Subalternity and Difference
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
Gyanendra Pandey is Distinguished Professor of History at Emory University, USA, and is the series editor of the Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories book series at Routledge. He is one of the leading theorists and originators of the subaltern studies approach and has published widely in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies.
Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories
Edited by Gyanendra Pandey, Emory University, USA.
Editorial Advisory Board: Partha Chatterjee, Columbia University/Calcutta;Steven Hahn, University of Pennsylvania; David Hardiman, University of Warwick;Bruce Knauft, Emory University; Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, New York University/Bangalore; and Ann Stoler, New School of Social Research, New York.
This series is concerned with three kinds of intersections (or conversations): first, across cultures and regions, an interaction that postcolonial studies have emphasized in their foregrounding of the multiple sites and multi-directional traffic involved in the making of the modern; second, across time, the conversation between a mutually constitutive past and present that occurs in different times and places; and third, between colonial and postcolonial histories, which as theoretical positions have very different perspectives on the first two intersections and the questions of intellectual enquiry and expression implied in them. These three kinds of conversation are critical to the making of any present and any history. Thus the new series provides a forum for extending our understanding of core issues of human society and its self-representation over the centuries.
While focusing on Asia, the series is open to studies of other parts of the world that are sensitive to cross-cultural, cross-chronological and cross-colonial perspectives. The series invites submissions for single-authored and edited books by young as well as established scholars that challenge the limitations of inherited disciplinary and chronological and geographical boundaries, even when they focus on a single, well-bounded territory or period.
1. Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories
Investigations from India and the USA
Edited by Gyanendra Pandey
2. Subalternity and Religion
The prehistory of Dalit empowerment in South Asia
Milind Wakankar
3. Communalism and Globalization in South Asia and Its Diaspora
Edited by Deana Heath and Chandana Mathur
4. Subalternity and Difference
Investigations from the North and the South
Edited by Gyanendra Pandey
Subalternity and
Difference
Investigations from the North
and the South
Edited by
Gyanendra Pandey
First published 2011
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
2011 Gyanendra Pandey for selection and editorial matter; individual
contributors, their contributions
The right of the editor to be identified as the author of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance
with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Subalternity and disfference : investigations from the north and the
south/edited by Gyanendra Pandey.
p. cm. -- (Intersections: colonial and postcolonial histories; 4)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Postcolonialism--Social aspects. 2. Minorities. 3. Racism. I. Pandey,
Gyanendra, 1949
JV51.S83 2011
325.3--dc22
2010051481
ISBN13: 978-0-415-66547-6 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-86852-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Times
by Taylor & Francis Books
For Anjan Ghosh
colleague, comrade and friend
in memoriam
Contents
Introduction: the difference of subalternity
Gyanendra Pandey
Part I
Gender, sexuality, and the regime of modernity
At risk: gender, sexuality, and epidemic logic
Dilip K. Das
Homosexuals from haystacks: gay liberation and the specter of a queer majority in rural California, circa 1970
Colin R. Johnson
Different speakers, different loves: urban women in Rekhti poetry
Ruth Vanita
Part II
The politics of belonging
Making London's Oriental Quarter
Michael H. Fisher
Indigenous immigrants, religion, and the struggle for belonging in the United States
Mary E. Odem
All Strom's children: gender, race, and memory in the twentieth-century American South
Joseph Crespino
Part III
Revisiting liberalism
Thinking equality: debates in Bengal, c.18701940
Prathama Banerjee
Mestizo mainstream: reaffirmations of natural citizenship in Ecuador
Christopher Krupa
Viola's story: re-locating difference
Gyanendra Pandey
Preface and acknowledgements
The present anthology is the second to emerge out of a series of conversations between scholars of the USA and India, and now more broadly the North and the South, begun in meetings in Emory University, Atlanta (USA), and continued in a number of workshops held in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Delhi (India) in the summer of 2009, as well as in a variety of other exchanges. The conversations, concerned broadly with questions of enfranchisement and disenfranchisement through history, focused in the initial stages on Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories (the theme of a first volume published by Routledge in 2010), and have gone on (in this volume) to investigate the question of difference in its relation to subalternity.