“At a Moment of Danger”: Subaltern Studies Historiography ...Subaltern Studies Historiography as a Critique of the Postcolonial Condition1 Grant Farred Introduction The historical

“At a Moment of Danger”: Subaltern Studies Historiography as

a Critique of the Postcolonial Condition1

Grant Farred

Introduction

The historical narrative . . . reveals to us a world thatis putatively “finished,” done with, over, yet not dis-solved, not falling apart.

—Hayden White, The Content of the Form (21)

In the world of Anglophone politics, India occupies a signal posi-tion. It came to postcolonialism first. Almost a century and a halfafter the Caribbean’s Haiti had achieved independence fromFrance and all the major Latin American countries had thrown offthe shackles of Spanish (and, in the case of Brazil, Portuguese)colonialism, India won its sovereignty from Britain. BecauseIndian independence was achieved, in anti-colonial terms, bothrelatively late and relatively early, India has come to symbolizecontemporary postcoloniality. More than a century after the bare-ly lettered slave Toussaint L’ Ouverture led the sans coulottes tofreedom after some bloody battles against the French, MahatmaGandhi inaugurated a series of passive resistance campaigns incolonial South Africa protesting the salt tax levied against SouthAsians in the province of Natal. Gandhi’s non-violent strategydefined, as it reached its apogetic moment in the struggle againstthe Raj, the twentieth-century anti-colonial movement. Cast within the broader postcolonial paradigm, India historically

represents the “second wave” (or post-World War II period) of anti-colonialist movements that produced the contemporary ThirdWorld, a development that has (for a complex of reasons that rangefrom the highly Anglophone nature of postcolonial theory to thecontemporaneity of the Indian experience) displaced the “firstwave”—with the exception of the Haitian revolution—andassigned it a subordinate theoretical and historical position.

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However, India’s elevated postcolonial position is not only the con-sequence of its “originality,” i.e., the historic effect of being the firstpast the independence post; it can also be attributed to the factthat, together with the Cold War (and its end in 1990), the anti-colonial movement was the most important socio-historical devel-opment in the second half of the twentieth century. Once India and Pakistan freed themselves from British rule, the

drive for independence rapidly gained pace. Among the subjectcommunities, there was a strong desire to become post-colonial asblack and brown peoples in Africa and the Caribbean set aboutexpelling their European colonizers, enfranchising their populace,and taking on the task of governing themselves. The colonizedwere committed to taking their place as equals in the comity ofnations after centuries of subjugation, exploitation, and degrada-tion. Postcolonialism stands as a historic event because it trans-formed relations between the European colonial rulers and theirnow liberated subjects and, in the process, reconfigured globalpolitics. Having liberated themselves politically, postcolonialistdiscourse enabled the historically oppressed to narrativize and, fre-quently, re-narrativize their own past (in Hayden White’s sense ofthe “historical narrative” as an infinitely incomplete, transformativeproject [21]) and to script their own futures. Bearing the indeliblemarks of colonization, postcolonial peoples were, for the first time,free to historicize their subjectivity.Within a few short years of Indian independence, colonies in

Francophone and Anglophone Africa and the Caribbean achievedstatehood. Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Trinidad and Tobago, andKenya were all independent by the mid-1960s. By 1980, whenZimbabwe liberated itself from Ian Smith’s white minority ruleknown as “UDI” (a unilateral declaration of independence by agovernment that was recognized neither by “Rhodesia’s” ex-colo-nial master, Britain, nor the international community, because of itsracist policies), only apartheid South Africa and South African-con-trolled Namibia (configured as the “province” of South-WestAfrica) had not achieved sovereignty. For historically explicablereasons, anti-colonialism sustained the existence of subjugatedcommunities the Third World over even as the failures of the post-colonial condition were becoming increasingly apparent. From C.L. R. James’s critiques of the legislative excesses of KwameNkrumah’s new postcolonial government in Ghana, to the NaxaliteRebellion against the continued impoverishment of the peasants inand around the province of Bengal, India, to the brutal fate ofGuyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney at the hands ofForbes Burnham’s government, the shortcomings of the postcolo-nial nation-state were everywhere in evidence by the end of the1970s.Within a decade after Zimbabwe, a scant forty years after

Jawaharlal Nehru became India’s first postcolonial prime ministerand the Third World’s preeminent statesman, Sam Nujoma becameNamibia’s new leader and Nelson Mandela was en route to achiev-ing Mahatma-like status after his release from a twenty-seven year

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incarceration in apartheid’s gaols. Mandela’s release from prisonwas, of course, secured by a historic combination of Gandhi’ssatyagraha philosophy (the largely—but not exclusively—peacefulDefiance Campaign of the 1950s) and Toussaint’s more insurrec-tionary mode of resistance (the multi-pronged strategy of strikes,protest, and violent resistance intent on rendering apartheid socie-ty “ungovernable” in the 1980s).The process of inscribing postcoloniality, of writing itself as both

anti- and postcolonial, is crucial to India’s standing as singular and“originary” Third World nation. From the famous “Mutiny” of 1857to independence in 1947, Indian historiography—whether in theform of journalistic coverage of anti-colonial activities in metro-politan and local newspapers from the nineteenth century on, orthe articulation of native resistance in fiction, autobiographies, orscholarly journals—has played a key role in establishing thenation’s sovereignty as a groundbreaking event. Because of India’ssignal role in the postcolonial world, its status as the earlyNehruvian leader of the Non-Aligned movement (erudite, wellversed in the discourse of the metropolis, but deftly negotiating aposition that defied easy alliance to either the Cold War East orWest and yet possessing none of the withdrawal from ideologicalconflict associated with neutrality), it is historically appropriate thatthe first serious disenchantments with the newly independent ThirdWorld should have found articulation “in”—or, rather, from—theSubcontinent. This critique of postcoloniality was offered by a collective of

South Asian historians, the Subaltern Studies School, under theleadership of Ranajit Guha, a scholar working not from withinIndia but Australia after he had spent time teaching at SussexUniversity in England. Writing back to South Asia about Indian his-toriography from the Antipodean diaspora after a deep immersionin the Cultural Studies milieu of New Left Britain, Guha’s work rep-resents a crucial engagement with what he labels the “disillusion-ment caused by failed possibilities” (Guha 1997, xii). Producedfrom an enabling dislocation and emphasizing the value of writingfrom beyond the context of origin and psycho-political investment,Guha’s “disillusionment” marks, in the narrow sense, a disagree-ment with and a rewriting of “elitist” Indian historiography, the cor-nerstone of his critique of South Asian historians. In the stronglyworded terms of his seminal 1982 essay “On Some Aspects of theHistoriography of Colonial India,” Guha writes,

The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a longtime been dominated by elitism—colonialist elitismand bourgeois-nationalist elitism. Both originated asthe ideological product of British rule in India, but havesurvived the transfer of power and been assimilated toneo-colonialist and neo-nationalist forms of discoursein Britain and India respectively (Guha 1997, 37).

