t h e / u n t i m e l y / p a s t
the bibliography project
post-colonial historiography, subaltern studies ...
last modified: 19 February 2000
If you wish to be notified of major updates to this site,
let me know at jeffreyhearn@compuserve.com
Ambler, Charles, Review of Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe", by Timothy Burke. American Historical Review 103:2 (April 1998), 562-563.
Amin, Shahid, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Eds. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 9. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996.
"Ranajit Guha's opening essay meticulously constructs new pathways in recovering the subalterns for history. Ajay Skaria documents the ambivalent relationship of a forest people with colonial masters, as mediated by written contractual agreements for the exploitation of valuable timber. Shail Mayaram takes a disturbingly close look at the nature and memory of genocidal Partition violence directed against the Meos of the Alwar Bharatpur region. Kamala Visveswaran deconstructs the category 'Woman', as deployed in nationalist discourse, so as to document the dilution of the agency of the female-nationalist that this entails. Gyan Prakash analyses the ways in which science was compromised in its encounter with things colonial and Indian.
"Susie Tharu and Tejaswini Niranjana critically evaluate the issues of caster, Hindutva, and recent western-inspired strategies of reproductive choice for women, cautioning against an unproblematic feminist perspective on these contentious contemporary concerns. Vivek Dhareshwar and R. Srivatsan critique the notion of the citizen in modern India by introducing the 'rowdy-sheeter' of police records as the law-abiding citizen's double. In a scathing autobiographical essay Kancha Illaih contrasts the life and world of Dalitbahujan (lower castes) and the upper castes and reveals the incommensurabilities that inhere in Indian society. David Lloyd offers a reading of the new Irish histories in terms of insights derived form the Subaltern project." from the Oxford on-line catalog
Arnold, David, and David Hardiman, Eds. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 8. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994.
"This volume consists of essays in honour of Ranajit Guha, the founding figure of the Subaltern Studies, by five members of the original editorial group. The essays take up themes from Guha's own work, linking subaltern experience and mentality with colonial knowledge/power and the cultural and political processes of Indian elites. It includes a complete bibliography of Ranajit Guha's published work and a memoir on his work and career by Shahid Amin." from Oxford's on-line catalog
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
"As a subject, post-colonial studies stands at the intersection of debates about race, colonialism, gender, politics, and language. This volume provides an essential key to understanding the issues that characterize post-colonialism. It includes definitions of: diaspora, Fanonism, imperialism, Manicheanism, mimicry, negritude, orientalism, settler-colony, transculturation.
"There are suggestions for further reading at the end of each entry as well as a comprehensive bibliography of essential writings in post-colonial studies." from the back cover of the paperback
Brombert, Victor, "Orientalism and the Scandals of Scholarship." American Scholar (Autumn 1979), 532-541.
Review of Edward W. Said, Orientalism.
Burke, Timothy. Lifebuoy Men. Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption, and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Body, Commodity, Text: Studies of Objectifying Practice.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations 37 (Winter 1992),
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, "Trafficking in History and Theory: Subaltern Studies." In Beyond the Disciplines: The New Humanities. K. K. Ruthven, Ed. Canberra, 1992.
Chatterjee, Partha, and Gyanendra Pandy, Eds. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 7. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Clifford, James, Review of Edward W. Said, Orientalism. History and Theory 19:2 (1980), 204-223.
Cooper, Frederick, et al., Eds. Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America. Madison, WI, 1993.
Cooper, Frederick, "Conflict and Connection: Rethinking Colonial African History." American Historical Review (December 1994), 1516-1545.
Coundouriotis, Eleni Claiming History: Colonialism, Ethnography, and the Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.
"By looking at African novels--written in both French and English--of the colonial and postcolonial periods, Claiming History places African literature in its proper context within the field of postcolonial studies and illustrates how historical narration not only 'answers back' to Europe's colonialist legacy, but also serves as a complex form of dissent among Africans themselves. Exploring the dialogue between literature and history, Coundouriotis gives voice to African novelists' defiance of colonialism and nationalist ideology, adding significantly to our understanding of a body of work that has long been ignored and misunderstood." from the back cover fo the paperback edition
Contents: Introduction, 1. The Traditional Cultures of Rene Maran and Chinua Achebe. 2. History, Human Sacrifices, and the Victorian Travelers to Dahomey. 3. Contesting Authenticity: Paul Hazoume, Ethnography, and Negritude. 4. Resistant History in Paul Hazoume's Doguicini. 5. History as Transgression in Le Devoir de violence. 6. Temporality and the Geographies of the Nation: "The Future Present" in The Famished Road". Afterword.
