Antonio Gramsci is widely celebrated as the most original political thinker in Western Marxism. Among the most central aspects of his enduring intellectual legacy is the concept of subalternity. Developed in the work of scholars such as Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha, subalternity has been extraordinarily influential across fields of inquiry stretching from cultural studies, literary theory, and postcolonial criticism to anthropology, sociology, criminology, and disability studies. Almost every author whose work touches upon subalterns alludes to Gramsci’s formulation of the concept. Yet Gramsci’s original writings on the topic have not yet appeared in full in English. Among his prison notebooks, Gramsci devoted a single notebook to the theme of subaltern social groups. Notebook 25, which he entitled “On the Margins of History (History of Subaltern Social Groups),” contains a series of observations on subaltern groups from ancient Rome and medieval communes to the period after the Italian Risorgimento, in addition to discussions of the state, intellectuals, the methodological criteria of historical analysis, and reflections on utopias and philosophical novels. This volume presents the first complete translation of Gramsci’s notes on the topic. In addition to a comprehensive translation of Notebook 25 along with Gramsci’s first draft and related notes on subaltern groups, it includes a critical apparatus that clarifies Gramsci’s history, culture, and sources and contextualizes these ideas against his earlier writings and letters. Subaltern Social Groups is an indispensable account of the development of one of the crucial concepts in twentieth-century thought.

In the 1920s Turkey and Iran faced political upheaval as both states attempted to find their routes to modernity. This is the first study to observe the practice of modernization in Turkey and Iran not only from above, by examining the measures adopted by the political regimes of the late Ottomans, Ataturk and Reza Shah, but also from below, exploring how different social levels contributed to the drive for modernity. It is a full and thorough analysis of how these societies reacted to reform and change. "The State and the Subaltern" offers a fresh perspective on the accommodation and resistance to modernization and the relation between the common people and the state in two Islamic societies during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a fascinating exploration of the history of subalterns - the rank and file of society - with specific reference to gender, ethnicity, industrial and non-industrial urban labour, rural labour, unemployment and the impact of immigrant labour.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's original essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism's "worlding" of the world. Spivak's essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, to be able to access the state, and to suffer the burden of difference in a capitalist system that promises equality yet withholds it at every turn. Since its publication, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued. In these phenomenal essays, eight scholars take stock of the effects and response to Spivak's work. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights. Then, through the lens of Spivak's essay, they rethink historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates "Can the Subaltern Speak?" within contemporary issues, particularly new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico. In an afterword, Spivak herself considers her essay's past interpretations and future incarnations and the questions and histories that remain secreted in the original and revised versions of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" both of which are reprinted in this book.

This book brings together James C. Scott's most important work on peasant religion and ideology; everyday forms of peasant resistance; and state technologies of personal identification. In a collection of interrelated essays Scott introduces the major concepts that lie at the core of his work and illustrates, through ethnographic and historical work how they can be understood through practical examples.

The term “subalternity” refers to a condition of subordination brought about by colonization or other forms of economic, social, racial, linguistic, and/or cultural dominance. Subaltern studies is, therefore, a study of power. Who has it and who does not. Who is gaining it and who is losing it. Power is intimately related to questions of representation—to which representations have cognitive authority and can secure hegemony and which do not and cannot. In this book John Beverley examines the relationship between subalternity and representation by analyzing the ways in which that relationship has been played out in the domain of Latin American studies. Dismissed by some as simply another new fashion in the critique of culture and by others as a postmarxist heresy, subaltern studies began with the work of Ranajit Guha and the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective in the 1980s. Beverley’s focus on Latin America, however, is evidence of the growing province of this field. In assessing subaltern studies’ purposes and methods, the potential dangers it presents, and its interactions with deconstruction, poststructuralism, cultural studies, Marxism, and political theory, Beverley builds his discussion around a single, provocative question: How can academic knowledge seek to represent the subaltern when that knowledge is itself implicated in the practices that construct the subaltern as such? In his search for answers, he grapples with a number of issues, notably the 1998 debate between David Stoll and Rigoberta Menchú over her award-winning testimonial narrative, I, Rigoberta Menchú. Other topics explored include the concept of civil society, Florencia Mallon’s influential Peasant and Nation, the relationship between the Latin American “lettered city” and the Túpac Amaru rebellion of 1780–1783, the ideas of transculturation and hybridity in postcolonial studies and Latin American cultural studies, multiculturalism, and the relationship between populism, popular culture, and the “national-popular” in conditions of globalization. This critique and defense of subaltern studies offers a compendium of insights into a new form of knowledge and knowledge production. It will interest those studying postcolonialism, political science, cultural studies, and Latin American culture, history, and literature.