Within Guha’s historiographical paradigm, the “failed possibili-

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ties” and the “neo-nationalist forms of discourse” are both effectsof the postcolonial bourgeoisie. Ideologically and intellectuallyindigent, the comprador class served only elite interests, from theways in which they organized the postcolonial state apparatus totheir accounts of postcolonial history. However, Guha’s ideological disenchantments resonate beyond

the narrow purview of South Asian coloniality. Within the genre ofpostcolonial historiography, the work of Subaltern Studies is salientbecause it is so symptomatic of the postcolonial condition.Subaltern historiography exceeds itself because it represents thefirst intellectually organized, cohesive, and structured critique ofand intervention into the growing failures of the postcolonialnation-state. Guha’s attack on Indian historiography is not, toamend Gayatri Spivak’s terms, “fully containable” to the SouthAsian context because it points “askew from its received signifiers”(Spivak 11). “Elite” bourgeois historiography is not solely the expe-rience of India or Pakistan; it is, regrettably, all too normative andfamiliar to Left and Subaltern communities from New Delhi toNairobi. Writing at a specific conjuncture, the 1975-77 Emergencyyears in which Indira Gandhi ruled India through the suspension ofdemocracy, Guha’s critique nevertheless signifies beyond itselfinto—and onto—the larger postcolonial predicament. By uninten-tionally producing a mode of historiography that would prove cru-cial to other (anti-) postcolonial critics, the Subaltern historiansgave voice to the dissatisfactions and struggles of postcolonial con-stituencies outside of their own locale.

In its effort to reject “elitist” accounts of South Asia’s anti-colo-nial past in favor of the Gramscian practice of “history from below,”Subaltern historiography ironically achieved the kind of statusafforded Indian independence some three decades earlier. Indiacame to Anglophone postcolonialism first, and Indian historiogra-phy stands as the first “school”—a self-consciously assembledgroup of scholars working on and toward a common project—ofhistoriography that systematically critiqued the history of the post-colonial nation-state. This form of Subaltern school intellectualpraxis became the model for radical thinkers throughout the post-colonial world who were at odds with their own, and other, post-colonial, bourgeois-nationalists. However, Subaltern historiogra-phy assumed, unlike Indian sovereignty, a salience in all spheres ofthe postcolonial world; in fact, radical Latin American historiansborrowed directly from their Indian counterparts to found theirequivalent of the Subaltern School in South America.2The projection of Guha’s critique girds this essay. The Subaltern

school’s model of historiography is read in terms of its conceptualinfluence: the work of the Indian historians had a tremendousimpact on other postcolonial contexts. Guha and his colleagueswrote for and about the Indian experience of colonialism and post-colonialism, but their historiography, because of the larger condi-tion of postcolonial “failure,” captured the uneasy, sometimes tur-bulent spirit of the postcolonial times. As this essay will show,Subaltern dissatisfactions with India’s various national move-


ments—in its anti-imperial and postcolonial guises—both precedeand postdate Guha’s critiques in “On Some Aspects of theHistoriography of Colonial India.” The pervading “disillusionment”and sense of “failed possibilities” that motivate Guha’s attack onMrs. Gandhi’s usurpation of power during the Emergency will bemore broadly conceived here as an indictment of the entire post-colonial movement. Following Guha’s dissatisfaction with the dominant narratives of

the colonialist, neo-colonialist, and neo-nationalist variety, thisessay explores how Subaltern School historiography facilitates orcompels a critical engagement with the postcolonial condition ofthe 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. What are the ideological effects ofpostcolonialism experienced as “neo-nationalist” repression? Howdoes the Subaltern historians’ critique of Indira Gandhi, or, for thatmatter, the novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s rebuke of Jomo Kenyatta’srule in Kenya (in the provocatively titled Petals of Blood3, or theIndo-Trinidadian dispute with Eric Williams, address itself to thecondition of postcolonial abjection and the failure(s) of the inde-pendent Third World? And how, in the process of reading Subalternhistoriography as symptomatic of the postcolonial predicament,does textual exchange take place among these various locales anddiscourses? How does South Asian Subaltern historiography speakto, of, and (more pertinently) for, the experience of the Sub-Saharanor Latin American underclass? How does the discourse ofSubalterneity circulate? What are its modalities of exchange? Whatpolitical possibilities do these intellectual trade routes createamong Subalterns the Third or metropolitan world over?At stake for the Subaltern School and all other critics of post-

coloniality’s failures (which is how Ngugi’s works about Kenya orLakshmi Persaud’s and Salman Rushdie’s novels about theCaribbean and the Asian subcontinent may be read) is the way inwhich official historiography is opened up to new interrogations.Resistance to “officiality” is possible because the historical render-ing of the postcolonial state is always, as White reminds us, anaporetic ascription—an irresolvable “theoretical truth” that allowsfor contradictory possibilities and interpretations (21). The post-and anti-colonial project is at once imagined as an accomplished,unalterable fact (“‘putatively’ finished” [Ibid.]), and in process,however dissolute the process may be (“not yet dissolved, notfalling apart” [Ibid.]). Because of the gaps between the contesting theoretical truths of

the postcolonial state, Subaltern historiography—the under- orunacknowledged ideological locale, the history that the hegemon-ic nation cannot or will not be allowed public articulation—becomes the interstitial space in which the nation’s past, its found-ing, and its complex present can be subjected to a scrutiny thatemerges “from below.” It is through this mode of historiographythat the nation can be probed, exposed to a new historical light,and read anew. That tenuous territory between the competingtruths that Subaltern historiography opens up can be mined bypostcolonial critics and made to yield different, un-official histories

