hay necesidad de ss_ rodríguez

7/28/2019 Hay necesidad de SS_ Rodrguez

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I.Rodriguez Is there a need for Subaltern Studies 1

I S THERE A NEED FOR SUBALTERN STUDI ES?

The questions Gustavo Verdesio, the editor of the present volume, sent us to serve

as general guidelines to organize our contributions can be grouped into four different sets

of interests. The first refers to the place of LATIN AMERICAN SUBALTERN

STUDIES (LASS) in the field of Latin American Studies, and asks for the relationship

between Subaltern, Cultural, Postcolonial Studies, and the type of cultural criticism

produced in Latin America. Perhaps the impetus behind this set is to make us ponder on

the commonalities of our efforts as Latin Americanists and make us realize that, in fact,

we belong to one and the same field and share the same genealogies. The second group

aims at establishing the particularities of the relationship between the South Asian

Subaltern Studies Collective and LASS, and points in the direction of a desencuentro

between the two groups. The third refers to the organizational structure of LASS, its

advantages and disadvantages, and wonders if it would have been better to choose a

different format, say an open rather than a closed structurea movement rather than a

group. And finally, the fourth set asks for the conditions of possibility of continuing the

subaltern studies discussion by other means, with other people, and under a different

format. Naturally, engaging in this dialogue implies on our part, were we to comply with

the request of the editor, to discuss the errors committed, speak about the possibilities

overlooked, and re-examine the limitations of our collective practice.

In the interest of collaborating with Verdesios project, I return to the praxis of the

group to re-examine our past endeavors. The nature of LASS and the type of work it did

is gathered in the volumes we published.1

In the introduction to the two volumes I edited,


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I particularly addressed issues related to who we were, our interests, differences, and

particular approaches to the field.2

And more recently, I took a somewhat different route

in an interview forRevista de Crtica Cultural.3

Whatever we were as a collective is all

recorded there and I think there is very little I can add to what I have already said on the

subject. In this piece I am interested not only in revisiting the proposal of subalternism as

an alternative and counterhegemonic epistemology that for me marked the continuity of

the legacy of Marxism by other means, but also in doing a retrospective situational

analysis of the juncture that brought us together, and in reconsidering some of the real

structural issues that caused the final demise of the group under that light.

SUBALTERN, CULTURAL, POSTCOLONIAL STUDI ES: THEIR GENEALOGIES

Subaltern Studies is in many ways for me the name of a transition. Given the

available choices within the field at the timea Marxism whose limits were already a

hindrance in thinking about the social processes inflected by high modernity, alongside

the most festive, triumphalist, and market oriented current of Cultural Studies, heavily

dependent on deconstructionI, together with the historical founders of the group, chose

the path of Subaltern Studies.4

Our program, project, and intentions are all made explicit

in our Founding Statement, a piece that was very well received in the field and that

became the object of desire for many in the profession.5

In that piece, our politics were

explicit and they turned around two central axes, one was the principle of solidarity with

the poor, and the other, the affinity of the groups members. Our recalcitrant faith in the

social agency of the poor, on the belief that they were endowed with consciousness and a

political will that could serve as a foundation for a theory, and the affinity (defined as a


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political sensibility), between the members of the collective was our investment, a way of

micro-managing the transition from an engaged past to a demobilized present and an

uncertain future. This is our first legacy to the field. The work of Ranajit Guharead

for instanceElementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, which contains

the kernel of his thinkingis permeated by this idea, and although we post- and neo-

Latin Americanist Marxists can think twice about the use of categories like peasant, or

feudal to refer to class and mode of production (the discussion around these themes in

Latin American scholarship is huge), his work was already in transit to other ways of

thinking the poor. Guha brought to the scene the mediation of Antonio Gramsci that later

led us in the direction of Ernesto Laclaus andChantal Mouffes work on the concept of

hegemony that revisited the genealogy of this term in relationship to the development of

the great International European workers movementFirst, Second, and Thirdand to

uneven development that were both useful concepts in understanding the transition in

Latin America. Guha was our mediator and compass during those disorienting days.6

Nonetheless, in no way or manner does this bet on the poor and its consciousness

and political will imply we were a nave or populist left (la izquierda boba)a

discussion we entertained in our second reunion at Ohio State. There was no Manichean

bent implicit in this conception, no ethical distinction between good and evil, not even the

idea of victims and oppressors. There was, on the contrary, the necessity of revising, or

rather constructing a theory of resistance grounded on the practices, consciousness, and

will of the poor. The question was, if class and class-consciousness were no longer the

guiding light, the trumpet card that served to adjust the unadjustable and explain the

unexplainable (that was what hegemony did for Laclau and Mouffe), what were the new


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and old ways of performing that consciousness? Where had we gone wrong in our

understanding of the agent of change? Enough water had run under the bridge for us to

realize that the projects and practices of the left (we had been part of it), in their

multifarious and metamorphosed ways, were not only already severely pass but also to

some extent corrupted. We knew that the determination in the last instance (that gave

rise to theories of reflection in art and literature and to the nave belief in the transparency

of language, and the immediacy of political, ideological and class consciousness)

proposed by the two tier model of Marxism had fallen into disrepute, and the

displacement of the key organizing concept of class by new theories of the subject and

subjectivity (mainly those proposed by feminism and ethnic studies) had left a vacant

space, a big hole, a vacuum that urgently needed to be theorized. We were Marxist; we

had read our Marxism; we were aware of the polemics within Marxism.