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In Adivasis and the State, Alf Gunvald Nilsen presents a major study of how subalternity is both constituted and contested through state-society relations in the Bhil heartland of western India. The book unravels the historical processes that subordinated Bhil Adivasi communities to the everyday tyranny of the state and investigates how social movements have mobilised to reclaim citizenship. In doing so, the book also reveals how collective action from below transform the meanings of governmental categories, legal frameworks, and universalising vocabularies of democracy. At the core of the book lies a concern with understanding the dialectics of power and resistance that give form and direction to the political economy of democracy and development in contemporary India. Towards this end, Adivasis and the State contributes a sustained and nuanced Gramscian analysis of hegemony in order to interrogate the possibilities and limits of subaltern political engagement with state structures.

Thematically, this book problematizes Iranian official nationalism. It reviews how every modern Iranian regime since the constitutional revolution of the 1905-06 has failed to legitimize its official identity, resulting in the fall of five different regimes. The book details how the collapse of each regime resulted in the interruption of the official meaning of being Iranian, as well as the meanings of its enemies. What remained the same was how every Iranian regime represented itself as the agent of a particular national desire defined in terms of making Iran to become sovereign, developed, democratic, and constitutional. Nonetheless, no regime was able to convince a great majority of the people that it achieved what it represented. This book makes three specific contributions. The first contribution is pedagogical. By focusing on the dynamics of regime changes, it provides a heuristic model for identifying challenges that all Iranian regimes have faced. Moreover, the book is a comprehensive review of the disruptive, oppressive, and bloody nature of the rise and fall of different regimes. The second contribution is theoretical. Rather than examining the behavior of various Iranian regimes in isolation from their international context, the book examines how each regime got to understand itself in relations to its imperial others. By examining the governmental rationality of each regime, the book offers a better theoretical framework for understanding political development not only in Iran, but also in all other Middle Eastern and South Asian states. Finally, the third contribution of this book is its critical approach to the main body of the literature on Iran, modernity, development, democracy, and constitutionalism.

"In the 1920s Turkey and Iran faced political upheaval as both states attempted to find their routes to modernity. This is the first study to observe the practice of modernization in Turkey and Iran not only from above, by examining the measures adopted by the political regimes of the late Ottomans, Atatürk and Reza Shah, but also from below, exploring how different social levels contributed to the drive for modernity. It is a full and thorough analysis of how these societies reacted to reform and change. The efforts of nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century reformers did not protect either country from the challenges of the separatism of minorities or from occupation by European powers. The setback that the Iranian Constitutional Movement suffered in the years before the outbreak of the First World War; the political disintegration and partial occupation of Persia during the war; the traumatic loss of the European provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan War and its subsequent defeat in World War I; the threat of imminent disintegration after the war - all of these represented enormous problems for the order of these two countries. The middle classes and the intelligentsia of each state felt they had no other option than to look for a man of order who would modernize their nations and societies and install centralized, powerful government capable of solving each country's growing problems of underdevelopment, while at the same time safeguarding each nation's unity and sovereignty. The practice of authoritarian modernization in post-World War I Turkey and Iran resulted from the perceived failure of earlier attempts to introduce modernization both from below as well as from above in these two neighbouring countries. The State and the Subaltern offers a fresh perspective on the accommodation and resistance to modernization and the relation between the common people and the state in two Islamic societies during the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is a fascinating exploration of the history of subalterns - the rank and file of society - with specific reference to gender, ethnicity, industrial and non-industrial urban labour, rural labour, unemployment and the impact of immigrant labour."--Bloomsbury Publishing.