Subaltern Studies

A Short History of an Intellectual Project (1982–2005)

Abstract

This article summarizes the trajectory of Subaltern Studies, an Indian intellectual project that existed between 1982 and 2005 and is currently seen as synonymous with postcolonial critique. Through the analysis of texts in which the collective’s researchers and their critics reflected on the project, this article argues that it is possible to discern three well-defined moments in the history of Subaltern Studies regarding the predominant theoretical-methodological approach in each of them. The first is marked by the preponderance of an approach that resembles the framework of the social history of culture in the production of a certain type of “history from below”. The second is characterized by an increasingly explicit adherence to poststructuralist and deconstructionist theoretical-methodological positions, without abandoning the approach of the previous phase. In the third and final stage of the history of Subaltern Studies, the theoretical-methodological positions that emerged in the second period, mobilized within the emerging field of postcolonial criticism, became hegemonic. This set of inflections produced enormous changes in the meaning of ideas such as subalternity and critiques of nationalism, which had existed since the very incept of the Indian collective.