This fact notwithstanding, we could not let go of the desire of constructing a

critical approach to culture from the viewpoint of the subaltern and in solidarity with

them. We did not share the disposition of demobilizing the poor or of depriving them of

their agency; we were not going to make them pay for the corruption of party politics or

for the necessities history and tradition brought to bear on these types of social, political,

and cultural organizations. And agency was the magic word or formula we seemed to

encounter in the South Asian collective use of the term subaltern. Agency plus the term

subaltern itself seemed to give meaning to cultural criticism and value to a field left

empty by the evacuation of Marxist categories. In the work of the South Asian collective

we found the vehicle to perpetuate whatever could be rescued of a depleted epistemology,

and we used Subaltern Studies to make a statement; we used it as a pre-text to put forth


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yet another agenda of field work in the transition from a bi- to a unipolar world system.

We said that much in our Founding Statement.

However, by the time the historical founding members met for the very first time

at George Mason University, a very important body of work on this transition was

already at work in Latin America. We were conversant with this type of work. The fact

that we are always called to make the distinction between Subaltern and Cultural Studies,

more than between Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies is proof that the difference

between us could not be so easily discerned. This was a sign not only of the

contemporaneity of our scholarship but also of the sharing of some presuppositions and

concerns. After all, we are in the same field; we belong to the same professional group,

and yes, we share our genealogies. All of us,fin de siglo cultural workers in the field of

Latin American studies, were of one and the same generationten years of difference

between us, give and take. As students, most of us were brought up under the aegis of

Marxism, whether of the orthodox or revisionist kind, which was the dominant paradigm

during our formative years. Most of us, at least in our early youth, were politically

engaged, some were militants in social movements, most of us became public

intellectuals who participated in public debates in our respective societies, marched

against the war in Vietnam in the US, worked in the solidarity committees in favor of all

the movements in Latin America, supported the revolution. We were engaged

intellectuals, people who took a stand, wrote for the newspapers, read the same books.

The Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools that gained so much notoriety in the

works of Cultural Studiesidentified cultural analysts had been for all of us ex- or post-


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Marxists, the seedbeds of large polemics on the constitution of culture and the role of

culture in regard to society, class, and party construction, and yes, important elements in

the discussion of ideology and class struggle. Who is not going to remember the polemic

between party intellectuals like George Lukacs and Bertold Brecht? Who ignored the

power of Adornos negative dialectics? Who was not learned in the Benjaminian

warnings of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and the art of story telling? Who

did not know the polemic on class undertaken by Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and

Raymond Williams? In fact, Guha belongs to that generation of historians who, so the

oral history goes, did not give a damn about his work. All those bibliographies were

there to be recognized by all of us; those bibliographies were our common ground, our

true home base. We had also been schooled in the Ecole des Annales founded by Lucien

Fevbre and Marc Bloch in 1929, and knew first hand the works of Fernand Braudel, of

Henry Pirenne, of Pierre Vilar. All that and more, like the French School of criticism:

Pierre Macheray, Lucien Goldman, Louis Althusser. And if Macheray and Goldman

were already gathering dust in the attic or were consigned to the garbage heap of history

the same is not true of the work of Louis Althusser who is key to the transition to the new

French theoreticiansFoucault, Lacan, and Derridawho were going to be the stars of

the new firmament, the munificent and opulent theoreticians of the transition back to the

unipolar world of capitalism, whose theories traveled widely without ever being

considered traveling theoriesSpivaks Can the Subaltern Speak stood as a

groundbreaking exception.7

We all had been breastfed by the same tradition and we all

were in the process of being weaned. The difference between us at that moment, the

difference that was being emphasized and paraded, was our place of enunciation. Where


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we lived became a determining factor at the juncture of globalization. This was nothing

new because this was also true at the time of the revolution. Knowledge was equated

with lived experience and I dont have any argument against that. However, in my view,

our posture before the transition, what each of us chose to emphasize, distinguished the

two approaches to the field. The transition from liberalism to neo-liberalism was the real

parting of the waters.

One way of stating this transition that sticks in my mind is Silviano Santiagos.