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that contain a disruptive veracity. Once transfigured, these inter-stitial findings can be transcribed into a new historiographical dis-course, one that simultaneously challenges the official account andlays bare the erasure (in the sense of concealing through revealing,inadequately) of the postcolonial state’s history.It is into this breach of partial dissolution and partial revelation

that the Subaltern historians step. Writing against the repressive,anti-democratic backdrop of the Emergency and with the 1967Maoist rebellion in Naxalbari (an event which will be vital to thereading of Subalterneity in this essay) still fresh in their thinking,Guha and his colleagues recognize both the fragility of the post-colonial state (its critics, its very populace, can only be silencedand controlled by extraordinary, undemocratic measure) and itsresoluteness (it is still functional; it may be under threat but it willnot be “dissolved” nor is it “falling apart”). The uncertain, splitcondition of the postcolonial state compels thinkers such as theSubalterns into political ambivalence, a moment in which thenation’s vulnerability both enables and warns against—evenimplicitly threatens—opposition as it lurches resolutely or uncer-tainly toward authoritarianism. In order to address their historic postcolonial aporia, the

Subaltern thinkers invoke that other key moment of subcontinentalcrisis: the Raj, when historical accounting was interstitially poisedbetween an opaque colonialist confidence in its capacity to quellrebellion and quash resistance, in any mode, irrespective of its sizeor organizational capability—in effect, a largely unarticulated cog-nition that British rule was already “‘putatively’ done with.” Thepostcolonial aporia demands that the Subalterns address them-selves to the urgency of the present through a reconsidered analy-sis of the official historical portrait of the colonial past. So entan-gled are these various modalities and temporalities that, to invokeWalter Benjamin’s critique of anti-materialist history as being com-posed of “homogenous, empty time,” there is something “homoge-nous” and “heterogenous” (so superimposed and intertwined arethe different epochs), yet also “empty” and excessively full (evacu-ated of and impacted with temporally specific meaning as it is)concerning the “time” of Subaltern intervention into India’s post-colonial crisis (260). Through the Subalterns, the past is put towork against the conditions of the present. The postcolonial stateis critiqued for where it is because of how it accounts for where itcame from, for how it made (represents and inscribes) and is mak-ing (principally by not allowing for a critical counter-narrative of)its history.

Subalterneity as Anti-Postcoloniality.

Historical narration without analysis is trivial, historicalanalysis without narration is incomplete.

—Peter Gay, Style In History (189).

Although the Subaltern School came into epistemological being


in Delhi in 1982 with the publication of the first volume ofSubaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, itsintellectual and ideological roots can be more accurately traced to1950s Calcutta. It is, however, a complicated temporal and geo-graphical trajectory. The path from Calcutta to Delhi leads fromnewly independent India’s province of Bengal to nineteenth centu-ry English historiography as well as wending its way through agrar-ian southern Italy and the newly industrialized city of Turin, innorthern Italy, before, some thirty years later, addressing itself to thenineteenth century Raj and finding its voice in the postcolonialIndian capital. Guha’s Subaltern School drew on the work of the1950s anti-Stalinist British Marxist historians and the historio-graphical paradigm developed by the Italian Marxist Gramsci dur-ing Mussolini’s Fascism. Thus, Subaltern School historiographyrepresents not only a circuitous conceptual journey, but also acomplex intellectual hybrid melded out of the peripheral (India),the metropolitan (Britain), and the semi-peripheral (Italy and theMediterranean). Knowledge, methodology, praxis, and ideologyare produced out of a complex exchange between these varioussites and cities. While the context of the Asian subcontinent wasfundamental to the work of the Subaltern historians, their histori-ography emerged out of a broader process: the adapting of para-digms, the borrowing of concepts, and the adjusting and translat-ing of modes of thinking from one geographical and philosophicallocale to another. Conceived in intellectual hybridity, it is appro-priate—and perhaps inevitable—that Subaltern historiographyshould have an application outside of its specific geographical con-text and influence postcolonial thinking across linguistic and his-torical (Anglo- versus Luso- or Hispanophone) boundaries.While the Subalterns would resonate beyond the Asian subcon-

tinent into the broader postcolonial world from the 1980s on, theirwork was founded in close links to 1950s Left British historiogra-phy. It was in this decade that the British New Left historians, ledby the Reasoner collective of E. P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, andChristopher Hill, were forging a tradition of writing “history frombelow.” Following Gramsci, who argues that the “history ofSubaltern groups is necessarily fragmented and episodic” (54), theEnglish historians (Thompson in particular) worked to redress thiscondition: their project, like their Indian counterparts’, was torecover, investigate, and recreate British Subaltern historiography.In place of its fragmentation, they worked to provide it with awholeness and coherence. Based in the northern English countryof Yorkshire, the Reasoner historians introduced a genre of writingpremised upon the experience of the working class. Published in1958, Thompson’s groundbreaking text The Making of the EnglishWorking Class established itself as a model for the recovery of nine-teenth-century English working class radicalism, organization,agency, and resistance. Offering thick accounts of working men’sassociations, trade unions, and the Dissenters, Thompson and hiscolleagues wrote against the grain of dominant British historiogra-phy.

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Whereas existing histories focused almost exclusively on theexperience of the ruling classes, the Marxist-inspired Reasonermode disrupted the prevalent tradition. Thompson, Saville, andHill reconfigured the terrain of British historiography by demon-strating how the eighteenth and nineteenth century working class-es frequently opposed the landed gentry, the aristocracy, the cler-gy, and the new capitalist class produced by the IndustrialRevolution. The working class, as Thompson so famously remindsus, “was present at its own making” (9). Possessed of a critical his-torical consciousness since its very constitution, the working classmade its own history, frequently in antagonistic relation to the var-ious ruling elites. Thompson’s work, more so than that of hisReasoner colleagues, enabled both a reconceptualization of met-ropolitan historiography and impacted the formation of theCultural Studies school at the University of Birmingham in the late60s. Cultural Studies, as its practitioners and critics are wellaware—and as the work of Guha and his fellow Indian historiansdemonstrate—was specially indebted to the work of Gramsci. Thisis particularly true of its leading theoretician, Stuart Hall, whorelies extensively on Gramsci’s writing in The Hard Road toRenewal, his 1988 critique of Thatcherism.At more or less the same moment that the Reasoner collective

was writing against the dominant historiography, a new generationof Indian historians was producing its own accounts of a radicalSouth Asian underclass opposed to colonial rule that drew mainlyfrom two sources. Firstly, Subaltern Studies “employed the analyt-ical tool of history writing inherited from the British Marxist histo-rians,” among whom Thompson and Hill featured prominently(Chaturvedi xi). Secondly, the Indian historians relied heavily—after an extended period of reflection—upon the work of Gramsci.While both models were foundational to the work of Subaltern his-toriography, they can be said to have performed different functionsfor Guha and his colleagues. Gramsci and Thompson were bothrooted in a radical politics of opposing hegemony. The Reasoner historians provided a model of how to do “thick”

