Subaltern (postcolonialism)
Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics.
As a method of intellectual discourse, the concept of the subaltern originated as a Eurocentric method of historical enquiry for the study of non-Western peoples (of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East) and their relation to Western Europe as the centre of world history.
In discussions of the meaning of the term subaltern in the work of Gramsci, Spivak said that he used the word as a synonym for the proletariat (a code word to deceive the prison censor to allow his manuscripts out the prison),[5] but contemporary evidence indicates that the term was a novel concept in Gramsci's political theory.
[7] In Toward a New Legal Common Sense (2002), the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos applied the term subaltern cosmopolitanism to describe the counter-hegemonic practice of social struggle against Neoliberalism and globalization, especially the struggle against social exclusion.
Moreover, de Sousa Santos applied subaltern cosmopolitanism as interchangeable with the term cosmopolitan legality to describe the framework of diverse norms meant to realise an equality of differences, wherein the term subaltern identifies the oppressed peoples, at the margins of society, who are struggling against the hegemony of economic globalization.
Postcolonial theory studies the power and the continued dominance of Western ways of intellectual enquiry, the methods of generating knowledge.
The historian Fernando Coronil said that his goal as an investigator must be "to listen to the subaltern subjects, and to interpret what I hear, and to engage them and interact with their voices.
The power to narrate somebody's story is a heavy task, and we must be cautious and aware of the complications involved.
That in order to truly communicate with the subaltern native, the academic would have to remove him or herself as "the expert" at the center of the Us-and-Them binary social relation.
As such, modernization is characterized by free trade, open markets, capitalist economic systems, and democratic systems of governance, as the means by which a nation should modernize their country en route to becoming a developed country in the Western style.
Therefore, mainstream development discourse concentrates upon the application of universal social and political, economic and cultural policies that would nationally establish such modernization.
[14] In Making Development Geography (2007), Victoria Lawson presents a critique of mainstream development discourse as mere recreation of the Subaltern, which is effected by means of the subaltern being disengaged from other social scales, such as the locale and the community; not considering regional, social class, ethnic group, sexual- and gender-class differences among the peoples and countries being modernized; the continuation of the socio-cultural treatment of the subaltern as a subject of development, as a subordinate who is ignorant of what to do and how to do it; and by excluding the voices of the subject peoples from the formulations of policy and practice used to effect the modernization.
Hence do subaltern social groups create social, political, and cultural movements that contest and disassemble the exclusive claims to power of the Western imperialist powers, and so establish the use and application of local knowledge to create new spaces of opposition and alternative, non-imperialist futures.