Day, Gary, "Muffling the Voice of the Other." Times Higher Education Supplement (6 August 1999), 23.
Review of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Dienst, Richard, "Imperialism, Subalternity, Autonomy: Modes of Third World Historiography." Polygraph 1 (Fall 1987), 67-80.
Dirks, Nicholas B., Ed. Colonialism and Culture Ann Arbor, MI, 1992.
Dirlik, Arif, "Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism." History and Theory (December 1996)
Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, forthcoming (June 1997).
"The essays in this volume range from questions of cultural self-representation in China to more general problems of reconceptualizing global relationships in response to contemporary changes. Although the new era of global capitalism calls for a remapping of global relations, such remapping must be informed both by a grasp of contemporary structures of economic, political, and cultural power and by memories of earlier radical visions of society. Without these two conditions, Arif Dirlik argues, the current preoccupations with Eurocentrism, ethnic diversity, and multiculturalism distract from issues of power that dominate global relations and that find expression in murderous ethnic conflicts.
"In lieu of multiculturalism, Dirlik offers 'multi-historicalism,' which presupposes a historically grounded conception of cultural difference, seeks in different histories alternative visions of human society, and stresses divergent historical trajectories against a future colonized presently by an ideology of capital. Arguing that the operations of capital have brought the question of the local to the fore, he points to 'indigenism' as a source of paradigms of social relations, and relationships to nature, to challenge the voracious developmentalism that undermines local welfare globally. from the Westview catalog
Includes: "Introduction: Postcoloniality in the Perspective of History"; "Culturalism as Hegemonic Ideology and Liberating Practice"; "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism"; "The Global in the Local"; "The Asia-Pacific Idea: Reality and Representation in the Invention of a Regional Structure";, "Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinventing of Confucianism"; "Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism"; "There is More in the Rim Than Meets the Eye: Some Thoughts on the 'Pacific' Idea"; "Three Worlds or One, or Many?"; "The Reconfiguration of Global Relations Under Contemporary Capitalism"; "Postcolonial or Postrevolutionary?: The Problem of History in Postcolonial Criticism"; "The Postmodernization of Production and Its Organization: Flexible Production, Work, and Culture"; "The Past as Legacy and Project: Postcolonial Criticism in the Perspective of Indigenous Historicism."
Dussell, Enrique The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity New York: Continuum. Translated by Michael D. Barber.
Ganguly, Keya, "Colonial Discourse and the History of Indian Art: A Re-visionist Reading." Journal of Communication Inquiry 12:2 (Summer 1988), 39-52.
Gold, Arthur, "Us and Them." The Nation (24 March 1979), 309-310.
Review of Edward W. Said, Orientalism.
Greene, Thomas M., "One World, Divisible." Yale Review (Summer 1979), 577-581.
Review of Edward W. Said, Orientalism.
Guha, Ranajit, Ed. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 1. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Guha, Ranajit, Ed. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 2. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Guha, Ranajit, "The Prose of Counter-Insurgency." In Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 2. Guha, Ranajit, Ed. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Guha, Ranajit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
"The historiography of peasant insurgency in India has hitherto been a record of the colonial administration's effort to deal with insurgency. The result has been a failure to understand the insurgent. The colonialist has commonly seen insurgency as crime, seldom understanding it as a fight for social justice. Guha's work adopts the peasant's viewpoint and studies 'the peasant rebel's awareness of his own world and his will to change it.'" from Oxford's on-line catalog
Guha, Ranajit, Ed. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 3. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Guha, Ranajit, Ed. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 4. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Guha, Ranajit, Ed. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 5. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Includes: David Hardiman, "The Bhils and Shahukars of Eastern Gujarat"; David Arnold, "Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896-1900"; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: Mahasweta Devi's 'Stanadayini'"; Ranajit Guha, "Chandra's Death"; Shahid Amin, "Approver's Testimony, Judicial Discourse: the Case of Chauri Chaura"; Asok Sen, "Discussion: Subaltern Studies: Capital, Class, and Community"; Ajit K. Chaudhury, " Discussion: In Search of a Subaltern Lenin: Mahasweta Devi," translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Appendix A: "Breast-Giver"; Appendix B: "The Testimony of Shikari, the Approver, in the Court of Sessions Judge H. E. Holmes."
