Born into a poor, Muslim family at the end of the 19th century, Gama became World Champion wrestler by defeating the reigning Polish champion in London in 1910. By focusing on the life of Gama, the heroic representations of Gama that appear in the Hindi language literature, and the transformations in wrestling regimens that have occurred over the past several centuries, I locate the discourse and practice of wrestling within a context of intersecting concerns with nationalism, class identity and embodied (...) consciousness. To articulate the way in which subaltern identity is embodied in relation to nationalist ideas about masculine fitness, and in relation to the state as a political institution, I provide an analytic interpretation of the heroic body that focuses on themes of nervousness and obsession. (shrink)

The topics of language and subaltern social groups appear throughout Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Although Gramsci often associates the problem of political fragmentation among subaltern groups with issues concerning language and common sense, there are only a few notes where he explicitly connects his overlapping analyses of language and subalternity. We build on the few places in the literature on Gramsci that focus on how he relates common sense to the questions of language or subalternity. By explicitly tracing (...) out these relations, we hope to bring into relief the direct connections between subalternity and language by showing how the concepts overlap with respect to Gramsci's analyses of common sense, intellectuals, philosophy, folklore, and hegemony. We argue that, for Gramsci, fragmentation of any social group's 'common sense', worldview and language is a political detriment, impeding effective political organisation to counter exploitation but that such fragmentation cannot be overcome by the imposition of a 'rational' or 'logical' worldview. Instead, what is required is a deep engagement with the fragments that make up subaltern historical, social, economic and political conditions. In our view, Gramsci provides an alternative both to the celebration of fragmentation fashionable in liberal multiculturalism and uncritical postmodernism, as well as other attempts of overcoming it through recourse to some external, transcendental or imposed worldview. This is fully in keeping with, and further elucidates Gramsci's understanding of the importance of effective 'democratic centralism' of the leadership of the party in relation to the rank and file and the popular masses. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to elaborate two distinctive but interconnected modes of temporalization through common points in the work of Jaques Derrida and Jaques Lacan, namely the Subalternated and the Dislocated time. The explication of the different form of time structure reveals time as relational phenomena, which is constituted by the non-relation between the subject and the Other. The process of subjectivization as the formalization of the Real, or as the work of mourning, excludes traumatic present and opens (...) the space for free flow of the Subalternated time, which is marked by linearity, identitarian thought, subordination, causality ect. The present is, therefore, marked by ontologization of the posthumous remains, canonized, excluded and deprived of any subversive potential. But despite this eternal requiem, something remains between the future and the past, non-present in its spectral subsistence which disrupts smooth stream of the Subalternated narrativity, announcing arrival, return and temporarily inexhaustible artificiality of novelty in the form of the Dislocated time. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 1 2 3 4 5 6.

The present paper entitled "Subaltern Language Games and Political Conditions: A Perspective on Applied Philosophy" attempts to streamline Wittgensteinian language games and political conditions. The expression `subaltern ` stands for the meaning as given in the concise oxford dictionary, that is, `of inferior rank`. Subaltern language game is the game of marginalized people. Language game is meaningful in the context of social and political relationship. My contention is that technical or symbolic language is an instrument to serve (...) the end of the affluent class. I think that any social and political change requires change in languagegame. By applied philosophy, I mean that philosophical theories are applicable in concrete human situation. In this sense, I have considered Wittgenstein as an applied philosopher because he holds that words are dead but assume life when it is used or applied in the concrete life situation. In order to make society free from exploitation and reduce inequality, we have to change the prevailing language game. The language game which I am proposing may be called as the "Subaltern Language Game". I have tried to understand Wittgenstein's language game in the light of Derrida's theory of deconstruction. The ordinary languagephilosophy as expounded in` Philosophical Investigation` deconstructs `technical language philosophy' of `Tractatus` because technical language gives an abstract system of symbols and lacks blood and flesh of lifeworld. My contention is that language game is inseparable from socio-political structure. As a matter of fact language game is the expression of forms of life. The language game of the affluent and the ruling class is different from the language game of the poor and downtrodden. The language game of one ethnic group is different from the language game of another ethnic group. The language game of the white people is different from the language game of the black. In Indian context, the language game of the upper caste is different from the language game of the lower caste. The possibility of inequality due to linguistic advantages of privileged class is a fact and not a fantasy. In order to develop linguistic capacity, it requires socio-political and socio-cultural mechanism. The social inequality due to linguistic handicap of individual can be lessened by a process of change in values. This process of change in value system is called culturalisation or sanskritisation. It can be helpful in changing the use of language and its meaning. Thus, in moving from theory to practice, philosophers work to change these words and rules for those philosophers who are trying to do applied philosophy. The language game of the applied philosopher should be fashioned in accordance with socio-political realities. It is not plausible to do applied philosophy with outdated mode of philosophising. (shrink)