Speaking about Brazilian culture, but the same could have been said of Chilean and

Argentinian culturein fact, I read the work of Nelly Richard along these lines

Santiago states that

In those three years we are referring to [1979-1981], the struggle of the

leftists against the military dictatorship ceases to be the hegemonic question in the

cultural and artistic Brazilian scene, opening up space to new problems and

reflections inspired by the democratization in the country (I insist: in the country,

not of the country). The transition of this century to its "end" is defined by the

bereavement of those who exit, supported by their companions in struggle and by

the memory of the recent political events, and, at the same time, by the audacity

of the new generation that comes in, pushing the door as impotent radicals

without memory of the present. To the sorrow of those who leave is opposed the

emptiness to be inhabited by the acts and words of those who come in (my

translation).8


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This transition from what Raul Antelo calls the Declnio da Arte, Ascensao da

Cultura(this is the title of his book that published Santiagos article) was characterized

by taking off the black and somber cloths of the military dictatorship to dress in the

festive and transparent garments of the democracy. One of the books Santiago mentions

to illustrate this change carries the very telling title ofPatrulhas Ideolgicas, a book that

is more a gathering of the polemic that establishes the balance of the generation that

resisted and suffered during the regime of exclusion and less as a platform of a new

generation that desired to take literally the "diastole"of the militarization of the

country" (my translation, 12).

9

Without any questions, the most significant book at that time was Nestor Garca

Canclinis Culturas Hbridas. Jean Franco, George Ydice, Renato Rosaldo, Juan Flores

brought that book to the attention of the North American academy. But the important

work of Renato Ortiz, Jess Martn Barbero, Roberto Schwartz, Silviano Santiago,

Beatriz Sarlo, Nelly Richard (to mention solely those living in Latin America, because

the question raised implies a comparison between forms of continental

Latinamericanismmainly in the US and in Latin America) was in circulation and being

vehemently discussed by all of us. Some of these scholars represented the state of the art

of the field, and if they were not the vanguard they were the postmodern avant-garde.

The greatest rubric of those works was the analysis of mass, electronic, and

industrial pop cultures, but looking at those texts with the wisdom of hindsight, they

represent the scholarship of the transition from a world with telos to one without it; they

were in fact the effects of the transition to democracy fostered by the programs of neo-


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liberalism. All these works responded to the needs of peripheral societies as they

adjusted themselves to the new logic of high modernity or postmodernity. They were

adamant in analyzing the new profile liberalism projected in the programs of neo-

liberalism. After all, the defeat of the revolutionary lan or even of serious popular and

social democratic projects of governance, ran from South to North. Looking at this body

of work from this perspective, I can understand the reluctance on the part of Latin

American scholars to be grouped under the festive rubric of Cultural Studiesa current

of thought they associated with North American academy. Actually, to my knowledge,

their work officially circulated under the rubric of Cultural Studies only after Mabel

Moraa edited her volume titled Nuevas Perspectivas desde/sobre Amrica Latina: El

desafo de los estudios culturales, which was the proceedings of the first conference she

organized in Pittsburgh under that title.10

But I could be wrong.

These Latin American scholars, whose home base was in Latin America, were

serious analysts of the transition to the neo- and the post-. They proposed new and

alternative ways to the field of Latin American Studies, reflected on the disciplines that

had formed the identities of the former nation-states, identified the new profiles of

fragmented, shattered, and dispersed social subjects and social movements locally, and

discussed the inadequacies of the liberal paradigms circulating in a mimicry of civil

society. In this, there was a convergence of interests between them and us. They spoke

about modernity, modernizing, and modernization, we of Western Reason and the

philosophies of the Enlightenment. And in their cultural analysis they, like us, made a

move to include all forms of culturenot only high but also pop, mass, industrial, and

electronic cultures. These themes were also taken over by the discussions established by


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the national and international commissions on truth and reconciliation that fostered the

production of testimonials and changed the notion of historiography bringing the

disciplines of history, anthropology, and sociology closer to the spirit of Subaltern

Studies. In these efforts, their and our works dovetailed.

However, and this is clearer to me now that we have moved to another juncture,

one question has us equally baffled, this time not so much because we dont understand

what is going on but because we understand it all too well. In those days, LASS scholars

were more invested in revising and insisting on the left than in debating the aporias of

liberalism. We were more interested in finding out what had gone wrong, the future

possibilities for the left, and the nature of radicalism, more than in civil society, the new

social movements, or the debates on pluralism and democracy. This divergence of

interest is explained, I believe, in terms of the moment at which we came together as a

group, and the distance between the 1970s in the Southern Cone and the 1990s in Central

America and the Caribbeanthe fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the defeat of the

Sandinistas (1990) are just one year apart. The bottom line was that, at that juncture, we

saw ourselves as radical scholars and thought Cultural Studies scholars were liberal social

democrats, and there is some truth to that, right?