Guha, Ranajit, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Eds. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
"This book collects ten essays from the five volumes of Subaltern Studies that have so far appeared. The aim of the studies is 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 research and academic work in this particular area. the contributors ... focus attention on what Gramsci called the subaltern classes and their condition, and also re-examine well-known events and themes in the new, more rounded perspective. The contributors encompass history, politics, economics and sociology; attitudes, ideologies, and belief systems." from Oxford's on-line catalog
Guha, Ranajit, Ed. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 6. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Includes: Sumit Sarkar, "The Kali-Avatar of Bikrampur: A Village Scandal in Early-Twentieth Century Bengal"; Gautam Bhadra, "The Mentality of Subalternity: Kantanama or Rajdharma"; Julie Stephens, "Feminist Fictins: A Critique of the category 'Non-Western Woman' in Feminist Writings on India"; Susie Tharu, "Response to Julie Stephens"; Gyanendra Pandey, "The Colonial Construction of 'Communalism'" British Writings on Benares in the Nineteenth Century"; Partha Chatterjee, "Caste and Subaltern Consciousness", Ranajit Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography"; Veena Das, "Subaltern as Perspective."
Guha, Ranajit. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.
"This book is made up of modified versions of three essays written in 1986-87 and published between 1988 and 1992. All three connect with our project, Subaltern Studies, and refer back to and develop certain propositions I have taken up there." from the Preface
Contents: Chapter 1. Colonialism in South Asia: A Dominance without Hegemony and Its Historiography. Chapter 2. Discipline and Mobilize: Hegemony and Elite Control in Nationalist Campaigns. Chapter 3. An Indian Historiography of India: Hegemonic Implications of a Nineteenth-Century Agenda.
Hourani, Albert, "The Road to Moracco." New York Review of Books (8 March 1979), 27-30.
Review of Edward W. Said, Orientalism.
Irwin, Robert, "Writing about Islam and the Arabs." Ideology & Consciousness 9 (Winter 1981/1982), 103-112.
Review of Edward W. Said, Orientalism.
Larson, Pier M., "'Capacities and Modes of Thinking': Intellectual Engagements and Subaltern Hegemony in the Early History of Malagasy Christianity." American Historical Review 968-1002.
"Pier M. Larson examines how the people of highland Madagascar came to understand and practice the Christianity introduced to them by British missionaries during the early nineteenth century. Larson argues that the Malagasy grafted European Christianity onto their language and existing religious practices. He emphasizes, for instance, that the Malagasy concept of fivavahana (supplication) came to designate religion/worship/prayer in Madagascar and that British missionaries adopted evangelistic strategies suggested to them by the Malagasy. As a result of the way they engaged the foreign missionaries intellectually, the Malagasy forced the Europeans to change their strategies of evangelization and their theology in order to make it more effective and compatible with Malagasy ways of thinking and acting. Most important, Larson uses this analysis of Malagasy experiences with Christian missionaries to critique studies of imperial cultural history that assume European cultural and intellectual hegemony without actually demonstrating it. He contends that the Malagasy example of 'subalterns'" intellectual authority over Christianity provides particularly compelling evidence of the cultural limits of colonial domination because the spread of Christianity is one of the most lasting and powerful cultural legacies of European imperialism. And his analysis suggest that while the 'subjects' of European empire were often politically and economically weak, their intellectual worlds and local discourse dominated colonial popular cultures and forced colonizers to speak in local idiom rather than impose and rule through foreign ones. Larson's essay thus addresses some of the central questions in the current debate about the impact of imperial culture on colonized peoples and does so in a way that raises important theoretical as well as substantive issues." Editors note, AHR, 102:4 (October 1997), p. xv
Mallon, Florencia E., "The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History." American Historical Review (December 1994), 1491-1515.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. Verso, 1997.
"Much controversy has recently come to surround the status and value of postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory has been challenged on several fronts: on its interdisciplinary competence, on the politics of its institutional location, and on its implicit domination of other kinds of postcolonial analysis, many of which have been established for much longer than postcolonial theory itself. The ensuing debate has often become so heated, even personalized, that hte issues at stake have been obscured.