Inpatient mental health nursing operates with an overarching goal to support people living with mental health challenges by managing risk of harm to self and others, decreasing symptoms, and promoting capacity to live outside of hospital settings. Yet, dominant, harmful stereotypes persist, constructing patients as less than, in need of saving, and lacking self‐control and agency. These dominant assumptions are deeply entrenched in racist, patriarchal, and Othering beliefs and continue to perpetuate and (re)produce inequities, specifically for people with multiple intersecting (...) identities relating to race, class, gender, and culture. This paper explores the relevance of postcolonial feminism, particularly Gayatri Spivak's concept of Subaltern—conceptualized as groups of people who are denied access to power and therefore continue to be systematically oppressed and marginalized—in illuminating the problematic and dominant assumptions about people living with mental health challenges as lacking agency and requiring representation. Through an understanding of Subalternity, this paper aims to decenter and deconstruct dominant colonial, patriarchal narratives in mental health nursing, and ultimately calls for mental health nursing to fundamentally reconsider prevailing assumptions of patients as needing representation and lacking agency. (shrink)

The author revisits the question raised during the 1990s by Gayatri Spivak in her famous and difficult article « Can the Subaltern Speak ? », a question which fuelled endless debates in the field of postcolonial studies. He shows that the question is deceptive : the issue is less to decide whether, in the absolute, the subaltern can speak - they obviously can -, but to see whether they actually manage to do so, and to make themselves heard (...) when it really matters, i.e., within a specific political situation. (shrink)

The scientific and philosophical approach to pain must be supplemented by a hermeneutics studying how racism has complicated the communication of pain. Such an investigation reveals that not only are non-white people seen as credibly speaking their pain, but also pain “science” is one of the ways races have historically been constructed. I illustrate this through a study of Frantz Fanon’s clinical writings, along with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave-owners’ medical manuals and related documents. I suggest that, with this history, what (...) philosophers understand as the problem of pain is best framed as the problem of colonial violence. (shrink)

This article uses decolonial to critique the discourse of ‘subaltern whiteness’ by questioning some Afrikaner scholars’ morality of regarding ‘white Afrikaners as subaltern’. Subaltern designates submerged, subordinated, exploited or suppressed – those whose voices have been historically muted, their humanity stripped by those with sociopolitical and economic power. Within South Africa, this raises the question: to what extent can white Afrikaners be regarded as subaltern? The article proposes indivisibility of epistemic vulnerability and regenerative theological praxis both (...) emerging within Afrikaner theological discussion as viable response to broken bodies of those who still bear the marks or scars of apartheid and rather not to seek to hijack their voice. (shrink)

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks seminal contribution to contemporary thought defies disciplinary boundaries. From her early translations of Derrida to her subsequent engagement with Marxism, feminism and postcolonial studies and her recent work on human rights, the war on terror and globalization, she has proved to be one of the most vital of present-day thinkers. In this book Stephen Morton offers a wide-ranging introduction to and critique of Spivaks work. He examines her engagements with philosophers and other thinkers from Kant to Paul (...) de Man, feminists from Cixous to Helie-Lucas and literary texts by Charlotte Bronte, J. M. Coetzee, Mahasweta Devi and Jean Rhys. Spivaks thought is also situated in relation to subaltern studies. Throughout the book, Morton interrogates the materialist basis of Spivaks thought and demonstrates the ethical and political commitment which lies at the heart of her work. Stephen Morton provides an ideal introduction to the work of this complex and increasingly important thinker. (shrink)