research, in the anthropological sense of recreating events in thor-ough, painstaking detail. The Englishmen, Thompson and Hilton,provided a paradigm for their Indian counterparts about how todocument, value, and transcribe local instances of Subalternorganization and resistance; and, as importantly, how to simulta-neously translate particular accounts into paradigms for a moregeneralized opposition to the colonial or ruling class bureaucracyor state. Gramsci, on the other hand, lent a theoretical edge toSubaltern scholarship; he offered Guha and the Subaltern histori-ans a set of critical concepts, among which “hegemony” and, ofcourse, “Subaltern” are arguably the most salient with which toengage the accounts they were recovering and subjecting to, inPeter Gay’s term, “historical analysis.” Among the Subaltern schol-ars, these two modes of historiography find distinct articulation. Itis in Guha’s writing that Gramsci and Thompson seem to meld mostfluently; Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee can be more


aptly characterized as theoreticians for whom Gramsci is only oneof several influences; while in the work of Gautam Bhadra andDavid Arnold it is the Thompsonian model that holds sway.For Indian historians such as Guha, their initial acquaintance

with Gramsci’s notion of Subaltern agency in the 1950s would takea long time to manifest itself in their work. “The translation of TheModern Prince and Other Essays in 1957,” Chaturvedi writes, “gen-erated a small Gramsci-literate public” in newly postcolonial Indiathat read but did not incorporate the Italian’s work into their histo-riography until some twenty years later (Chaturvedi xiii). After hav-ing been introduced to Gramsci’s work in the 1950s by “SusobhanSarkar, eminent Bengali historian who taught Ranajit Guha as a stu-dent at President’s College in Calcutta,” it would take Guha and hisSubaltern School colleagues until that “first volume” in the early1980s before the work of the Italian philosopher found articulationin Indian historiography (Ibid.).Subaltern Studies can be conceived of as a three-stage process

that is simultaneously marked by chronological discreteness andoverlap. The temporal lag between the moment of reception (read-ing Gramsci under Sarkar’s tutelage), the moment of Subaltern con-ception (using Gramsci’s writing as the model for their historiogra-phy), and the moment of critical enunciation (the publication ofSubaltern Studies 1) marks more than a long period of gestation,reflection, and discussion in the group of historians. It also turnson a more crucial historical event: the epoch of crisis in postcolo-nial Indian society that begins in Naxalbari in 1967 and culminateswith Indira Gandhi’s State of Emergency between 1975 and 1977.“The Naxalite movement erupted violently in 1967,” Prakash Singhwrites, “its flames spreading to almost all parts of the country” (33).Located at the juncture of India, Nepal, and (contemporary)Bangladesh,4 the village of Naxalbari became the lodestar forresistance against the Indian state. What began as a local cam-paign for land reform, after a “group of peasants surrounded a plotof land” owned by the jotedars, became a Maoist movement forsocial transformation that spread through the states of Bengal,Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar – among others (Roy 9). As its “flames spread” (Mao likened the Naxalite rebellion to a

“prairie fire” that was sweeping across India) and the movement’stactics became more violent (including assassinations), it becameclear that the Naxalbari peasants’ rebellion was distinctly post-colonial in character: “Two decades had passed since the dawn ofIndependence and yet large segments of the Indian population –peasants, workers and tribals – continued to suffer the worst formsof exploitation” (Mao qtd. in Singh 3; Ibid.). Twenty years of sov-ereign rule by the Congress Party of Nehru and his daughter IndiraGandhi had yielded Indian Subalterns nothing but the brokenpromises of postcolonialism. After resisting the British Raj andwinning independence, the Naxalite Subalterns were the firstgrouping to organize against and oppose the postcolonial “fail-ures” that Guha would write about some fifteen years later in thefirst volume of Subaltern Studies. Such was the salience of the

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Naxalite movement that, as Singh argues, their disruption of Indianpolitical life could only be fully grasped analogically—when thepeasants from Bengal were set in relation to other radical anti- orpostcolonial groups. The Naxalite “movement,” Singh writes, “came to be compared

with the Huks of Phillipines, the Al Fatah of Palestine, and theTupamaros of Uruguay” (Ibid.). In constructing a Subaltern histori-ography, Guha and his colleagues were compelled—by history—toconceive of Indian peasant resistance as a mode of oppositionthat—especially during the 1960s and ’70s—signaled beyonditself. Even with the most local of resistances, the most containedof grievances, the Indian Subalterns were insistently postcolonialand radical; their ideological bedfellows were the militant “AlFatah” of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization, not theensconced Congress Party of Nehru or Mrs. Gandhi. The Naxaliteswere committed to social transformation through (often violent)confrontation, not political appeasement. Reaching its insurgentpeak between 1967 and 1971, this peasant rebellion represents aparadigm shift within Indian historiography. The Naxalites were ananti-postcolonial movement in the mold of the Mau Mau, Mao,and Che Guevara, a radical group that broke completely with theGandhian philosophy of satyagraha; the Naxalites were (infinitely)more 1857 Mutiny than 1940s passive resistance. The Anglophonemodel of (largely peaceful) transformation revealed itself, like itspredecessor the British Raj, to be especially vulnerable to internalchallenge. It was not externally susceptible to, say, the militarythreats of Pakistan or the “West,” but it was shown to be open tointerrogation and attack (quite literally) by radical local constituen-cies who rejected the neo-colonial tendencies and practices of theCongress Party. The Naxalite insurgency exposed one major failing of the post-

colonial Indian state—its ideologically soft underbelly—while the1975 Emergency revealed the other characteristic shortcoming ofpostcolonial regimes: the corruption, repression, and suspension ofdemocracy when the ruling party, especially its leadership, wasaccused and found guilty of legislative and judicial impropriety.Stanley Wolpert maps the events that led to the Emergency: “OnJune 12, 1975, Judge Jag Mohan Lal Sinha of Allahabad’s HighCourt found Prime Minister Gandhi guilty of two counts (out offifty-two charges brought against her) of campaign malpractice inconnection with her race against Raj Narain for a seat in Parliamentfour years earlier. The conviction carried a mandatory penalty ofbarring Mrs. Gandhi from running for or holding any electiveoffice for a period of six years” (Wolpert 396). After protests byordinary citizens and denunciations by opposition politicians inParliament, Indira Gandhi’s response two weeks later was emphat-ic: on “June 26, 1975, the president of India proclaimed a state ofnational emergency, ‘suspending’ all civil rights, including habeascorpus, clamping a lid on the press, placing armored units on spe-cial alert, and grounding air flights over Delhi” (Ibid. 397). While belonging to different ideological strands, the material