Yet, back then, all of us were looking for new vocabularies to undertake a

situational analysis of culture, an analysis that described a saturated public sphere in

which the new forms of opposition had to be re-imagined. It was clear that the

opposition had taken new unedited forms, some of which were going to derive on the

performative, the queer, and beyond. If I am going to pinpoint our intervention in the


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field, that is the insistence in the power of negative dialectics and radicalismnot so

much in governability as in ungovernability. In the notion of subalternity, I believe we

come closer to the gatherers of testimonials. I am thinking in particular of the works

undertaken in Colombia, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Guatemala by historians, journalists,

and all kinds of social agencies.11

This type of intellectual work compiles the

experiences and opinions of the downtrodden subaltern. Some of them were part of the

insurgency, some of the violence that came as a result of the insurgency, and some are the

effects produced by the transition to democracy. I am thinking ofsicarios, sufferers,

traitors, HIV infected people, the residues and shreds of the transition. Their voices

constitute what Nancy Fraser calls the subaltern counterpublics.12

Their ideas constitute

part of the discussion of the public sphere in Latin America and the basis for a true

democracy.

Living within the hegemonic nation, fully inserted within high modernity, we

took electronic and mass culture for granted and insisted on dwelling in the residual

memory of the left. It was not that we minimized the importance of that thematization of

the transition because who could deny the importance of mass mediation in the formation

of the new Latin American identitiesand/or the formation of public opinion worldwide;

who could subdue the importance of its consequences? See for instance the work on the

public sphere by Lauren Berlant that constitutes a counterpart of the work done in Latin

America. I am thinking of Sarlos work on consumption, or Frasers idea of the

counterpublics that is conversant with Richards, not to speak of the analysis of civil

society by Michael Hardt which could be a companion to Martin Barberos.13

It was

rather that we were more interested in what was left of the left, and in how to think left,


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or at least left of center within the hegemony of the right. That was one of our major

concerns and part of our legacy. Living in the metropolis, is it really that hard to

understand that gesture?

Mass consumption and the new forms of consumerism were certainly not

attractive venues from which to think the field. In this I believe we were closer to

Richard than to Sarlo, more to Barbero than to Canclini, more to Santiago than to Ortiz.

More attractive were all those remnants, the leftovers and shreds of the big defeat. I

personally was much less interested in the cultures of consumption and more in the great

duelo. We were aferrados, we clung to the memories of the past, hopes and memories

that were also part of the transition, and if being obstinate is just another name for the

virtue of persistence and resiliency, then our legacy to the field is precisely that: we were

the empecinados.

For that reason alone South Asian Subalternism was a proper vehicle for us. I

am sure they went through the same circle of hope and defeat, of uncritical allegiance and

critical distance, of the direct experience of the rising hopes for a better future for the

poor and the betrayal of corrupt leaders, hardened dogmas, and local cultural

determinations. They had a wealth of knowledge concerning their own local experience

they wanted to revise, unhinge, untangle. They were also discontented with the liberal

national leadership and the ideas of modernization and development western style that the

compradorbourgeoisie had displayed for purchase. We then were, so to speak, at ground

zero in several different parts of the world at different historical conjunctures but, to our

credit, it was we who recognized our affinities and not the other way around. This was


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due to the mediation of Gayatri Spivak who made them available to the U. S. academic

readership. The difference between localities, who was where when, also was a factor in

the constitution of that South Asian Subaltern Studies collective.

The relation between Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies was much more organic

and fluid from the very beginning. In my view of things, the agendas of these two

approaches were very compatible. Actually, the South Asian Subalternists called

themselves postcolonial and as postcolonial scholars they circulated within the First

World academies. In the Latin American version of Postcolonial Studies, there was an

explicit validation of ancient Amerindian cultures, a desire to unearth their old

epistemological ways of organizing the universe of meaning and in validating them.

There was also a need of linking old indigenous epistemologies to new indigenous

struggles and hence, a systemic analysis of capitalism was in order. The old Marxist

hermeneutics was resuscitated and Immanuel Wallerstein, Gunder Frank, Anibal Quijano,

and the Theology of Liberation came to be important referents. True, some read this

group of scholars because they were interested in system theories, in hermeneutics, and

some because they were interested in politics. That was a divide.