Over the past 25 years, migrant detention and criminalisation has steadily increased in the United States. This state of affairs has triggered social workers to advocate through policy and service on behalf of migrants. In order to evaluate contemporary practice, a critical position is generated through a genealogy of social work practice with migrants where the colonial archeology of contemporary social work practice is found in the history of the settlement movement. Here, an irony becomes apparent within social work. Social (...) work practice is a settler colonialism paralleled by Gayatri Spivak's reading of colonial discourses resulting in the subaltern condition. Following Spivak's analysis, social work advocacies affirm migrant subalternity by re-presenting the migrant as an image of nonagentive victimhood while simultaneously representing migrants through political advocacies on their behalf. As a liberation ethics counter to the colonial discourses, Spivak's exit of subalternity as the road to hegemony is drawn for social work practice. In this effort, Indigenous Action Media's distinction between allies and accomplices is central to develop a social work practice as an ethics of liberation. Social workers thus become accomplices with criminalised and detained migrants on the road to hegemony. (shrink)

Resumen: En el presente análisis proponemos una lectura del poemario Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos(2008) de Conceição Evaristo desde una perspectiva de la retórica subalterna, entendiendo lo anterior como la emergencia literaria de otras formas subjetivas. En este sentido afirmamos que en el poemario en análisis la subjetividad de la hablante se construye mediante la voz y el cuerpo femenino, afirmando la diferencia como sustento subjetivo. Abstract: In this analysis it is proposed a reading of the poetry collection of (...) Conceição Evaristo, Poemas da recordação e outros movimentos(2008) from subaltern rhetoric perspective. Understanding the aforementioned as the literary emergence of other subjective forms. In this regard, it is stated that in the poetry collection analyzed, the speaker’s subjectivity is constructed through the voice and female body, affirming difference as subjective sustenance. (shrink)

The subaltern has frequently been understood as a figure of exclusion ever since it was first highlighted by the early Subaltern Studies collective’s creative reading of Antonio Gramsci’s carceral writings. In this article, I argue that a contextualist and diachronic study of the development of the notion of subaltern classes throughout Gramsci’s full Prison Notebooks reveals new resources for “refiguring” the subaltern. I propose three alternative figures to comprehend specific dimensions of Gramsci’s theorizations: the “irrepressible (...) class='Hi'>subaltern,” the “hegemonic subaltern,” and the “citizen-subaltern.” Far from being exhausted by the eclipse of the conditions it was initially called upon to theorize in Subaltern Studies, such a refigured notion of the subaltern has the potential to cast light both on the contradictory development of political modernity and on contemporary political processes. (shrink)

Umesh Bagade’s historic critique of the caste blindness of the Subaltern Studies project retraces its emergence as a criticism of the Nationalist and Marxist schools of Indian history. He shows how the subaltern historians borrowed Antonio Gramsci’s concept of “subaltern” in order to retain a broadly Marxist framework without “class” but discarded the crucial Gramscian emphasis on oppression and economic exploitation. They grievously misread, confused, or omitted caste as a “system” when they constructed their model of the (...) subaltern as subordinate but autonomous. The caste system functioned as a graded inequality with close links to patriarchy in which the lower castes were oppressed, exploited, and subordinated rather than autonomous. A homogenized “subaltern” status thus lumped the oppressed lower-caste peasants and the tribal peasantry with upper-caste peasantry. It was not acknowledged that the “solidarity” that expanded the base of subaltern revolt was achieved through coercion of the lower castes and women. The subaltern cultural “consciousness” of caste Panchayats, which was central to the project’s epistemology, was governed by Brahmanical religion and culture. The kinship relations that comprised peasant solidarities were built on endogamous caste practices. Predictably, the Subaltern Studies project found a close affinity with postmodernism and eschewed the question of emancipatory politics. The project therefore excluded anticaste mobilizations from the purview of “subaltern revolts” and simultaneously rejected the need for a comprehensive historical interpretation in which the caste system and patriarchy could be analyzed and opposed. In exposing the biases and lacunae of subaltern historiography, Bagade provides a clinical observation of history with an eye on history’s ability to influence reality. He shows the path that was not taken, which anticaste scholarship is now forging. (shrink)

