SUBALTERN, term proposed by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and developed in postcolonial theory to refer to populations pushed to the margins of history and civil society.
Gramsci, a founding member of the Italian Communist Party and a vocal critic of Mussolini, was imprisoned from 1926 until his death in 1937, and his Prison Notebooks have become an important collection of texts in Marxist theory. In them Gramsci coined the term “subaltern,” originally a word designating a subordinate military rank, to refer to subordinate social classes. The subaltern for Gramsci included the traditional Marxist proletariat but also the subordinate classes of precapitalist eras such as peasants.
Gramsci’s use of the novel term may have been an attempt to circumvent prison censors who would have flagged an explicitly Marxist word like “proletariat,” but the expansiveness of Gramsci’s usage was taken up by South Asian scholars in the 1970s and 1980s to describe the position of colonial and postcolonial subjects. The uniqueness of colonial subordination was largely left out of Marx’s analysis of class, as were systems of dominance that go beyond material conditions, such as those based in religion, gender, ethnicity, and caste.
The Subaltern Studies Group, founded in Great Britain in 1982, was an editorial collective of six scholars led by Ranajit Guha. The group’s intention was to rethink South Asian history from the perspective of the subaltern classes, those who had been excised from conventional history. Guha argued that while the lives of the subaltern classes are in large part determined by the dominant classes, historians should not lose sight of the ways in which the former act in the world independently and beyond the reach of the latter.
In 1988 Gayatri Spivak published her now-canonical essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in which she shows how attempts to give voice to the subaltern almost always fail since they merely incorporate marginalized perspectives into a dominant framework. She considers the example of the British debate over whether to ban the ritual of sati, an Indian cultural practice in which a widow throws herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre. A woman who commits sati can be read as a pious wife who performs a voluntary act of devotion or as a pitiable victim of a patriarchal culture. When testimonies from individual women are considered, their voices are filtered through the lens of the ongoing debate; between these two poles, the woman herself is erased. Spivak uses this example to argue that there is always something about the subaltern that cannot be captured by or explained to those in power, and that attempts to explain, capture, or “give voice to” the subaltern, even by well-meaning academics, are themselves enactments of power that produce new silences and exclusions. Recognizing this limit on the historian’s knowledge––the silence of the subaltern––is therefore essential to studying historically marginalized groups.
Spivak’s essay helped propel the concept of the subaltern across disciplines. The term is now used in literary studies, anthropology, sociology, critical theory, and Latin American, East Asian, and Middle Eastern area studies.
The definition and position of the term have shifted and become more contested over time, particularly as it becomes harder to define who and what truly remain on the outside of twenty-first-century global capitalism.