deprivations of neo-colonialism that the Naxalites struggled toredress and the antagonism to challenge in any form (autocratictendencies all too often innate to postcolonial regimes) confirmedthe Subaltern historians’ central critique: for all the trappings ofindependence, in these Benjaminian “moments of danger,” thepostcolonial state showed itself to be far more like its colonialistpredecessor than different. Elites of different ideological stripes,races, and ethnicities perhaps, but elites intent on guaranteeingtheir self-interest, nonetheless. Confronted by insurgent peasantsor rebuked by its own courts (an event, granted, far less likely tooccur during the Raj), the hegemonic state—regardless of itsguise—responded with its repressive apparatus, or it roderoughshod, however temporarily, over the rulings of its own judici-ary; the full functioning of the democratic state was contingentupon, if not Subaltern quiescence, then certainly the absence ofSubaltern challenge to the authority of the ruling bloc. In amoment of crisis, the power of the elites revealed itself to be com-pletely non-ideological. Instead, the ruling bloc’s primary instinctmanifested itself: the protection of narrow, sectarian interests. In this regard, the events of “1967” and “1975” do more than

lend credence to Guha’s later debunking of the Indian elite in hisattempt to rewrite the nation’s historiography. Their self-represen-tation, in Guha’s terms, is a patently false one: their “role as pro-moters of the cause of the people rather than that as exploiters andoppressors, their altruism and self-abnegation rather than theirscramble for the modicum of power and privilege granted by therulers in order to make sure of their support for the Raj” demon-strates how, as the ruling party in postcolonial India, the CongressParty is the latest incarnation of an elite that has acted against theSubaltern class (1988, 38). During the Emergency, the promises of postcolonialism (and the

very democratic foundation of the independent Third World state)were not only unfulfilled but severely abrogated by Mrs. Gandhi.Because of the Congress Party’s consolidation of “power,” the rhet-oric and ideology that had sustained the anti-colonial movementand the early phases of Third World independence now showedthemselves to be conceptually inadequate. Working at that criticalconjuncture, the nascent Subaltern School’s writing was informedby Gramsci’s “Notes on Italian History,” his view of the founding ofthe Italian state that can be cast—if not irreducibly—as a contem-plation on historical crisis. In his essay, Gramsci accounts for Italy’slack of a bourgeoisie (unlike France); its fragmented nature as astate (really a collection of city-states) further divided by regionalconflict between the industrializing North and the rural South atendency to reify geographical difference that Gramsci explicitlycritiques; and the process by which figures such as Mazzini,Garibaldi, and Cavour secured a state.5 At a moment when a newmode of subjugation was instituted against the Indian people,Guha and his colleagues were well positioned to turn away fromthe present crisis and toward Gramsci. In Foucault’s terms, theSubaltern scholars proceeded to mine an “archeology of (past)

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knowledge” so as to make it textually relevant to the ideologicaldemands of their moment.“Subaltern groups,” Gramsci writes, “are always subject to the

activity of ruling groups, even when they rebel and rise up: only‘permanent’ victory breaks their subordination, and that not imme-diately” (55). Gramsci’s call for Subaltern vigilance (and, to a less-er extent, a Trotskyist revolution) resonates in two historical regis-ters. Firstly, it draws attention to the transhistoricality of hegemo-ny: “Subalterns” are, as postcolonial subjects in independent Indiadiscovered during the Emergency, perpetually vulnerable to “rulinggroups.” However, while subjugation is not new, the mode of sub-jection is, and this is the task that confronts the Subaltern histori-ans: how to respond to the particularities of this crisis. Secondly,a factor that has greater pertinence for the Subaltern project as awhole, the underclass is “permanently” susceptible to ruling classinterpellation and appropriation. The history of Subaltern resist-ance in the Raj cannot, as Guha is all too well aware, stand inde-pendent of officiality—it can be expropriated, like any other dis-course or experience of resistance, by the dominant narrative. Thestruggle of the Subaltern is never owned by the underclass—it canalways be reconfigured, misrepresented, and consumed by hege-monic narratives.

Reinscribing the Past and Critiquing the Present

To articulate the past historically does not mean to rec-ognize it “the way it really was” (Ranke). It means toseize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment ofdanger.

—Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (255)

Faced with a crisis they could understand but not fully explicate,the Subaltern historians cast their intellectual glance away from theurgencies (and exigencies) of the present not in order to escape it,but to better grasp its antecedents, its workings, and its effects forthe underclass and the Left. It is in such a Benjaminian “momentof danger”—when the state is no longer accountable to its con-stituents, when the democratic right to resist is denied, and whenthe state is no longer the representative of the collective but theguardian of elite or sectarian interests—that the Subaltern histori-ans “seized” the past as a politicized “memory.” Through theirreclamation of anti-colonial Subalternity, they simultaneously chal-lenge the dominant conception of the “way it really was” and con-vert the past into a modality of theoretical, philosophical, and his-toriographical resistance. Like Benjamin’s overburdened “angel ofprogress,” the past is made to stand for something other than itsown moment; the past is chronologically displaced and criticallygrafted onto the present.The Subaltern scholars turned toward the past so that they could

interrogate and account for the “failed possibilities” of postcolo-


nialism. Within the 1970s India of Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,”Guha and his colleagues Pandey, Chakrabarty, and Shahid Aminhad a great deal to be “disillusioned” with since the suspension ofcivil society concretized precisely the kind of “failed possibilities”of—the promises reneged on by—the sovereign Third World state.Within a few short decades in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, andthe Caribbean, postcolonial leaders from Nkrumah to Kenyatta toBhutto to Forbes Burnham had all shown themselves prone toabuse power in all its many forms, from rank corruption to routineexploitation of the underclass. With the Third World nation alreadyin an advanced state of disrepair, the Subalterns were subjected toa litany of (by now familiar) problems, ranging from insufficienthealthcare to badly administered education systems to inadequatehousing. And the repressive violence of the postcolonial state was,as in India (and in too many postcolonial states), everywhere in evi-dence. It is in this way that the Emergency years signified not only

