Dipesh Chakrabarty: Fifty Years of E.P. Thompson's 'The Making of the English Working Class'

Dipesh Chakrabarty: Fifty Years of E P Thompson's the Making of the English Working Class by TigersEye99

Are Those-Who-Do-Not-Count Capable of Reason? Thinking Political Subjectivity in the (Neo-)Colonial World and the Limits of History

By Michael Neocosmos, 2012

This article is concerned to show that the historical science of the (neo-)colonial world is unable to allow
for an analysis of the political subjectivities of ‘those-who-do-not-count’ or ‘subalterns’ as rational beings.
Rather, it can only think such subjectivities as the products of people who are merely bearers of their social
location, not thinking subjects. As a result, such history can only be a history of place, not a history of the
transcending of place; it therefore amounts to colonial or state history. Historical objectivity invariably
produces state history. The thought of the possibility of emancipatory politics, which always exceeds place,
is thus precluded. This is an unavoidable epistemic problem in history and the social sciences in their current
form. Following the work of Lazarus, I argue for an alternative historical methodology in Africa in terms of
an internal analysis of the idioms of politics as discontinuous subjective sequences.

Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography

by Dipesh Chakrabarty, 2000

Subaltern Studies: Writings on Indian History and Society began in 1982 as a series of interventions in some debates specific to the writing of modern Indian history. Ranajit Guha (b.1923), a historian of India then teaching at the University of Sussex, was the inspiration behind it. Guha and eight younger scholars based in India, the United Kingdom, and Australia constituted the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies until 1988, when Guha retired from the team. The series now has a global presence that goes well beyond India or South Asia as an area of academic specialization. The intellectual reach of Subaltern Studies now also exceeds that of the discipline of history. Postcolonial theorists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds have taken interest in the series. Much discussed, for instance, are the ways in which contributors to Subaltern Studies have participated in contemporary critiques of history and nationalism, and of orientalism and Eurocentrism in the construction of social science knowledge. At the same time, there have also been discussions of Subaltern Studies in many history and social science journals. Selections from the series have been published in English, Spanish, Bengali, and Hindi and are in the process of being brought out in Tamil and Japanese. A Latin American Subaltern Studies Association was established in North America in 1992. It would not be unfair to say that the expression “subaltern studies,” once the name of a series of publications in Indian history, now stands as a general designation for a field of studies often seen as a close relative of postcolonialism.

Subaltern History as Political Thought.

by Dipesh Chakrabarty

Let me say at the outset where I am headed in this paper. I want to extract from the history of Subaltern Studies, the Indian series started in 1982, a methodological point that may allow us to see this series, for all its faults (and there were many), as part of a possible genealogy of the “masses” as political actors in Indian democracy. Democracy in India has some strongly populist aspects to it. Events such as riots and violent street demonstrations are an everyday feature of the political process in India. How do we write the histories of the “masses” as a form of collective agency? I will go on to argue that the resources made available to us by the English “history from below” tradition are not adequate in this respect mainly because this historiography, even when it originates from the Left, derives from political thought predicated on “the fear of the masses”.