Subaltern studies

The Construction and Representation of the Subaltern Community:

Sathianathan Clarke and an analysis of selected writings by Dipesh Chakravarty.



I would like to begin this paper by closely considering the term ‘subaltern’ to preclude any naive or one-sided understanding of the same as a purely economic category, before I argue for its representation and construction by focusing on one major mode of construction and representation, as I move on to the specifics. I propose to understand and convey what exactly constitutes the subaltern subject as against an authority, that elicits the need for the former to represent and construct as well as reformulate it self. Authority, as Marx states in his Capital, is never a one-sided affair, but rests on a complementary and reciprocal acceptance of such authority by the dominated. The dominant and the dominated, the subaltern and the elite, and the disciplinary authority of capital over labour in Chakravarty’s essays, for instance, ...