The impetus behind hermeneutics, to come to know what and how we know what

we know and in understanding the organization of knowledge in first world academies

was conversant with the criticism of Western reason and the desire to provintialize

Europethe phrase is Chakravartis, a desire that came along simultaneously with the

realization of the difficulties of carrying out such a task, namely, of reading against the

grain or in reverse, in viewing the world from the viewpoint of subalternity. For those


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locally and globally, and ultimately that it crossed Area Studies. Granted, the struggle

over Area Studies was a localized struggle but it was nevertheless a struggle to set the

tendency that would later spread out throughout the world.14

This was our way of speaking about the coloniality of knowledge, and our attempt

at provincializing the center. Hamid Dabashi put it very eloquently when he stated that

Our task is a recasting ofthe world map in which the primacy is to local geographies, to

the polylocality of our historical exigencies, the polyvocality of our voices, and the

polifocality of our visions (54).15

So, for those of us with home bases at the center, what

were our localities, vocalities, and focalities; what the place to speak from, our

community, our neighborhood? We saw ourselves as the periphery of the center whereas

our colleagues in Latin America were the center of the periphery. However, these

positionalities have never been acknowledged. More often than not, there is a conflation

of locality and possitionality and all of us are lumped together within dominancecosas

de gringos. Ours was a call for a dialogue among and between minority subaltern

intellectuals that never came to fruition. That can be part of the agenda for the new

project, and, the idea, our legacy to the field.

In this new phase of geopolitics and geoculture, there is, once again, the

possibility of going back to revise the common ground of Cultural, Postcolonial, and

Subaltern Studies, and to realize how the work of social scientists and cultural critics

converge in the use of bibliographies and approaches. Two of the most recent books I

have read, Martin Hopenhayns Neither Apocalypse, nor Integration and Arturo

Escobars Encountering Development are clear instances of the cross between social

scientists and cultural workers.16

Hopenhayn is interested in combining the literature


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produced by development literature in institutions like CEPAL, UNESCO, PNUD, etc.

and the contribution provided by cultural analysis regarding cultural consumption and

symbolic vindications. Arturo Escobar is interested in colonial difference, and in Saids

fashion of Orientalism, he proposes Developmentalism as the construction of Latin

America. The same can be said of all those studies that utilize the notion of subaltern

counter spheres. There is too a new energy coming from a new type of intellectual work

financed by non-governmental agencies and characterized by going directly to the

archives of the living, the productive agents, to bring their voices to bear on the public

discussion. In these efforts we find the convergence of Cultural, Subaltern, and

Postcolonial Studies approaches, new ways social and cultural analysts reinsert

themselves within the social fabric and feed the discussions of the public sphere.

Through these works subalterns constitute themselves into dialoguing partners and active

agents of the social fabric of today.

In sum, for all of us, as cultural analysists, the end of the century was

characterized by an epistemological break, a snap in the semiotic chain. The

consciousness of that break generated the new approaches to the field. We felt the need

to revisit the old sites and to rework the production of knowledge, the workings of

culture, and the agency of people. I like Hopenhayns phrasing of this transition when he

asks what to do the day after the revolution. To paraphrase him, how must we understand

the world now that we are neither apocalyptic nor integrated.

SOUTH ASIAN AND LATI N AMERICAN SUBALTERN STUDI ES COLLECTIVES

Of all the members of the South Asian collective, the one we privileged was

Ranajit Guha, the founder, our senior. It was his work we read and discussed and it was


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him we wanted to meet and the first to come to one of our gatherings. It was Patricia

Seed who organized a special reunion at Rice for us to meet him. The opening article in

our English volume published by Duke UP was the piece he read at that reunion. In that

piece he speaks about the intersection of times and argues that it is this particular phase

of global temporality[that constitutes] the ground that should suffice to compare [our]

two projects (36-7). Global temporalitypostmodernity, if you willwas his way of

approaching us. But in that article too, he also explained that the genesis of their project

was grounded in the South Asian experience and that they had never entertained

aspirations to universality; they did not count on any readership abroad. They were local

intellectuals dedicated to the study of their local community, their region, South Asia.17

Whatever approach Guha used was at the level of abstraction, and he always

acknowledged he knew very little about our field. Frankly speaking, we do not know

much about theirs either. In fact, in an effort to reach us, he used the mediation of

literature, availing himself of Gabriel Garca Marquez metaphor when he thanked us for

making it possible for them to break out their containment in two hundred years of

solitude (35)18

A few years later, at the conference at Duke, we got to know Dipesh Chakravarty

and Gyan Prakash, and at Columbia, at the homage Gayatry Spivak and Hamid Dabashi

organized for Guha, a group of us heard Partha Chaterjee speak. Other types of

associations we had with them are limited to my publication of the articles by

Chakravarty, Dipesh, and Dabashi in our volume in Spanish. These three pieces remind

me of our own analysis of modernism and modernization. And then I heard there had

been two other meetings with them, one in Chicago, organized by Chakravarty, and one


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in Mexico, organized by Saraub Dube, to which only a couple of us were invited. By the

times these events took place, LASS was already in total disarray. Some of the members

of LASS engaged the work of Chakravarty too.

