| dc.description | From July 10 to 12, 2013, I attended the annual conference of the European Global Studies Association at Roehampton University, London, UK. The theme of this year’s conference was “The Cosmopolitan Ideal: Challenges and Opportunities”. It was a small conference of nearly 200 delegates and aimed to critically interrogate the idea of cosmopolitanism as a notion that emphasizes the multiplicity of identities, belongings, and memberships that are possible across a plurality of communities. Aside from my ongoing research, publications, and program development within the field of Global Studies, this theme resonated with my ongoing project dealing with the significance of individual historical narratives towards inculcating a “sense of history”. My paper argues that a “sense of history” in terms of engagement with the past, as well as the construction of history, is often a process that is driven from above, by the social and political elite of the time. However, as the gulf between the histories of peoples and the state widens in this era of rapid globalization and the neoliberal retreat of the state, there is a greater need to bridge the gap between historical theory and the study of historical memory. My paper advocates for the social history approach of Subaltern Studies to broaden and deepen the understanding of global history and explores the significance of historical narratives such as The Book of Negroes (Lawrence Hill, 2007), Kiss of the Fur Queen (Tomson Highway, 1998) and Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958) to bring back the focus on peoples and processes, not only on events. There was a lot of gratifying discussion related to my project during and after my presentation, setting a very positive stage for the archival work that I embarked upon after the conference. Since this is an ongoing research, I am unable to share the draft paper in the public domain, however, the abstract of the paper follows below and I welcome any questions or suggestions through private communication.
Title: Subaltern Approach and the “Sense” of History in Global Studies
Abstract: In the 1980s, the scope of enquiry of Subaltern Studies was applied as a corrective to the dominant Eurocentric history writing, particularly in the South Asian postcolonial historiography. In its early commitment to social history, Subaltern Studies re-invented ‘subalternity’ by divorcing itself from Engel and Gramsci to invent a distinctive subalternity in which the nation was being re-configured, re-imagined, and re-theorised, exposing the breach between popular and national history. Subaltern Studies became an original site for a new kind of history from below, a people’s history free of national constraints, a post-nationalist re-imagining of the Indian nation on the underside, at the margins, and outside nationalism. Additionally, the intellectual efficacy of the term “Subaltern” enabled its adoption in fields such as anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and literary criticism.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, as the Cold War came to an end, critical attacks on the public sector under Reagan and Thatcher widened what many scholars began to see as a permanent rift between people and states. In more contemporary times, the gulf between the peoples and states has been widening worldwide as global capitalism fights states for power over national resources; through the emergence of the processes of globalization and the concentration of capital on a new level that is apparently outside the effective control of the state machinery; and the emergence of a new plurality of sites of resistance, social groupings, movements, regions, and subcultures. In this milieu, the paper will explore if the social history approach of early Subaltern Studies could enrich the texture and interpretation of contemporary global history? In particular, it will explore the usefulness of engaging with our interconnected global experience through individual historical narratives such as those provided by The Book of Negroes (Lawrence Hill, 2007), Kiss of the Fur Queen (Tomson Highway, 1998) and Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958). | en |
| dc.description.abstract | In the 1980s, the scope of enquiry of Subaltern Studies was applied as a corrective to the dominant Eurocentric history writing, particularly in the South Asian postcolonial historiography. In its early commitment to social history, Subaltern Studies re-invented ‘subalternity’ by divorcing itself from Engel and Gramsci to invent a distinctive subalternity in which the nation was being re-configured, re-imagined, and re-theorised, exposing the breach between popular and national history. Subaltern Studies became an original site for a new kind of history from below, a people’s history free of national constraints, a post-nationalist re-imagining of the Indian nation on the underside, at the margins, and outside nationalism. Additionally, the intellectual efficacy of the term “Subaltern” enabled its adoption in fields such as anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and literary criticism.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, as the Cold War came to an end, critical attacks on the public sector under Reagan and Thatcher widened what many scholars began to see as a permanent rift between people and states. In more contemporary times, the gulf between the peoples and states has been widening worldwide as global capitalism fights states for power over national resources; through the emergence of the processes of globalization and the concentration of capital on a new level that is apparently outside the effective control of the state machinery; and the emergence of a new plurality of sites of resistance, social groupings, movements, regions, and subcultures. In this milieu, the paper will explore if the social history approach of early Subaltern Studies could enrich the texture and interpretation of contemporary global history? In particular, it will explore the usefulness of engaging with our interconnected global experience through individual historical narratives such as those provided by The Book of Negroes (Lawrence Hill, 2007), Kiss of the Fur Queen (Tomson Highway, 1998) and Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958). | en |
