The subaltern after subaltern studies: Genealogies and transformations

The special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies provides an opening through which to consider the relevance of the Subaltern Studies project in the age of mass political movements, neo-liberal capitalism and the ever more scaled-up global movements of disenfranchised populations across state borders. The essays featured in this issue offer a range of reflections on new conceptual frames for thinking the subaltern in the twenty-first century, on the complexities of historical periodization in colonial contexts when seen from the perspective of a medievalist, on the relationship between social history and subaltern history in South Asia, and on the challenges of according empirical flesh to the category 'subaltern' in cultural and ethnographic analyses of figures such as the Dalit, the dacoit, and the possessed women of an impoverished fishing community in rural Tamil Nadu. Translating the idea of the subaltern into the register of lack and unease under global capitalism, Simon During argues that it is time we gave up the term 'subaltern' and adopted 'precariat' instead as a concept better suited to transnational forms of alienation in the contemporary world. Prathama Banerjee also suggests that the idea of the 'subaltern' is vulnerable to the contingencies of the contemporary. She subjects the category to rigorous examination both as a concept metaphor and a metahistorical resource. Rochona Majumdar's essay, 'Subaltern Studies as a History of Social Movements in India' argues that popular mobilisations in colonial India can quite legitimately be read as social movements in the manner of popular movements in post-colonial India.