"In what is the most comprehensive and accessible survey of the field to date, Bart Moore-Gilbert systematically examines the objections that have been raised against postcolonial theory, revealing the simplifications and exaggerations on both sides of the argument. He provides a detailed institutional history of the ways in which the relationship between culture and colonialism has been traditionally studied in the west, then traces the emergence of alternative forms of postcolonial analysis of such questions. He carefully presents the complex work of the three principal representations of postcolonial theory, Gayatri Spivak, Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, and considers the criticisms they have faced from an alleged Eurocentrism to an obfuscatory prose style. Finally, he assesses the overlaps and differences between postcolonial and other forms of postcolonial criticism and considers the way that postcolonial analysis may be connected with different histories of oppression." from the Verso on-line catalog
O'Hanlon, Rosaline, "Recovering the Subject: Subaltern Studies and Histories of Resistance in Colonial South Asia." Modern Asia Studies 22 (1988), 189-224.
Plumb, J. H., "Looking East in Error." New York Times Book Review (18 February 1979), 3, 28.
Review of Edward W. Said, Orientalism.
Prakash, Gyan. Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India. Cambridge, 1990.
Prakash, Gyan, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World: Perspectives from Indian Historiography." Comparative Studies in Society and History. (1990), 383-408.
Prakash, Gyan, Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography." Social Text 31-32 (1992),
Prakash, Gyan, "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism." American Historical Review (December 1994), 1475-1490.
Prakash, Gyan. After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Princeton, NJ, 1995.
Rafael, Vicente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Ithaca, NY, 1988.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
"The theme is the way in which intellectual traditions are created and transmitted.... 'Orientalism' is the example Mr. Said uses, and by it he means something precise. The scholar who studies the Orient (and specifically the Muslim Orient), the imaginative writer who takes it as his subject, and the institutions which have been concerned with 'teaching it, settling it, ruling it,' all have a certain representation or idea of 'the Orient' defined as being other than the 'Occident,' mysterious, unchanging and ultimately inferior." from the review by Albert Hourani in The New York Review of Books
Said, Edward W., "Orientalism Reconsidered." Race & Class 27:2 (1985), 1-15.
Seed, Patricia, "Poststructuralism in Postcolonial History." Maryland Historian 24:1 (1993), 9-28.
"Describes the problem of trying to understand the formerly subjugated using the records of the colonial bureaucracies. Poststructuralism has shaped the attempts at understanding 'from below.' Language, literacy, and politics distort even the most neutral-seeming records of the colonial past and obscure the colonized realities. A strategy for countering the problems requires 'reading against the grain' with an awareness of the problems. Ranajit Guha produced the first major study utilizing a poststructural approach. Other scholars surveyed include Raynaldo Ileto, Vicente Rafael, Jean and John Comaroff, David Cohen, Atieno Odhiambo, Nicolas Thomas, Timothy Mitchell, Brinkley Messick, and Tzvetan Todorov." G. O. Gagnon, Historical Abstracts, Vol. 46, Part A, (1995), 646.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography." In Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Vol. 4. Guha, Ranajit, Ed. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives." History and Theory 24 (1985), 247-272.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Eds. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality, and Value." In Literary Theory Today. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan, Eds. London, 1990.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, "Feminism in Decolonization." differences 3:3 (1991), 139-170.
Originally presented at the Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University, March 1991. See also: Joan W. Scott's "Comment."
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
"Are the 'culture wars' over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world's foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave.
"'We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,' Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the 'native informant' through various cultural practices--philosophy, history, literature--to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on.
"A major critical work, Spivak's book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality." from the Harvard University Press online catalog
To order the hardcover edition of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, go to:
To order the paperback edition of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, go to:
Thomas, Brook, "Parts Related to Wholes and the Nature of Subaltern Opposition." Modern Language Quarterly 55 (1994), 77-106.
Wallace, Jennifer, "Deconstructing Gayatri." Times Higher Education Supplement (30 July 1999), 20.
Abstract: "Can Gayatri Spivak's 'pretentiously opaque' writing make a difference in the real world? Jennifer Wallace talks to an academic who has eaten mice and snakes in rural India."
Watts, Pauline Moffitt, Review of The Invention of the Americas, Enrique Dussel. American Historical Review 102:2 (April 1997), 425-426.
Wolfe, Patrick, "History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory, from Marx to Postcolonialism." American Historical Review 102:2 (April 1997), 388-420.
Wieseltier, Leon, Review of Edward W. Said, Orientalism. New Republic (7 April 1979), 27-33.
© Copyright 1999-2002, Jeffrey Hearn