a(nother) “failed possibility,” but, at that moment, the failure ofIndian postcolonialism, symptomatic of Third World problems theglobe over. The repressions of the colonialists had returned in India(as it did, inter alia, in Kenya and Guyana), refracted through themachinations of the sovereign Third World state. In Guha’s almostpoetic reconstruction of the “Emergency years,” “the turbulence ofthe 1970s and its pain owed a great deal to this clash of doubt andself-doubt, interrogation and response . . . .One of its many unset-tling effects was to bring the impact of the twenty-year old nationstate’s crisis to bear on a settled and in many respects codifiedunderstanding of the colonial past” (1997, xiii). Recovering, reinscribing, and reclaiming the “past” is one of the

major accomplishments of the Subaltern School. However, that“codified past” is—both historiographically and theoretically—most susceptible to reinterpretation at precisely the moment of cri-sis because, with the repression of civil society, the established his-toriographical verities are implicitly subject to challenge. Therhetorical and ideological truths upon which the postcolonialnation was founded revealed themselves to be, at this signal con-juncture, less aporetic than inadequate: they could not sustain thedemocracy signified by “1947.” The official, elitist rendering of thepast can no longer be relied upon; the past has had to be sundered.For Guha et al., the past has to be ripped apart violently by a newhistoriographical analysis, it has to be undone and rewritten frombelow: historiography and postcoloniality have to beSubalternized, written from below, but as the experience of anagential underclass who acted; Subalternized historiographyrestores the underclass to history as full participants in the makingof their historical experiences. Subalternized postcoloniality trans-lates the history of underclass resistance into vocabularies thathave an impact in and for other locales, other historical conjunc-tures, and for different moments. The problematic condition of the postcolonial paradigm in

Naxalite and Emergency India enabled Subaltern Studies, lent the

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work of these historians its special edge, and allowed this brand ofscholarship to operate across a range of temporalities. TheSubaltern school sought not only to reclaim and re-present thepast, but to make the past critically available for reading the pres-ent; Guha and his colleagues speak at once to the peculiarities oftheir moment, to the anti-colonial experience, and their work con-tinues to have an application to the “failures” and violences of thecurrent postcolonial conjuncture. As a theoretical and historio-graphical strategy, for this reason, Subaltern Studies resonates bothgeographically—across continents and regions—and temporally—across different historical moments. Subaltern Studies could serveas a model for, say, Latin American critics of the postcolonial orpost-dictatorial condition because it was founded upon reinsertinginto nationalist histories the voices and experiences, the disenfran-chisements and the struggles, of the underclass, the silenced, the“disappeared”: those unrepresented by repressive, coercive, andundemocratic regimes, those denied the speaking of their own dis-sident pasts, and their various histories of resistance. Committed toarticulating a politics from below, Subaltern historiography proveditself to be temporally and contextually flexible: it was adaptable todifferent moments and conditions of anti-imperial and postcolonialstruggle.The need for Subaltern historiography marks a crucial epistemo-

logical inadequacy: the production of a Subaltern account of thecolonial past represents the extent to which postcoloniality is con-stituted out of a series of “failed possibilities.” The Subaltern sub-ject, newly recovered and agential, stands as the definitive markerof postcolonial inadequacy. Subaltern historiography is the conse-quence of postcolonial failure. Indian postcoloniality, conceivedin the violence of 1947, has to be reconceived because of the inter-nal violence of the Naxalite movement and the 1975 Emergency.“1947” is itself a temporal designation that has to be interrogated.It cannot stand simply as a temporal marker that ante- and post-dates Indian independence and that is inevitably theorized withinthe metaphorics of non-violence, satyagraha, and bourgeois liber-alism. “1947” is as much a symbol of the achievement of inde-pendence as it is symptomatic of the earliest failings of postcolo-nial Indian historiography: it is the founding moment, the first pub-lic occasion on which the nationalist elite first undermine the con-tributions to Indian sovereignty and that instance when the speci-ficities of the Subaltern class—their distance from the elite—areunrecognized.Calcutta is thus doubly inscribed as a point of Subaltern origin:

through the Naxalite violence, and the violent repression duringthe Emergency, Sarkar’s 1950s Calcutta confronts and enunciatesitself as the 1970s’ Maoist rebellion in the state of Bengal. TheMarxist struggle, contained in Gramsci’s writings and activism, thatprovided the theoretical foundation for the Subaltern School aretransformed into the anti-bourgeois nationalist revolutionary prac-tice by the Naxalites. The 1970s revolution was anticipated (andfacilitated) by the early Calcutta years.


Writing Against the Sixties

The sense that something epic was happening was pret-ty hard to miss.

—Tom Hayden (qtd in Gitlin, Democracy Is In The Streets).

Much as Guha reads the 1970s repression and “crisis” as a cata-lyst for revisiting, revising and “interrogating” the “codified colo-nial past,” he is also implicitly compelling an engagement with thefuture of postcolonial India—and the condition of postcolonialityitself. Guha is inviting more than a retrospective historical recon-struction by “unsettling” the “codified” accounts of the colonialpast. His work, and that of the Subaltern School in general, trans-forms the contemporary crisis into a moment of historic possibili-ty: the recognition that the “understanding” of coloniality and, byinevitable temporal and conceptual extension, postcoloniality, ispartial (to the elite classes) and incomplete (bearing the weight ofSubaltern silence) and consequently in urgent need of reconsider-ation. The Subaltern has to be historicized, in the process of whichhistoriography is Subalternized by a range of agents largely deniedvoice and interventionist capacity in and by elite accounts. Because of the place from which he is speaking—Australia, a

society where the history and devastating consequences of colo-nialism remain unaddressed in too many crucial ideologicalways—and about whom he is speaking (India, the mother of theAnglophone anti-colonial movement), his focus, his several audi-ences, and the scope of the project of Subalternity (the Gramsciandetermination to write “history from below”), Guha’s vision couldnot be restricted to that single 1970s crisis—significant as it was fordemocratic forces in India. The mid-1970s was, of course, amoment of generalized postcolonial crisis as much as it was amoment of postcolonial achievement. During this period, theManley government in Jamaica found itself under ideological andeconomic attack by the America government (Secretary of StateHenry Kissinger visited the Caribbean nation in 1976 to issuewarnings about Prime Minister Michael Manley’s fraternizing withFidel Castro). In Kenya, the declining years of the Kenyatta regimesaw widespread disillusionment with a regime that becameincreasingly dictatorial and indifferent to the fate of the severelyembattled Subalterns. Further south, Tanzanians grappled with thefallout of Julius Nyerere’s “African socialism” as the country’s pop-ulace struggled with the effects of a largely unsuccessful experi-ment in blending African traditions with orthodox Marxist eco-nomic policies. However, in the mid-1970s, both Portuguese colonies, Angola

and Mozambique, achieved independence as Angusto Neto andSamora Machel, respectively, took office as their sovereign coun-try’s leaders in 1974 and ‘76. At this stage, Mozambique’s neigh-bor Zimbabwe was only four years from liberation. In South Africa