An unconventional formalization of the canonical square of opposition in the notation of classical symbolic logic secures all but one of the canonical square’s grid of logical interrelations between four A-E-I-O categorical sentence types. The canonical square is first formalized in the functional calculus in Frege’s Begriffsschrift, from which it can be directly transcribed into the syntax of contemporary symbolic logic. Difficulties in received formalizations of the canonical square motivate translating I categoricals, ‘Some S is P’, into symbolic logical notation, (...) not conjunctively as \, but unconventionally instead in an ontically neutral conditional logical symbolization, as \. The virtues and drawbacks of the proposal are compared at length on twelve grounds with the explicit existence expansion of A and E categoricals as the default strategy for symbolizing the canonical square preserving all original logical interrelations. (shrink)

A commitment to engage with the structural and historical processes that result in discrimination and injustice in the utilisation of natural resources and landscapes is an epistemic responsibility that must be achieved in order to imagine a just society in which environmental justice is a feasible possibility. Indian author Bhoopal’s Forests, Blood & Survival: Life and Times of Komuram Bheem (2023), translated from Telugu by P A Kumar, is one such literary narrative that vividly portrays the injustices endured by tribal (...) communities in India at the hands of colonial forest officers, money lenders, capitalist extractive authorities, and other oppressive authorities. In this context, the article explicates this narrative of tribal communities to demonstrate and encourage alternative viewpoints and positions of tribal cultures that may confront the dominance of colonial-capitalist logic as a monolithic framework in environmental discourse. In doing so, the first section discusses the natural environment of the tribes and their way of life, followed by an intervention on the colonial brutality and injustices that tribals have been subjected to, and finally, how their resistance is deemed to be subaltern environmentalism. (shrink)

This introductory chapter sets out the rationale for the ensuing chapters and their division into different parts. It also provide an overall and comprehensive prologue to the Gramsci-Ambedkar encounter. Indeed, "parallels are strong and very striking for two thinkers who are otherwise so different - in political experience, philosophical background and ideas of effective strategy" (Jon Soske, personal communication). Nevertheless, the moral fabric of their political commitment to Dalits/subalterns bring them very close, particularly in the upholding of Gramsci's 'intellectual and (...) moral reform' and Ambedkar's 'social and moral consciousness of society'. (shrink)

The ways in which the Aristotelian sciences are related to each other has been discussed in the literature, with some focus on the subalternate sciences. While it is acknowledged that Aristotle, and Plato as well, was concerned as well with how the arts were related to one another, less attention has been paid to Aristotle's views on relationships among the arts. In this paper, I argue that Aristotle's account of the subalternate sciences helps shed light on how Aristotle saw the (...) art of rhetoric relating to dialectic and politics. Initial motivation for comparing rhetoric with the subalternate sciences is Aristotle's use of the language of boundary transgression, germane to the Posterior Analytics, when discussing rhetoric’s boundaries, as well as the language of "over" and "under" found in APo. First, I discuss three passages in Rhetoric Book I and argue that Garver's (1988) account cannot be correct. Second, I look to the subalternate sciences, especially focusing on optics and the distinction between "unqualified" optics and mathematical optics. Third, I discuss rhetoric's dependence on both dialectic and politics. (shrink)

