Subalternity and Difference

Investigations from the North and the South

Gyanendra Pandey, Gyanendra Pandey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136701610
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Focusing on concepts that have been central to investigation of the history and politics of marginalized and disenfranchised populations, this book asks how discourses of 'subalternity' and 'difference' simultaneously constitute and interrupt each other. The authors explore the historical production of conditions of marginality and minority, and challenge simplistic notions of difference as emanating from culture rather than politics. They return, thereby, to a question that feminist and other oppositional movements have raised, of how modern societies and states take account of, and manage, social, economic and cultural difference. The different contributions investigate this question in a variety of historical and political contexts, from India and Ecuador, to Britain and the USA.

The resulting study is of invaluable interest to students and scholars in a wide range of disciplines, including History, Anthropology, Gender and Queer and Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.

1

INTRODUCTION

The difference of subalternity¹

Gyanendra Pandey

In a recently published anthology, Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories: Investigations from India and the USA,² my colleagues and I sought to re-affirm and radicalize the received notion of subalternity. We reiterated the position that “subalternity,” like “belonging,” is constantly negotiated (and differentiated), and stressed that it is not organized along a single axis, such as that of the economy. We also underlined the relevance of the concept to advanced liberal democracies and bourgeois societies today, no less than to the so-called developing and underdeveloped countries of the Third World or to pre-industrial and pre-modern times. What we do in this volume is to re-examine the idea of “difference,” in order to extend and deepen our investigations of subalternity, and to return more sharply to the question that feminist and other oppositional movements have raised, of how modern societies and states take account of, and live with, difference.

In undertaking this task, it will help to prise away the notion of difference from the rather impoverished sense of “diversity,” of segments revolving around a center (as minorities supposedly do in the nation-state), a move that assumes that the structure of society, the social organization, and range of political possibilities is always given from the start. I want to trouble this assumption in two ways. The first, which I hope will be readily conceded, is to recognize that “difference” is by definition manifold and fluid. Like subalternity, only perhaps more obviously so, the idea of difference cannot be thought or organized along a single (say, cultural or biological) axis. Distributed along multiple grids, it comes in innumerable forms, appearing differently in different places: malleable, evolving elements and tendencies that come into view and disappear, change, coalesce, and reappear, in other forms, amid other networks, in other contexts. Thus, the idea of difference signals fundamentally, and importantly, a history and politics of becoming – not of the already normalized, stable and relatively immutable.

Second, as already indicated, I relate the issue of difference – commonly conceived of as “deviance,” or “discrepant minority” (woman versus man, black versus white, African or Oriental against European, Muslim versus Hindu, Jew against Christian, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, trans-sexuals as against heterosexuals), and involving the pronouncement of radical alterity, allegedly based on “natural,” “biological” dissimilarity or long-established and deeply rooted conditions of apartness – to that of subalternity, i.e. articulations of dominance and subordination, and the hierarchical ordering of social, political and economic power. What happens to our account of emancipation/assimilation, and the accommodation of “difference,” if the paradigmatic example of the history of difference is taken to be, not as it has been since the nineteenth century, the Muslim or Jew, but, say, dalits, blacks or women – other important assemblages that have often been described as “different” in modern historical and political discourse?

Historians and other social scientists have in recent times generated significant research and debate around the ideas of subalternity and difference. In the main, however, work around these concepts has led to two different, not to say autonomous, narratives – one concerned primarily with “subalternity,” the other with “difference.” One of the more unexpected examples of this split may be the discourse on African Americans in the USA, where the history of one and the same individual body, and a social assemblage identified as “black,” repeatedly tends to get channeled into several distinct streams: the history of the African American Freedom Movement, the black women's struggle, labor history. Notwithstanding the appeals for intersectional analysis in investigations of issues of race, class, gender and so on, one or other of these (say, race) is often reduced to another (class), or vice-versa, in a great deal of academic and political analysis.

Consider Robin Kelley's comment on why “history from below” has had little impact on the study of African Americans. “There are those who might argue that all black history is ‘from below’, so to speak, since African Americans are primarily a working-class population.” In consequence, he writes, “Many scholars concerned with studying ‘race relations’ folded the black working class into a very limited and at times monolithic definition of the ‘black community’”; or, as Nell Painter has it, converted the black working class into “representative colored men.” “The civil rights and women's movements persist[ed] in keeping their agendas separate,” Jacqueline Jones noted in 1985.³ How might we muddy the waters of these discrete streams?

Much critical scholarship, feminist, postcolonial and other, has called for engagement with the “mosaic of quotations” and the “variety of writings (in multidimensional space)” that go to make up texts of (in this instance) subalternity and difference.⁴ Simone de Beauvoir famously pursued the twin questions of “otherness” and “subordination” in her inquiry into the category of woman. Sander Gilman has written of how blackness and Jewishness feed on each other in defining the qualities of their difference. Gayatri Spivak has, in her extensive writings on feminist difference and gendered subalternity, always insisted on the intimate connection between the two.⁵

I suggested in my introduction to Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories that the foregrounding of differences of gender, sexuality, caste, race, etc., at the hands of the state and the dominant classes, has long been a way of organizing – and naturalizing – subalternity. Thus:

Men are not “different”; it is women who are. Foreign colonizers are not “different”; the colonized are. Caste Hindus are not “different” in India; it is Muslims, and “tribals,” and dalits [or ex-Untouchables] who are. White Anglo-Saxon Protestant [we should add: heterosexual] males are not “different” in the USA; at one time or another, everybody else is. White Australians are not “different”; Vietnamese boat people, and Fijian migrants to Australia, and, astonishingly, Australian Aboriginals are.

