About the Book
Subaltern Studies has marked both a major departure in South Asian studies and indexed broader shifts in the critical humanities and social sciences. This volume explores what it means today to set to work studies of subaltern subjects in our rapidly mutating social worlds.
This handbook spans diverse historical, ethnographic, and geopolitical spaces, drawing in the Antipodes and the Americas, Diasporas and Oceanic worlds, Africa and the Middle East, apart from Europe and many South Asias – overlapping arenas in which the “subaltern” continues to find distinct yet substantive articulations. It also seeks to meaningfully juxtapose practices and processes of gender and race; indigeneity and indenture; age and sexuality; slavery and apartheid; the Adivasi and the Dalit; settler-colonialisms and nations; nature and environment; caste and tribe; diaspora and blackness; capital and property; science and technology; media and cinema; the body and dance; heteronormativity and queerness; state and governance; and politics and justice. In these ways, the study un-frames disciplinary boundaries and maps emergent terrains, exactly articulating pressing subjects and rethinking distinct subalternities.
This book is aimed at researchers, scholars, and advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the critical human sciences, especially history, anthropology, social theory, and cultural, gender, and literary studies.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Subalterns and Histories Formations-Itineraries-Genealogies 2. Subaltern Photography 3. Some Ironies and Anomalies in the History of Subaltern Studies 4. Adivasi Indigeneity: Reframing Subaltern Studies Today 5. “But Who May Abide?”: Reckoning with Ranajit Guha, 1923-2023 6. The Language Twist: Subaltern Studies and After 7. Subaltern, to the Right and to the Left of the Spectrum 8. The Subaltern as a Way of Reading: History Writing and the Colonial Oblivion in Latin America 9. Notes on Subalternity and Combative Decoloniality: In Dialogue with Dipesh Chakrabarty and Frantz Fanon 10. Subaltern Historiography and Post-Apartheid South Africa 11. “Peeping Through a Chink”: Age, Evidence, and the Sexual Subaltern 12. Science and the Subaltern: A Hairy-Eared History of Nehruvian Science 13. Stretching Subalternity: The Figure of “The Migrant” in the Postcolonial World Order 14. Property and Subaltern Pasts Indigeneity-Servitude-Caste-Gender 15. Sovereignty, Anti-Extraction, and the Prose of Insurgency in Mexico 16. Resurgent Indigeneity and Discourses on History in Settler States 17. Subalterns in India’s Wildlife Conservation 18. Captive Transactions: Measures of Violence in the Northeastern Frontier of British India (1872-1919) 19. Ghosts of the Atlantic in South Asian Historiography 20. “Ameliorating” the Enslaved: Connected Histories of the Abolition of Slavery 21. Can the Subaltern Sweat? 22. Intimations of Dissent: Sexuality, Caste, History 23. Degrees of Smell: Understanding and Resisting Caste 24. When the Subaltern Speaks Supremacy 25. Sex, Caste, and Race: Iterations of the “Social Question” in Ambedkar’s Castes in India 26. Dalit Womanism-Humanism: Against Caste and Gender Hierarchies 27. Amid the Ruins: Savitribai Phule’s Poetry as Subaltern History 28. Anti-Caste Tamil Cinema Against the Darshanic Gaze Subjects-Arrangements-Practices 29. Muslim Labourers and Subaltern Religion: Assertions of Faith and Community in Colonial India 30. Catholic Workers and the Mexican Revolution 31. Labouring Lives and Non-Work Moments: Rethinking Histories of Labour, Caste, and the Subaltern 32. Protean Justice: The Law, the Lawgiver, and the Subaltern Antinomies of Mughal and British India 33. Police Constables in Colonial India: From Subaltern Studies to Labour and Life History 34. Elites, Subjects, Citizens: Shifting Statuses of Zoroastrians 35. The Journey of a Word: Media as Name, Concept, Weapon 36. Productions of Injustice: Extra-Legal Credit in Northern India 37. Performance, “Tradition”, Contestation: The Case of Bhojpuri Nautanki of Bihar 38. Bharatnatyam, Sacred-Eroticism, and Liminality 39. Race, Gender, Reproduction: Malinalli/Marina and Multiple Mestizaje 40. When and Where Do They Enter?: Black Women’s Travel Narratives and the Question of Agency 41. Afterword: The New International
About the Author :
Saurabh Dube is Professor-Researcher, Distinguished Category, El Colegio de México; National Researcher, Distinguished Category, SNII (National System of Researchers), Mexico; and Distinguished Research Fellow, Max Weber Stiftung (Germany-India). Apart from around 140 essays and book chapters, his authored books include Untouchable Pasts, Stitches on Time, After Conversion, Subjects of Modernity and Disciplines of Modernity, as well as a sextet in historical anthropology in the Spanish language. A 600-page anthology/omnibus of Dube’s Spanish writings was published in 2019. Among his twenty edited volumes are Postcolonial Passages, Historical Anthropology, Enchantments of Modernity, Crime through Time, Unbecoming Modern and Dipesh Chakrabarty and the Global South. Dube also edits the innovative series, “Routledge Focus on Modern Subjects.” He has been Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, the Institute of Advanced Study, Warwick, the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, South Africa, the Max Weber Kolleg, Germany and the Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna. Dube has also held visiting professorships, several times, at institutions such Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Iowa, and Goa University (where he occupied the DD Kosambi Visiting Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies).
Ishita Banerjee is Professor-Researcher, Distinguished Category, at the Center for Asian and African Studies, El Colegio de Mexico, National Researcher, Distinguished Category, SNII (National System of Researchers), Mexico and Distinguished Research Fellow, Max Weber Stiftung (Germany-India). Her six authored books include A History of Modern India (2015), Religion, Law, and Power (2007) and Divine Affairs (2001). Among her dozen edited volumes are Cooking Cultures (2016), On Modern Indian Sensibilities (2018) and Caste in History (2008). Banerjee has published articles in a wide range of journals in the English and Spanish languages and edited the book-series “Hinduism.” She has been Fellow of the Max Weber Kolleg, Erfurt and of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla. Banerjee has held visiting professorships at the Simon Bolivar Andean University, Quito, Syracuse University and Goa University (where she occupied the DD Kosambi Visiting Chair in Interdisciplinary Studies).