This essay traces the ontological and political limits of Bruno Latour’s conceptualization of the ‘common world’. Latour formulates this concept in explicating how modernist scientific and political institutions require a metaphysical foundation that is anti-democratic in rigidly partitioning nature from society. In the stead of nature/society, Latour proposes a ‘cosmopolitics’ in which we recognize our embroilment in systems comprised of heterogeneous human and nonhuman actors, and seek to innovate appropriate procedures for governing such systems and composing a more peaceful common (...) world. However, feminist and postcolonialist science studies scholars have argued that Latour’s project fails to apprehend the experiences of subjects marginalized by scientific and political structures of representation. Thus, science studies scholars seem to be faced with a problem; to avoid ontological dissonance and contradiction in integrating Latour’s program with feminist and postcolonialist critiques we must defer his claims that the cosmopolitical program entirely supersedes contemporary social movements and oppositional politics. I offer an alternative. Namely, I argue that Latour’s formulations of cosmopolitics’ procedures and the common world’s boundaries actually require an incipient model of the limits of democratic representation. I modify Latour’s proposed system of representation by reading it against Dipesh Chakrabarty’s concept of ‘subaltern pasts’, which are unassimilable to academic historical narratives (in their attribution of agency to nonhuman gods, for example). This reading emphasizes how Latour does not adequately theorize and politicize the partially autonomous reality of those excluded from the common world and thus fails to attend to how this externalization replicates the violence of modernist representational institutions. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus (...) Tyrannos. Dramaturgically read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics. (shrink)

Although Gramsci's notions of hegemony and subalternity may seem outdated in this 21st century, a critical examination of the literature shows that these concepts apply in this global pandemic and political context. Racialization is a form of structural violence. In this paper, I also explore Gramsci's’ notion of engaged intellectuals to support the idea of social and political activism in nursing. Nurse scholars call for the decolonization of the discipline. Gramsci's philosophical approach to hegemony can be extended to racialization in (...) nursing. Gramsci's notions of civil society and state can help nurses to see the structures that create racism in nursing and society. (shrink)

Apart from the said AAR Symposium, a central part of the paper was also earlier presented in the Philosophy Department Colloquia, in the University of Melbourne; and it has benefited from my research in the Gibson Library as a Senior Fellow in the Department. I note gratidue also to my #259 colleagues, Dr Guy Petterson and Patrick Hutchings for help with research and/or comments on various excerpted drafts from the evolving work. And to many friends who have heard my wailings (...) on this problematic across the Tasman-Pacific-Indian-Atlantic waters. (shrink)

Spectacular outbreaks against the Portuguese receive regular scholarly attention. Resistance qualifies as an act against the colonial state, and in doing so, the dominant castes have succeeded in m...

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's original essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism's "worlding" of the world. Spivak's essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, (...) to be able to access the state, and to suffer the burden of difference in a capitalist system that promises equality yet withholds it at every turn. Since its publication, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued. In these phenomenal essays, eight scholars take stock of the effects and response to Spivak's work. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights. Then, through the lens of Spivak's essay, they rethink historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates "Can the Subaltern Speak?" within contemporary issues, particularly new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico. In an afterword, Spivak herself considers her essay's past interpretations and future incarnations and the questions and histories that remain secreted in the original and revised versions of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"—both of which are reprinted in this book. (shrink)

Historians of fourteenth-century science have long recognized the extraordinary work at both Oxford and Paris in which natural philosophy was becoming highly mathematical. The movement to subject natural philosophy to a mathematical analysis and to quantify such qualities as heat, color, and of course speed surely stands as one of the most significant aspects of late medieval science. Yet as Edith Sylla has observed, because qualities and quantities pertain to different categories in Aristotelian theory, one might expect Aristotelian theorists to (...) avoid quantifying qualities. Even more serious still, the very task of quantifying physical qualities exposes a tension in the nature of science that was discussed first by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics. (shrink)

In Adivasis and the State, Alf Gunvald Nilsen presents a major study of how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in the Bhil heartland of western India. The book unravels the historical processes that subordinated Bhil Adivasi communities to the everyday tyranny of the state and investigates how social movements have mobilised to reclaim citizenship. In doing so, the book also reveals how collective action from below transform the meanings of governmental categories, legal frameworks, and universalising vocabularies (...) of democracy. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India. Towards this end, Adivasis and the State contributes a sustained and nuanced Gramscian analysis of hegemony in order to interrogate the possibilities and limits of subaltern political engagement with state structures. (shrink)