Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s writings on the history of subaltern classes, the authors in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial sought to contest the elite histories of Indian nationalists by adopting the paradigm of ‘history from below’. Later on, the project shifted from its social history origins by drawing upon an eclectic group of thinkers that included Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. This book provides a comprehensive balance sheet of the project and its developments, including Ranajit Guha’s original subaltern studies manifesto, Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gayatri Spivak.

The Subaltern Studies Collective, founded in 1982, was begun with the goal of examining the subsequent history of colonized countries. This new group of essays from the Collective's founders chart the course of subaltern history from early peasant revolts and insurgency to more complex processes of domination and subordination in a variety of changing institutions and practices.

These ten essays culled from the five volumes of 'Subaltern Studies' aim to 'promote a systematic and informed discussion of subaltern themes in the field of South Asian studies, and thus help to rectify the elitist bias characteristic of much reserach and academic work in this particular area.'

"In its early phase, "Subaltern Studies" dealt extensively with the issue of community and violence in the context of peasant uprisings. Once the problems of peasant involvement in the modern politics of the nation were subjected to the same critical scrutiny, complexities in that relationship began to emerge. A new dimension was introduced when gender and national politics came to be taken seriously and in the present volume the whole range of new issues raised by the relations between community, gender and violence are addressed. The question of women and the nation, especially among minorities, features strongly in this work. Qadri Ismail examines the claims of Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka from the standpoint of the Southern Tamil woman; Aamir Mufti looks not at the familiar gendered figure of the nation as mother but, from the standpoint of the rejected minority, at the brutalized prostitute; while Tejaswini Niranjana writes on the "new woman" in contemporary Indian cinema. Further chapters look at women and minorities in the context of the law: Flavia Agnes examines the colonial and nationalist histories of the Hindu law of marriage and women's property, Nivedita Menon critically reviews the Indian debate over the universal civil code, and David Scott discusses, with an eyeto Sri Lanka, the concept of minority rights within modern theories of citizenship. The issue of violence is taken up by Satish Deshpande in his study of the imagined space within which the new Hindu Right seeks to assert its dominance, and by Pradeep Jeganathan in his exploration of violence in the cultivation of masculinity. In her conclusion, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak considers the position within a globalized economic space of the "new subaltern"--The Third World laboring woman."--http://books.google.com (Nov. 10, 2010).

DIVArgues for the saliency of the category of the subaltern over that of class./div

In recent years, the most important and influential change in the historiography of South Asia, and particularly India, has been brought about by the globally renowned 'Subaltern Studies' project that began 20 years ago. The present volume of critiques and readings of the project represents the first comprehensive historical introduction to Subaltern Studies and the worldwide debates it has generated among scholars of history, politics and sociology. The volume provides a reliable point of departure for new readers of Subaltern Studies and a resource base for experienced readers, who want to revive critical debates. In his introduction, David Ludden traces the intellectual history of subalternity and analyses trends in the globalization of academic discourse that account for the changing character of Subaltern Studies as well as for the shifting debates around it. In doing so, he expands the field of discussion well beyond Subaltern Studies into broader problems of historical research methodology in the study of subordinate people and into problems of writing contemporary intellectual history. The book thus provides a general readers' guide to techniques for critical historical reading. It uses Subaltern Studies to indicate how readers can read themselves, their context, the text, the author, the author's sources and the subject of study into a single, contentious field of historical analysis.

Subaltern Geographies explores the intersection between subaltern studies and cultural, urban, historical, and political geography to unravel subaltern perspectives, acknowledging the intricacies involved in conceiving and representing these spaces.