Overall, in their individual relationships with us, the members of the South Asian

collective were courteous and deferential but never to my knowledge intellectually

engagingexception be made of Dube who works in Mexico. At Duke they remained

mostly to themselves because they were conscious they were not part of our field

discussion but, in private, I know they thoroughly enjoyed the conference and considered

it of a high caliber. Therefore when the statement that they olympically ignore us

comes my way, I understand by it that some of us have noticed, and resented, that our

work, field, and bibliographies are indifferent to them, and have no bearing on their work.

Thinking seriously about the meaning of their indifference to our work, I can only

interpret it in light of the sharp division between fields and Area StudiesSouth Asia,

Latin America, etc. This division fosters a tradition of ignorance amongst the regions of

the world and favors the mediation of knowledge via Europe and Western thought. This

division is also part and parcel of the coloniality of power and part of our discussion over

Area Studies. It tells me that in the division of knowledge into rigidly classified

disciplines yawns the gap between disciplinary knowledges and this makes impossible

the interdisciplinary dialogue across, and that in particular the division between social

and human sciences has a sharp edge. Historians and literary specialists hardly ever

cross-reference each other. It is as if we worked at cross-purposes with each other, they

with their archives and us with figures of speech; they with the real thing and we with

the metaphysics of presence.


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Granted, in all appearance, for the South Asian collective there was nothing, or

very little, in a dialogue with us. In talking to themselves about us, they always

dismissed us by sustaining that ours was a different thing, but they never took the

trouble of seriously engaging in a conversation on the nature of that difference. So

while we did our thing they did theirs, and in so doing, we all remained locked within our

own forms of localism. Hence we chose to relate to each other through the European

mediation of Antonio Gramsci. That was our loss. We, the transnational peripheral

intelligentsia missed the opportunity to converse. Perhaps the moment was unpropitious.

Perhaps when we came into the scene, their collective work had lost their cohesion and

political impetus and the pervading cynicism of the epoch had dimmed their light.

Perhaps the transition also introduced an element of distrust that disconcerted them as it

did us. Perhaps all of us, the most radical flank of the international intelligentsia, were

turning into social democrats. Perhaps we were losing our grip and becoming openly

conservative. Who knows! But in theirdesconocimiento or disavowal of us, if you will,

I rather see a negation of themselves and of their own excellence and importance. They

turned their faces away from the image we provided for them in the speculum of Latin

American Subaltern Studies.

The fact is that, had we all recognized the productivity of a dialogue amongst

ourselves, we could have moved from a national and regional form of localization to a

continental and even global peripheral, one from below. To my knowledge, only Dabashi

and Spivak recognized this angle. At Columbia University Guha said he had transcended

subalternism and implied we should do likewise. To settle his scores with Marx, Guha

had turned to Hegel and high Indian culture, to the literature of the elite. It was in


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response do this new turn that Dabashi ironically drew the dividing line by stating, in a

paraphrase of Marx, that he was not a subalternist. This is then a good point to consider

for the future agenda of subalternism.

THE ORGANIZATI ONAL STRUCTURE OF TH E GROUP:

Considering the historical juncture of our coming together, the collapse of LASS

(and I almost dare say of the South Asian collective too) is part of the collapse of the left

and its forms of organization. During our formative years we had organized study groups

to instruct ourselves and read the material not included in the curricula. Drawing on this

model, we came together as a collective and disregarded that collective formats were a

thing of the past. The idea itself was vitiated and contaminated in all flanks due to the

similitude collectivities held with models pertaining to political parties and organizations

on the one hand, and the corporate world in the other. That was then a strike one against

us.

Strike two was the waning interest in the poor. Latin America is one of those

areas Arrigui calls redundant or obsolete. He argues that in the new structural change of

capitalism, one of those transitions from an organizational phase to an eclectic phase of

capital accumulation, [e]ntire communities, countries, even continentshave been

declared redundant, superfluous to the changing economy of capital accumulation on a

world scale (330). He further states that now [c]lass struggle and the polarization of

the world-economy in the peripheral localesboth of which played a prominent role in

[his] original conception of the long twentieth centuryhave almost completely dropped

out of the picture (xii) and that the equality of courage and force which, by inspiring

mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of


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respect for the rights of one another (21) was also a done deal. If that was so, then, who

was going to be interested in the Latin American poor? We had to think hard and fast

about that question. The interest in the Gulbenkian Commission Report regarding social

sciences and the book on the invention of the Latin American field by Mark T. Berger is

related to this awareness.19

Strike three was character: We were not empresarios, entrepreneurs, or brokers.

We were not bureaucrats. We did not want to invest our time organizing the group. We

wanted the group to exist de facto, spontaneously. We came together at the annual

conference and at the annual conference we decided who was to take it next and what the

theme was. Had we made a real and genuine effort, we could have worked out bylaws,

thought about membership, organized research agendas, founded a journal. We did

nothing of that. We limited ourselves to organizing panels at LASA and the MLA and to

preparing our annual gatherings. There were voices proposing a more coherent plan of

action as there was sometimes assiduous communication between us via email, but that

was the extent of that.

