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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2008
As explained by one of its founders, subaltern studies seeks to counteract histories written by elites, about elites, and for elites that ignore the majority of society. Through this examination, the urban poor, workers, and peasants of India, the original focus of attention, are agents in the formation of their subaltern consciousness: the “agency of change is located in the insurgent or the ‘subaltern.’”
Author's Note: My thanks to the graduate students of the “History from Below” seminar, fall 2007, Binghamton University, State University of New York.
1 Guha, Ranajit, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Guha, Ranajit and Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
2 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Deconstructing Historiography,” in The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Landry, Donna and Maclean, Gerald (London: Routledge, 1996), 205Google Scholar.
3 Guha, Ranajit, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, ed. Chaturvedi, Vinayak (London: Verso, 2000), 2Google Scholar.
4 I exclude from this discussion the Balkan provinces, where Marxist historiography during the Soviet era perforce centered on workers and peasants.
