I would like to say something about style. Readers will find that I rely a certain amount on direct quotations of passages—sometimes long ones—from the texts I subject to critique. As a reader, I find it distracting, choppy, even annoying. Normally I avoid it as much as possible, but I resort to it here in order to preempt charges of misrepresentation. I want the reader to be able to judge the merits of my arguments about key texts, and so I reproduce the relevant passages in full. But I also provide summaries for readers whose eyes, like mine, tend to glaze over in such circumstances.
However, there is another reason for this strategy. Several of the main theorists bury their arguments under a dense thicket of jargon, or present them so cryptically that the meaning is hard to nail down. The critic is therefore left with little choice but to interpret them to as best she can. Naturally this injects uncertainty into the argument. Here, again, the best antidote is to let the reader see the relevant texts so that she may form her own judgment about my rendering of them. No doubt there remains an element of interpretation in the task, but this is the case even when one deals with texts of exemplary clarity.
1 Some notable collections on this phenomenon include James W. Cook, Lawrence B. Glickman, and Michael O’Malley, The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present, and Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); George Steinmetz, State/Culture: State Formation after the Cultural Turn (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); an interesting and somewhat personal account is found in Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).
2 Robert J. C. Young, “Editorial,” Interventions 1:1 (1998), 4. Emphasis added.
3 John McLeod, “Introduction,” in McLeod, ed., The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies (London: Routledge, 2007). 6.
4 Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 6.
5 See Eagleton’s characteristically bracing discussion of this phenomenon in ibid., chaps. 1–4.
6 Young, Editorial, 5.
7 Some notable engagements on the literary and cultural front are Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992); Neil Lazarus, Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004); Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). The metatheoretical commitments of postcolonial theorists are a more complicated issue, since their professed views do not always jibe with their actual practice. For a critique of the boilerplate epistemology, see Christopher Norris, Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Critique of Cultural Relativism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
8 The best sources for the story of Subaltern Studies are the sketches drawn by members of the collective. See Ranajit Guha, “Introduction,” Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Sumit Sarkar, “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies,” in Sarkar, Writing Social History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 82–108; Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” Nepantla: Views from South 1:1 (2000), 9–32. See also David Ludden, “A Brief History of Subalternity,” in Ludden, ed., Reading Subaltern Studies (London: Anthem Press, 2002), 1–39, and the introduction to Vinayak Chaturvedi’s collection Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000).
9 This group included Sumit Sarkar, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman, Gyanendra Pandey, and Dipesh Chakrabarty.
10 See Partha Chatterjee, “A Brief History of Subaltern Studies,” in Chatterjee, Empire and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 289–301; Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” 14.
11 See Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies I: Writings on South Asian History & Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), 1–8.
12 For examples, see Suneet Chopra, “Missing Correct Perspective,” Social Scientist 10:8 (Aug. 1982), 55–63; Sangeeta Singh et al., “Subaltern Studies II: A Review Article,” Social Scientist 12:10 (Oct. 1984), 3–51.
13 For examples of such responses, see Partha Chatterjee, “More on Modes of Power,” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies II (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
14 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies IV (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), 330–63.
15 Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Press, 1986); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
16 Two examples of this turn are Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Ajay Skaria, Hybrid Histories: Forests. Frontiers, and Wildness in Western India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999).
17 It is interesting that South African historiography was moving in a direction largely parallel with that of India in the 1980s, with a strong turn to history from below and a kind of Gramscian Marxism. Key to this development were the works of Charles van Onselen, Belinda Bozzoli, Shula Marks, Dan O’Meara and others. The intellectual history is very ably charted by Martin J. Murray in “The Triumph of Marxist Approaches in South African Social and Labour History,” The Journal of Asian and African Studies 23:1–2 (1988), 79–101. But these works never received the same attention in broader circles as did their Indian counterparts.
18 Ronald Inden, “Orientalist Constructions of South Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 20:3 (1986), 445. Emphasis added. Better late than never, one might say …
19 See the symposium in the American Historical Review 99:4 (Dec. 1994), with essays by Gyan Prakash, Florencia Mallon, and Frederick Cooper.
20 Gyan Prakash, After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); David Ludden, Reading Subaltern Studies: Critical History, Contested Meaning and the Globalisation of South Asia (Delhi : Permanent Black, 2001); Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000).
21 Representative essays from this genre are collected in Ileana Rodríguez, ed., The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
22 This was Neplanta: Views from the South. Apparently the journal was only in print from 2000 to 2003.
23 Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” republished as “A Small History of Subaltern Studies,” in Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3–19.
24 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 15.
25 Ranajit Guha refers to the universalization of capital, sometimes as a “tendency”, other times as a “drive.” See Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 16, 19, 65, 102.
26 Guha, quoted in Chakrabarty,