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and Namibia, however, the mid-1970s marked a period of turbu-lence as students led the resistance against apartheid and SamNujoma’s SWAPO (the somewhat anachronistic acronym for theSouth West African People’s Organisation) movement stepped upits fight against the apartheid military forces, mainly in the coun-try’s northern regions. After 1976, Nujoma’s forces were aided bythe ability to take refuge in a neighboring, Marxist Angola vigor-ously opposed to the apartheid regime. Playing host to SWAPOcost the Angolans dearly, not only in that period and up until SouthAfrica’s “liberation,” but right up until now, as the on-going devas-tation of that country attests. In the “first wave” postcolonial statesin Latin America, conditions were no better. From Pinochet’s Chileto the Argentine juntas to the Revolutionary Party in Mexico camethe recurring horror of the “disappeared,” a history whose “memo-ry” has been insistently seized but not resolved. In the Indonesianarchipelago, Suharto’s military forces wreaked havoc and destruc-tion, as well as waging a widespread terror campaign against theEast Timorese. All this in the name of postcolonial independence.The price of sovereignty for the postcolonial Subaltern or the resist-ing subject critical of the independent government or the religious(as is the case with the predominantly Catholic East Timorese) orethnic minority was a different, but often no less brutal form, ofsubjugation. Postcoloniality did not guarantee equal protection forall its citizens. However, in so far as the Subaltern commentary on the Indian

condition was applicable to the larger postcolonial paradigm, itwas also “retrospectively” a critique of the “high”—or the “epic”(and optimistic)—moment of postcoloniality. The 1960s, the epochof postcolonial optimism and “possibility,” a moment inducted byIndian independence in 1947. If Indian sovereignty definedAnglophone postcoloniality, it is in part because it remained for solong the inaugural event: the anti-colonialist movement that notonly initiated the process, but remained for a decade the “only”independent government (Pakistan and Sri Lanka, which achievedits status in 1948, were overshadowed by India). It was not until1957 that Kwame Nkrumah (a Nehruvian figure in his own way)led Ghana, previously the Gold Coast, to independence. WhileGhana’s independence reverberated around and for Sub-SaharanAfrica, its signality never equaled that of India. However, whatNkrumah’s nation did mark was, to invoke Harold MacMillan’sfamous speech, how swiftly the “winds of change” were blowingthrough—and in the process, liquidating—the British Empire. Writers such as James Miller and Todd Gitlin have, inter alia, rep-

resented the Euro-American experience of the 1960s as the decadeof cultural revolution, but also as a transnational movement thatwas influenced in no small measure by the practices of the anti-and postcolonial world.6 Within this conceptualization, the “60s”can be said to begin with the moment just before John Kennedybecame the first Roman Catholic President of the United States andonly concludes some time after Watergate—perhaps with the Iranhostage situation; Fredric Jameson, among other critics, periodizes


the 60s as that moment that extends from 1958, the CubanRevolution, until 1973, the year of the oil embargo.For the Anglophone postcolonial world, the 60s also have to be

conceived as a long decade. It was a historical moment thatextended beyond narrow chronology; it was a historical modalitythat could not be neatly demarcated as beginning in 1960 and end-ing in 1970; it was a period inaugurated by Ghanaian independ-ence in 1957 and ended with the achievement of Zimbabweansovereignty in 1980—that is, invoking a periodization of the 60sthat emphasizes the trope and mode of anti-colonialism. Anti-colonialism in the British colonies was tremendously influenced bycharismatic figures such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevera, and FrantzFanon, demonstrating the links between the “first” and what mightbe conceived of as the “third” postcolonial wave in parts of SouthAmerica and the Francophone and Hispano-Caribbean, a rare butcrucial link between the Anglophone and Latin anti-colonialism.With his work in Algeria, Fanon aligned Africa with the Caribbeanin a way that echoed but was distinct from the connections con-ceptualized by his philosophical “predecessors” Aime Cesaire andLeopold Senghor. Another anti-imperialist vector was also crucialto this moment: the Chinese Revolution, with its unusually pro-grammatic attention to culture, bequeathed the iconic Mao to anti-colonialists from Africa to South Asia. Those twenty-three yearsrepresent not only an extended temporality, the “decade” markednot so much by the passing of the years as by the growing list ofBritish colonies that won independence, but also an ideology ofresistance and possibility very different from that experienced bythe activism and critique of Euro-American Subalterns. Located at the far end of that moment and having witnessed its

long and ambivalent unfolding (i.e., the celebration of independ-ence followed by an “Emergency” of one variety or another), theSubaltern historians wrote from a locale deeply saturated by thefailures of the decade and the postcolonial experience in India.Immunized in 1975 against the countercultural optimism and thefamously eulogized “spirit” of the era—the 60s as the decade ofradical possibility—Guha and his colleagues took the “long view”(in Raymond Williams’s sense of the “long revolution,” a transfor-mation that would take a considerable amount of time and wouldhave to be philosophically struggled over and for). By virtue ofhaving “inaugurated” Anglophone postcoloniality, the Indian histo-riographers had the benefit of observing how Third World inde-pendence revealed itself as “failed possibility.” It was not, howev-er, the movement toward or the achievement of independence thatthe Subaltern scholars were most critical of; it was, rather, growingunderstanding about how the past was used to enshrine—withoutnational self-reflection or critique—a bourgeois-nationalist dis-course that would later, though not much later, be used to silenceIndira Gandhi or Kenyatta-like oppositionality. The “past,” newly interrogated and freshly conceptualized by the

Subaltern School after having been so easily and uncritically mar-shaled in the cause of anti-colonial liberation, had to be made to

