Subaltern

The concept of the subaltern denotes a range of political subjectivities that are dominated by the hegemonic structures of society. Etymologically, the word signifies subordination and otherness (from Latin sub, meaning under, and alter, meaning other). The term connotes ways in which the socially dominant seeks to maintain power over those without it. It also evokes the ways in which the dominant deny subordinated groups the opportunity to participate in structures of power in the first place by naming them as other, marginalizing them to the point of being excluded from the realm of the social itself.

The concept of the subaltern is derived from the work of Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci, writing in his Prison Notebooks, defines the group as those ignored by the hegemony and systematically excluded from the exercise of power. In Gramsci's definition, subalterns do not form an identifiable class in a Marxist sense, because they are unable to articulate a specific politics. They remain important in his analysis, however, as the oppressed populations that have the potential to create an alternative to the state. This structure is connected to the subordinated classes among southern Italians during the Risorgimento in Gramsci's writing, but his formulations have proven to be broad enough to be used in other contexts, and have been important to Marxist thinking in general.

In recent years, the term has come to be associated with the work of postcolonial critics. Ranajit Guha and the Subaltern Studies Group, focusing on postimperial India, use Gramsci's term in order to conceptualize subordinated peoples there. For Guha, the subaltern exists in a binary relationship with the dominant, but cannot simply be identified as such. Because it is not recognizable as a class, it is best defined, suggests Guha, by examining the differences left when one subtracts the elite from the total Indian population. This thinking has in turn been vital to Gayatri Spivak, whose analysis of subaltern women in India looks for spaces in which such women might become able to attain political representation for themselves. Guha, Spivak, and other postcolonial critics have seized on the term in order to identify peoples that have been routinely overlooked by official histories. However, because the subaltern is necessarily defined only in relation to the dominant, achieving political representation leads to subalterns transcending that role, or becoming part of the dominant. Spivak suggests that such an outcome is not a negative one, but the problematic highlights the difficulty of dismantling structures of power, as they always risk being replaced by a new hegemony.