In spite of this negative climate, and of all of LASS shortcomings, ours was an

attempt to keep subalterns at the center of the theoretical agenda, and it was a historical

and theoretical project tied to politics. Still is. When subalterns are transformed into

theoretical categories, they are given a status as active agents in the production of

knowledge. The South Asian collective, and Guha in particular, makes them absolutely

pivotal to the structure of imperial historiography and hence of politics. When he points

out the slippery character of subalternity he is referring to the anxieties produced in the

minds of hegemonic subjects and how it affects their writing and their knowledge


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production. The mere existence of subalterns constituted into an interruptus made the

entire history of colonialism a failed enterprise in spite of the high rates of capital

accumulation. Our effort resided in trying to foment a paradigm of postcoloniality based

on subalternity, that is, in subordination, and what subordination represented for the

production of knowledge, for the historical archive, at the precise moment in which the

institutional agendas were turning towards a corporate model of knowledge production

that launched a severe offensive against any type of subaltern agenda. Industrial and

electronic cultures came to have a bearing in this great leap forward of North American

universities.

20

In opposing this agenda LASS became attractive and desirable. Looking at

it from this perspective, the project is even more attractive today.

I think that had we worked out a solid organizational structure, and had we had a

clear research agenda, then our project could have survived. Thinking in retrospect, there

were several ways of constructing affinities in our group. There were the young and the

old; the established and the beginners; the European, the Africans, and the Latin

Americans, men and women, blacks and non-blacks, gay, straight, and bisexual, but all

those signs and discourses were conveniently disregarded. Differences were in fact never

discussed. We ignored the fact that rank and hierarchy of all kinds are also part of social

relations and the distinction between elite and subaltern is always duplicated in all social

structures. Ours was no exception. The effect of all this unfinished business was a

climate of distrust and distrust translated into a form of disrespect amongst the members.

This is, I dare say, a very maculinist way of approaching group dynamics but what else is

new? Masculine protocols were coming back into fashion. Our differences, our

heterogeneity, could have been a source of wealth, instead they became a hindrance.


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Difference was the big and unresolved question raised at our meeting in Puerto Rico.

Rather than confronting difference head on, we spoke about it procedurally, in terms of

membership and group structure, mechanically, harried, and pressed. But, one thing is

certain, and that was that no one wanted to organize the group on the basis of exclusions

because exclusions reeked of party politics and all of us were sick of that.

If I am going to sum up our problems, I would say that our academic discussion

was harassed by historical, political and academic distrust. I am sure each one of us felt

at a certain moment unwanted. Was distrust a symptom of the perception of

incompatible research agendas? Did we transfer our political discrepancies to our

organizational discrepancies? Nothing was ever spelled out in the open. We tried doing

it at our last meeting at Duke. I have the fondest memories of that meeting, one of the

best I have ever attended, because I could see all our potential displayed. We were

strong, obstinate, brave. To this day I lament our demise because, together, we were

simply a formidable group.

Disregarded by the South Asian collective and somewhat ignored by the Latin

American Latin Americanists residing in Latin America and in the U.S., the group as a

group nonetheless had a strong appeal in the field and much of the emerging discontent

was due to the desire to join us. For the young we were providing models of academic

interventionnot only theoretical models (that too) but also energy, ways of organizing

themselves, ways of having an impact. That is another of our legacies to the field.

POLI CY STATEM ENTS AND F IELD FORECASTING THE GROUP LEGACY

This is a free country and we are free agentsso the individualist motto reads.

We all abide by it. So, if the purpose is to do Subaltern Studiespor la libre, then there is


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approaches, know well who they can and want to work with. I welcome this project and

wishwhoever wants to undertake the effort to organize it, good luck.


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1Jos Rabasa, Javier Sanjins, Robert Carr (eds.). Subaltern Studies in the Americas. A special issue of

Dispositio/No 46, 1996.2 Ileana Rodrguez (Ed.) The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Durham, London: Duke UP,

2002; Convergencia de Tiempos: Estudios Subalternos/Contextos Latinoamericanos: Cultura, Estado,Subalternidad. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.3El Grupo Latinoamericano de Estudios Subalternos. Revista de Crtica Cultural. Junio 2002, No. 24:

71-774 For a similar discussion on multiculturalism see Nancy Fraser. Justice Interruptus. Critical Reflections

on the Postsocialist Condition. New York & London: Routledge, 1997;5 Latin American Subaltern Studies/Founding Statement. In John Beverley and Jos Oviedo. The

Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. A special issue ofboundary 2. Vol. 20, Number 3, Fall 1993:

