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The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader

2002; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-82-4-778

1527-1900

Mark Thurner,

Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies

This Reader (hereafter, LASSR) inventories the exciting variety of work produced by the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (hereafter, LASSG) over its relatively short life span. The book’s 21 or so chapters are organized in thematic sections devoted, respectively, to theoretical and temporal convergences in South Asian and Latin American critical projects, histories of indigenous peoples and colonialism, the subject positions of intellectuals, questions of governability, and the postcolonial problematics of citizenship, resistance, and disobedience. A final critical essay by Walter Mignolo answers an inviting lead essay delivered by the founding guru of the South Asian Subaltern Studies group, Ranajit Guha. Ileana Rodríguez provides a useful introduction to the project as a whole. The cast of contributors is impressive—something like the subalternist edition of Who’s Who in Latin American cultural studies.Guha leads off with a renewed call to recover “the small and silenced voice of history—the voice of the subaltern” (p. 45). In general, however, this is not the true calling of this Reader. For some time now, subaltern studies has not been (at least, directly) about subalterns or even about listening to subalterns; rather, it has been about working out the philosophical and political implications of the ways in which elite discourses have walled off (or inscribed) the subaltern in a nearly inaccessible labyrinth of power-inflected knowledges. The attractive cover illustration on the handsomely produced paperback edition of LASSR is in keeping with, or at any rate suggestive of, this trend—and the contents generally bear witness to it. Thus we behold a textured photographic image of Inka walls in which a receding series of aligned rectangular portals draws the eye into and beyond what archaeologists would likely tell us were once the sacred and domestic spaces of a select elite. Skeptics and tongue-in-cheek critics might be tempted to extend the analogy all too literally to the contemporary project of subaltern studies itself (for an Indian complaint, see Arvind N. Das, “The Poor Man’s Subaltern Studies,” Biblio 11, no. 1 [1996]), but one suspects that they would not be the richer for it.Still, some historians and anthropologists of Latin America will no doubt note and find pause to question—as Florencia Mallon did some years ago (see the December 1994 American Historical Review forum on subaltern studies)—the predominance among this group of literary and cultural critics. Going by the bionotes at the back of the book, the disciplinary affiliation of 16 of the 21 contributors is literary or cultural studies, with the remaining five split between sociologists (2), historians (2), and political scientists (1). This in itself has distinguished the LASSG from the South Asian group, and perhaps rightly so. Rightly so because since the middle to late 1980s the project of subaltern studies has taken a critical poststructuralist or postcolonialist turn (on this point, see V. Chaturvedi’s introduction to Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial [2000]). The turn is informed by a certain catachrestic fluency with a set of linguistic protocols and operations, sometimes associated with the “theory” and practice of mostly German and French philosophers of language, from Nietzsche to Derrida and much in between. For whatever reason, relatively few Latin Americanist historians and social scientists have been eager to betray any such fluency and so in the 1990s literary and cultural critics appear to have been more receptive and perhaps better positioned to extend the project in new directions. In any case, it is likely that too much has already been made of disciplinary and ideological affiliations in a trans-disciplinary (or even undisciplinary) discursive field perhaps better characterized as an intellectual commitment to a radical, postvanguardist political and philosophical practice otherwise at odds with the bourgeois conventions of the liberal academy.Academic affiliations and codes of distinction aside, HAHR readers will likely find much to mine and mind in this Reader. LASSR succeeds as a virtuoso exemplar of the genre: rich for its diversity of settings and subjects, novel in its identification of a wide-range of problematics, unified in its critique of reigning conventions, and challenging for its dizzying array of “otherwise” thinking and writing. Although this review cannot possibly do justice to the many brilliant contributions of the individual authors, it is clear from this collection that the group was well on its way to developing a style of analysis, debate, and writing that could very well find an echo in future trends. On the other hand, and as one might expect in a Reader of this kind, there’s not much here for grave-diggers of past Latin American “voices,” subaltern or elite. Guha’s “small voice of history”—which in a more developed essay published elsewhere he opposes to “the big voice of theory”—is often nearly inaudible amongst the otherwise resounding and frequently impatient rush to “theory.” Footnotes which might otherwise persuade must frequently go begging, and there is also the occasionally annoying instance of just getting it wrong—which, innocently enough, sometimes follows from the crying need for “historical background” upon which to build grand theoretical generalizations. God knows historians are not above this sort of crying, but here the tendency is one of the more common handicaps of disciplinary training and methods in literary and cultural studies. (That said, one of the things which has distinguished subaltern studies from many brands of cultural studies is more sustained critical attention to, if not good ears for, historicity.) Only one example among several that specialists will notice: Gareth Williams’s, at times, brilliant reading of tragedy in contemporary Peru ignores a new historiography which has largely debunked the quick and dirty narrative of the colonial and postcolonial state that he adopts, which is a pity.If I read him correctly, Walter Mignolo’s closing essay (which deploys a canned version of an argument developed at greater length in his recent book Local Histories, Global Designs) registers the theoretical necessity of rewriting subalternity and its relation to modernity by first taking account of Spanish America’s different histories of coloniality. This Reader favorably places Latin American work on the global map of postcolonial and subaltern studies, but the task of redrawing that map remains a work-in-progress. This imaginable but daunting task of remapping will want to hear more small voices—of historians, anthropologists, subalternists, and others—and they, in turn, will need to engage the critical virtuosity displayed in this Reader.