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respond to and speak against the 1960s. The Subaltern School ofhistoriography stands as an “anti-60s” postcolonial epistemologybecause it is crafted as a body of knowledge—a collection of re-readings of the Indian colonial past—that is written from a distinct,difficult, and asynchronic position. Produced from a present inor-dinately marked by failure, Subalterneity constitutes a rejection ofthe hegemonic past, a recognition of the postcolonial Left’s inabil-ity or reluctance to challenge dominant constructions of history bythe postcolonial elite. The present is, in this conception, account-able to the past only because it is, paradoxically, only by acknowl-edging the neglected actors of the colonial era that it can claimagency for the postcolonial Subaltern. By writing the colonized Subaltern into history (anew), Guha,

Pandey, and their colleagues insist upon the urgent need of thepostcolonial underclass to demand their right to make not onlytheir own past but also their own contemporaneity. The postcolo-nial underclass’s agency is, within the Subaltern account, contin-gent upon its historical predecessor: the history of the colonizedhas to be reconstituted in order for the present and the future to beradicalized. The Subaltern School historiography almost juxtapos-es itself in relation to the 60s. It offers itself, in contradistinction tothe dominant mode of reading the 1960s as an apogetic momentin postcolonial history, as an intellectual modality produced out ofand because of postcolonial “failure”: Subaltern historiographydraws attention to the incidental and the systematic un-democra-tizing of the Third World in a moment that African, Asian, andCaribbean sovereignty was widely, all too frequently, and uncriti-cally celebrated. Because of the salience of its moment of con-ception, in the midst of the postcolonial euphoria of the 1960sthrough 1980, Subaltern historiography offers itself as a caution—calling attention to how historical discourses work and to whatfunction they perform for the elite and the Subaltern alike in con-structing the national subject—against how narratives of the nationimplicitly rely on silencing, partiality, and deliberate exclusion.The Subaltern historiographers argue against understanding eliteaccounts of national events as the only history of a nation or amovement. Ironically, it is only by writing against or metaphorically rejecting

the 60s, by gainsaying the “spirit” of the era, and by recovering theGramscian ethos of Calcutta from its three-decades silence that theSubaltern School can realize the promises of “1947.” It is by inter-rogating the cultural purchase and critiquing the ideological hege-mony of elite historiography that the structural and intellectual dis-enfranchisement of the postcolonial underclass can be countered.Conceived in and because of a “moment of danger,” Subaltern his-toriography has a highly developed accountability to the past andpresent experiences of its constituents.

Notes


1Thanks to Tess Chakkalakal: friend and interlocuter; and toSaurabh Dube for his comments.

2See, among others, Ileana Rodriguez’s essay “El GrupoLatinoamericano de Estudios Subalternos,” The Latin AmericanSubaltern Studies Reader (Latin America Otherwise), edited byIleana Rodriguez, and John Beverley’s Subalternity andRepresentation: Arguments in Contemporary Cultural Theory (PostContemporary Interventions) for an account of the founding ofLatin American Subaltern Studies and its links to the South Asianhistorians.3Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Petals of Blood. Capte Town: David Philip,1982.4At the moment of the conflict, Bangladesh was known as East

Bengal and still a part of Pakistan.5Demonstrating an unexpected, a-chronological symmetry

between his prison writings and that of the Subaltern historians sev-eral decades later, Gramsci shows himself to be a critic of anti-colonial resistance modalities, and moralities, in the Raj – andopposed to literary forms and moralities in pre-RevolutionaryRussia. The “current phenomenon of Gandhism in India,” hewrites, “Tolstoy’s theory of non-resistance to evil, both of whichhave so much in common with the first phase of Christianity(before the Edit of Milan). Gandhism and Tolstoyism are naïve the-orisations of the ‘passive revolution’ with religious overtones.”(Gramsci, 107).6See James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huronto the Seige of Chicago, and Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of HopeDays of Rage.

Works Cited.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn.Frankfurt: Schoken, 1973.

Beverley, John. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments inContemporary Cultural Theory (Post ContemporaryInterventions). Durham, Duke U P, 1999.

Gitlin, Todd. The Sixties: Years of Hope Days of Rage. New York:Bantam, 1993.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Ed. andtrans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York:International Publishers, 1971.

Guha, Ranajit. “Introduction,” A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995. Ed. Guha. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.

_____. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” Selected SubalternStudies. Ed. Guha. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

James, C. L. R. Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution. London:Allison and Busby, 1977.

Jameson, Fredric. “Periodizing the 60s,” The Ideologies of Theory:Essays 1971-1986, Vol. 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis:U of Minnesota, 1988.

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Miller, James. Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to theSeige of Chicago. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

Naxalbari is not just the name of a village! (Twenty Five Years of theNaxalite Movement). Calcutta: Chandan Roy, 1996.

Rodriguez, Ileana. “El Grupo Latinoamericano de EstudiosSubalternos,” Revista De Critica Cultural 24 (June 2002).

Rodriguez, Ileana, Editor. The Latin American Subaltern StudiesReader (Latin America Otherwise). Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1982.

Singh, Prakash. The Naxalite Movement in India. New Delhi:Rupa and Co., 1995.

Spivak, Gayatri, “Subaltern Studies: DeconstructingHistoriography” A Subaltern Studies Reader. Delhi: Oxford UP,1988

Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. NewYork: Vintage, 1966.

Williams, Raymond. Long Revolution. New York: Harper andRow, 1966.

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. New York: Oxford UP,1993.


I N S T I T U T I O N :

School of Literatures and Performance Studies in English,University of Guelph, Newfoundland, Canada

F I E L D S :

Political and Postcolonial Theater

R E C E N T P U B L I C A T I O N S :

Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in theImagined Theatre. Critical Performance/s in CanadaMonograph Series, Textual Studies in Canada 15,2002.

Workers’ Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movementsince 1970. With David Watt. Sydney: Currency P,2001.

“Modernism and Genocide: Citing Minstrelry inPostcolonial Agitprop.” Modern Drama 44.1 (Spring2001): 91-102.

A B S T R A C T :

Centered on a consideration of the poet Milton Acorn’svarious roles as the public face of the radical-fringeCanadian Liberation Movement, this essay explores theperformative and textual strategies of contesting Maoistparties in Canada in the late 1960s and early ‘70s.

Vectors of the Radical

AFalan f i lewodA L A N F I L E W O D

Documents

“At a Moment of Danger”: Subaltern Studies Historiography ...Subaltern Studies Historiography as a Critique of the Postcolonial Condition1 Grant Farred Introduction The historical