110-121.6 Ranajit Guha. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Durham, London: Duke UP,1999.7Gayatry Spivak. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Marxism and

the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.8

Nesses tres anos a que estarmos nos referindo [1971-1981], a luta das esquerdas contra a ditadura militarydeixa de ser questao hegemonica no cenario cultural e artistico brasileiro, abrindo espaco para novos

problemas e reflexois inspirados pela democratizacao no pas (insisto: no pas, e nao do pas). A transicao

deste sculo para o seu fim se define pelo luto dos que saem, apoiados pelos compannheiros de luta epela lembranca dos fatos politicos recentes, e, ao mesmo tempo, pela audacia da nova geracao que entra,

arrombando a porta como impotents e desmemoriados radicais da atualidade. Ao luto dos que saem opo-

se o vazio a ser povoado pelos atos e palavras dos que estao entrando (12). Silviano Santiago Democratizaco noBrasil 1979-1981. (Cultura versus Arte) Declnio da Arte. Ascenso da Cultura. Raul Antelo et al (ed). Florianopolis: Letras

Contemporneas, 1998.9generacao que resistiu e sofreu durante o regime de excecao e menos como a plataforma de uma nova

geracao que desejava tomar ao pe da letra a diastoleda militarizacao do pas Santiago, ibid.10 Mabel Moraa. Nuevas Perspectivas desde/sobre Amrica Latina: El desafo de los estudios culturales.Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio, 200011 I am thinking in works like Alfredo Molano. Los aos de tropel: relatos de violencia. Bogot: Fondo

Editorial, 1985; Norma Vzquez, Cristina Ibez, Clara Murgialday. Mujeres-montaa. Vivencias deguerrilleras y colaboradoras del FMLN. Madrid: Grafistaff, 1996; Laurie Gunst. Born Fi Dead. A

Journey through the Jamaican Posse Underworld. Great Britain, Caledonian International Books, 1995;Mark Danner. The Massacre at El Mozote. New York: Vintage, 1993; Luz Arce. El Infierno. Santiago:

Planeta, 1993; Maria Alejandra Merino. Mi verad. Santiago de Chile, AGT, 1994.12 Nancy Fraser. Justice Interruptus. Critical Reflections on the Postsocialist Condition. New York &

London: Routledge, 1997; Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of ActuallyExisting Democracy. In Craig Calhoun (ed.). Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT,

1992.13 Lauren Berlant. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Durham & London: Duke UP, 1997l Beatriz Sarlo.Escenas de la vida postmoderna. Intelectuales, arte y

videocultura en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994;Nelly Richard,Residuos y metforas. (Ensayos

de crtica cultural sobre el Chile de la Transicin. Santiago de Chile: Cuarto Propio, 1998; Michael Hardt,

The Withering of Civil Society. Deleuze & Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, andCulture. Eleanor Kaufman & Kevin Jon Heller (eds.) Minnepolis: U. of Minnesota P., 1998: 158-178;

Jesus Martin Barbero. De los medios a las mediaciones. Mxico: Gustavo Gili, 1987.14 An good article to understand the institutional position of Spanish in the academy is Idelber Avelars

The Clandestine Mnage a Troi of Cultura Studies, Spanish, and Critical Theory. Profession 1999. The

Modern Language Association of America: 49-58.15 Hamid Dabashi. No soy subalternista. In Ileana Rodrguez. Convergencia de Tiempos. Estudios

subalternos/contextos latinoamericanos: estado, cultura, subalternidad. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001: 49-

60.


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16 Martin Hopenhayns Neither Apocalypse, No Integration. Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin

America. Durham & London: Duke UP., 2001; Arturo EscobarsEncountering Development. The Making

and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton UP., 1995.17 However in his bookElementary Aspectswe can see that to illustrate subaltern consciousness he is not

only a local scholar. In fact, he draws from the experiences of peasant uprisings in Europe, Asia, and

Africa and he mentions Latin America a few times, once in reference to the Amazonian Amerindians heknows through the work of Levy-Strauss and who, in his opinion, are people living in conditions of a

Stone Age culture in the Brazilian jungles (52).18Ranajit Guha. Subaltern Studies: Projects for our times and their convergence. Ileana Rodrguez (ed.)

The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Durham & London: Duke UP., 2001: 35-46.19 Gulbenkian Commission. Open the Social Sciences: Report of the Gulbenkian Commission on the

Restructuring of the Social Sciences. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford UP., 1996; Mark T. Berger. Under

Northern Eyes: Latin American Studies and US Hegemony in the Americas 1898-1990. Indiana: Indiana

UP., 1995.20 See my article on this subject. Ileana Rodrguez. Conocimientos fatigados y actividades en desuso:Cultura popular/arte de elite; microelectrnica/telecomunicacin. Estudios. Revista de Investigaciones

Literarias y Culturales. Ao 5, Julio-diciembre 1997, No. 10: 31-54.

hay necesidad de ss_ rodríguez

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