Difference becomes a mark of the subordinated or subalternized, measured as it is against the purported mainstream, the “standard” or the “normal.” What we are presented with are two terms in binary opposition, “hierarchically structured so that the dominant term is accorded both temporal and logical priority.”⁶ It is in the attribution of difference, then, that the logic of dominance and subordination has commonly found expression. The proclamation of difference becomes a way of legitimating and reinforcing existing relations of power.

What the disadvantaged, the marginalized and the subordinated – women, blacks, dalits, sexual minorities, conquered indigenous peoples, migrants and dislocated populations – have done, in response, is to deploy the very category of difference to demand a re-arrangement if not an overturning of prevailing structures of access and privilege. For 200 years and more, the political exertions of the subaltern could be seen as a striving for recognition as equals. The history of these efforts appeared as a history of sameness, and the right to sameness: “one man, one vote,” equal pay for equal work, the need to end inherited structures of discrimination and denial, and gain a greater share in public resources and state power. By the later twentieth century, however, the battle has been self-consciously extended to encompass another demand: the demand for an acknowledgement and even privileging of certain kinds of difference.

In this move, I might add, the deployment of difference marks something of a departure from a commonly described politics of identity: and this is how many academic theorizations of difference have posited its terrain. For the argument about difference as developed by subalternized groups may be seen as a strategic deployment of a term derived from the dominant political discourse – another example perhaps of what Spivak calls “strategic essentialism,” advanced in a “scrupulously delineated ‘political interest,’”⁷ although here such a strategy, if that is how we describe it, is not that of scholars studying subaltern groups and their histories, but of subaltern constituencies and assemblages themselves, seeking to access, appropriate, transform and be transformed.

The altered terms of the subaltern argument about difference grow out of an awareness not only that differences of gender, of communal practices and ways of being, even of incommensurable languages and beliefs, have provided the very ground for the diversity, density and richness of human experience. The new stance follows from a recognition that “difference,” and the very deployment of ideas of difference, has been the ground for claims of identity, unitariness, priority and privilege. Much feminist work has refused to accept any simple dichotomy between claims to equality and claims to difference, and argued instead that equality requires the recognition and inclusion of differences. “It is not our differences which separate women,” as Audre Lorde put it, “but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.”⁸

Such oppositional scholarship calls for a fundamental critique of the ways in which the idea of difference is deployed, and of the operations of categorical difference – an operation that of course marks out only particular “differences” as relevant to the making of our broader social and political arrangements.⁹ It leads us to ask how discourses of subalternity and difference simultaneously constitute and interrupt each other. How, I want to ask, is the difference of subalternity itself constituted? And what might this tell us about the deployment of arguments about difference in general?

Difference, “deviance,” and subalternity

A prominent theme in the history of the world since the eighteenth century has been the promise of emancipation, including the emancipation of societies and groups marked out as “backward,” or disadvantaged, or simply adrift from the “mainstream” of human history and progress, as it is conceived after the Enlightenment. In the context of new discourses of nationhood in nineteenth-century Europe, the problematic of difference takes the political form of the “Jewish Question”; and Marx's essay on that question becomes a lasting comment on the impossibility of the political emancipation of the Jew as Jew, that is, of political emancipation in a liberal mode – “tolerating” difference but demanding uniformity. The supposedly enlightened, tolerant, civil society of modern Europe, and with it the idea of the abstract citizen subject in the rational, universal order of the nation-state, is challenged by the very existence – and individuality – of the Jew, who is seen as being too particularistic and yet too global, too rooted and yet too dislocated, at one and the same time.¹⁰ This is of course a very specific, “nationalist” contextualization of the question of difference, but it informs a more pervasive discourse of the political.

It is necessary to note that the Jewish Question is a metaphor for far more than the Jews. It is Muslims, to make the point bluntly, who are the Jews of the later twentieth and early twenty-first century – once again, too narrowly community-centered and too world-wide, too parochial and too deracinated, to fit in as responsible (read unmarked and naturally belonging) members of the nation-state. This is not to deny the critical differences between the history of the Jews – a consistently tiny minority in Europe, perceived as racially other, as killers of Jesus, as the only religious minority until the post-Reformation era, a people without a state until the formation of modern Israel – and that of Muslims, substantial populations that have controlled large territories and had state power in many places from the inception of Islam until today. In that respect, the parallel between Jews and homosexuals may be somewhat more tenable – with their similar histories of being small minorities that are persecuted in Christian Europe (the experience elsewhere was perhaps more mixed) until late modernity, culminating in the Nazi Holocaust. My point, however, is about metaphor: of a minority that never quite fits, and is seen as dangerous to the nation/state: hence, the Jewish Question in nineteenth-century Europe, and the “problem” of Muslims today.

Yet, if the Muslims are the Jews of recent decades, the unrecognized Other of the era of modern states from the eighteenth century onwards have been slaves and Untouchables, women and other “invisible” groups, whose existence and particularity mount an equally important challenge to the existing discourses of civil society, uniform civil rights and the abstract citizen subject of the ne...