately related to questions of representation—to which representations have cognitive authority and can secure hegemony and which do not and cannot. In this book John Beverley examines the relationship between subalternity and representation by analyzing the ways in which that relationship has been played out in the domain of Latin American studies.

Dismissed by some as simply another new fashion in the critique of culture and by others as a postmarxist heresy, subaltern studies began with the work of Ranajit Guha and the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective in the 1980s. Beverley’s focus on Latin America, however, is evidence of the growing province of this field. In assessing subaltern studies’ purposes and methods, the potential dangers it presents, and its interactions with deconstruction, poststructuralism, cultural studies, Marxism, and political theory, Beverley builds his discussion around a single, provocative question: How can academic knowledge seek to represent the subaltern when that knowledge is itself implicated in the practices that construct the subaltern as such? In his search for answers, he grapples with a number of issues, notably the 1998 debate between David Stoll and Rigoberta Menchú over her award-winning testimonial narrative, I, Rigoberta Menchú. Other topics explored include the concept of civil society, Florencia Mallon’s influential Peasant and Nation, the relationship between the Latin American “lettered city” and the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780–1783, the ideas of transculturation and hybridity in postcolonial studies and Latin American cultural studies, multiculturalism, and the relationship between populism, popular culture, and the “national-popular” in conditions of globalization.

This critique and defense of subaltern studies offers a compendium of insights into a new form of knowledge and knowledge production. It will interest those studying postcolonialism, political science, cultural studies, and Latin American culture, history, and literature.

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John Beverley is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the coauthor of Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, author of Against Literature and Una Modernidad Obsoleta: Estudios sobre el Barroco, and coeditor of The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America.

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"An excellent, compelling overview and "mise en question" of subaltern studies. At once clear and conceptually sophisticated, this book engagingly rehearses many of the basic issues, texts and problems of the field but is in no way derivative. It is an intelligent, thorough, thoughtful 'reading' of an increasingly important area of study."-- Brad Epps, Harvard University

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Subalternity and Representation

Arguments in Cultural Theory

By John Beverley

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-2382-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
Postscript, 
1 Writing in Reverse: The Subaltern and the Limits of Academic Knowledge, 
2 Transculturation and Subalternity: The "Lettered City" and the Túpac Amaru Rebellion, 
3 Our Rigoberta? I, Rigoberta Menchú, Cultural Authority, and the Problem of Subaltern Agency, 
4 Hybrid or Binary? On the Category of "the People" in Subaltern and Cultural Studies, 
5 Civil Society, Hybridity, and the "'Political' Aspect of Cultural Studies" (on Candini), 
6 Territoriality, Multiculturalism, and Hegemony: The Question of the Nation, 
Notes, 

CHAPTER 1

Writing in Reverse: The Subaltern and the Limits of Academic Knowledge

Jacques Lacan told the following story in his Seminar:

I was in my early twenties or thereabouts—and at the time, of course, being a young intellectual, I wanted desperately to get away, see something different, throw myself into something practical, something physical, in the country say, or at sea. One day, I was on a small boat, with a few people from a family of fishermen in a small port. At the time, Brittany was not as industrialized as it is now. There were no trawlers. The fisherman went out in his frail craft at his own risk. It was this risk, this danger, that I loved to share. But it wasn't all danger and excitement—there were also fine days. One day, then, as we were waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, an individual known as Petit-Jean, that's what we called him—like all his family, he died very young from tuberculosis, which at that time was a constant threat to the whole of that social class—this Petit-Jean pointed out to me something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a small can, a sardine can. It floated there in the sun, a witness to the canning industry, which we, in fact, were supposed to supply. It glittered in the sun. And Petit-Jean said to me—You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!

He found this incident highly amusing—I less so. I thought about it. Why did I find it less amusing than he? It's an interesting question.... The point of this little story, as it had occurred to my partner, the fact that he found it so funny and I less so, derives from the fact that, if I am told a story like that one, it is because I, at that moment—as I appeared to those fellows who were earning their livings with great difficulty, in the struggle with what was for them a pitiless nature—looked like nothing on earth. In short, I was rather out of place in the picture. And it was because I felt this that I was not terribly amused at hearing myself addressed in this humourous, ironical way.

I am using the figure of Lacan here to stand for the dominant subject of knowledge—the "master thinker." Lacan intended this "little story" to illustrate his theory of the relation between the subject and the visual field (it forms part of his lectures on the gaze and scopic pleasure). But it is also a story about subalternity and representation—in this case, about how the subaltern represents the dominant subject to itself, and thus unsettles that subject, in the form of a negation or displacement: "I was rather out of place in the picture."

In Ranajit Guha's succinct definition, the word subaltern is "a name for the general attribute of subordination ... whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way." "In any other way" might surely be understood to include the distinction between educated and not (or partially) educated that the apprenticeship in academic or professional knowledge confers. That is what Lacan expresses, from the other side of the subaltern/dominant split, when he says that, as a young intellectual, he wanted to "see something different"—in effect, to exchange the position of the master, alienated from the world of labor and matter, for that of the slave.

For Guha, as for Lacan, the category that defines subaltern identity or "will" is Negation. Guha's epigraph for Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency is a passage in Sanskrit from Buddhist scripture, which he translates as follows:

(Buddha to Assalayana): "What do you think about this, Assalayana? Have you heard that in Yona and Kamboja and other neighboring janapadas there are only two varnas, the master and the slave? And that having been a master one becomes a slave; having been a slave one becomes a master?"

To access the peasant rebel as a subject of history requires a corresponding epistemological inversion: "the documentation on insurgency must itself be turned upside down in order to reconstitute the insurgent's project at reversing the world" (Aspects 333). The problem is that the empirical fact of these rebellions is captured precisely in the language, and the corresponding cultural assumptions, of the elites—both native and colonial—the rebellions were directed against. Such a dependency, Guha argues, betrays a bias in the very construction of colonial and postcolonial historiography in favor of the written record and ruling classes and their agents, whose status as such is partly constituted by their mastery of literacy and writing. This bias, evident even in forms of historiography sympathetic to the insurgents, "excludes the rebel as the conscious subject of his own history and incorporates the latter as only a contingent element in another history with another subject" (Aspects 77). Thus, "the historical phenomenon of peasant insurgency meets the eye for the first time as an image framed in the prose, hence the outlook, of counter-insurgency.... Inscribed in elite discourse, it had to be read as a writing in reverse" (Aspects 333). (Lacan's story is about a kind of seeing in reverse.)

Guha means by "the prose ... of counter-insurgency" not only the record contained in the nineteenth-century colonial archive, but also the use, including the use in the present, of that archive to construct the bureaucratic and academic discourses (historical, ethnographic, literary, and so on) that purport to represent these peasant insurgencies and place them in a teleological narrative of state formation. He is concerned with the way in which "the sense of history [is] converted into an element of administrative concern" in these narratives. Since the subaltern is conceptualized and experienced in the first place as something that lacks the power of (self) representation, "by making the security of the state into the central problematic of peasant insurgency," these narratives (of perfection of the state, of lawlessness, of transitions between historical stages, of modernization) necessarily deny the peasant rebel "recognition as a subject of history in his own right even for a project that was all his own" (Aspects 3).

Guha's project is to recover or re-present the subaltern as a subject of history—"an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called rebellion"—from the welter of documentary and historiographic discourses that deny the subaltern that power of agency. In that sense, as Edward Said observes in his presentation of the work of the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group, it is a continuation of the insurgency it represents historically. But that means that subaltern...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822323826
• ISBN 13: 9780822323822
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar