More than twenty-five years ago, a small group of South Asianists challenged the bourgeois-nationalist and colonialist historiography of Indian nationalism. Based mostly in India and critical of “economistic” Marxism, they aimed to recover the occluded histories of what Antonio Gramsci calls “subaltern social groups” and to put into question the relations of power, subordination, and “inferior rank” more generally. The influence of subaltern studies quickly became international, inspiring research projects in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Subaltern studies refers less to a discipline or distinctive methodology than to an academic field influenced by cultural Marxism, history from below, feminism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. In this field are many horses, not all of which can be ridden at once. Gramscian Marxism, and in particular the notions of hegemony and subaltern social groups, has jostled against the influence of British Marxists such as Edward P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, with their determination that there was a history from below, independent to some degree of elite initiatives, and that the mass of the population were not simply dupes of power holders, objects to be saved, directed, controlled, or reformed from above. Other influences have also loomed large, from the deconstructionism and textual analysis of Jacques Derrida to Michel Foucault's notions of disciplinary power at the site of the individual body and the biopolitics of “making life” at the level of the population. Feminism has played an important role, along with postcolonialism and criticism of “Western” modes of representation influenced by Edward Said's Orientalism.

There are outright contradictions among some of these approaches. French poststructuralism and discourse theory tend to approach subalternity as a discursive effect, the outcome of a process of Othering or marginalization. Here the subaltern becomes passive, silenced, unknowable, or ghostly and in some state of permanent and fixed subordination. Attempts to “recover agency” are here condemned as mere resurrections of the autonomous Enlightenment subject, as if it were clear what that was. On the contrary, various currents in cultural Marxism are more likely to see the subaltern as existing beyond the text, a living and active human subject, central (not marginal) to the operations of power and capable of transforming his or her own condition. Exaggeration of “agency” rather than effacement is the danger here.

Moreover, in some approaches, one might be forgiven for thinking of the subaltern as a sociological category—the lumpenproletariat, the peasantry, women, migrants, and so on. In other approaches, subalternity does not refer to a group in the sociological-objectivist sense but to a series of political and ideological articulations. Or, whereas the linguistic turn has led some into irony and political detachment, Marxian and other currents have underpinned political engagement. Finally, neither deconstruction, postcolonialism, nor Michel Foucault's trenchant, genealogical rejection of teleology and historicist developmentalism sit well with the Marxian Eurocentric historical metanarratives that repeatedly appear in the works of Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others. Guha's claim that the central problematic of modern Indian history is the failure of the bourgeoisie to “speak for the nation” is one example. This is the updating of a 19th-century idea about the contrast between the Italian and the French bourgeoisie that Gramsci got from Marx—but that relies on many a problematic notion of “capitalism,” “the bourgeoisie,” “the nation,” and so on.

However, to grouch about methodological incoherence is to miss the point. Many in the field are well aware of the tensions. The question is whether such tensions are productive. It seems to me that in consistently posing the question of subordination in a critical fashion and stirring wide-ranging and eclectic debates worldwide, this field has scored a major success—and one that can be built on.

The field of contradictions is distinctively constructed from critical approaches to subordination and inferior rank—from feminist and heterocritical repositionings of gender, to Foucault's method of studying not the sovereign center but the mode of application of power in diverse settings, to anti-Eurocentric currents in postcolonialism. All these approaches evince a steadfast opposition to the naturalness of categories, to economism, and to colonial and nationalist essentialism. They subject both social relations and knowledge production to critical scrutiny. Although subaltern studies can claim no ownership over its sources of inspiration, it has constituted a useful arena in which these diverse approaches have clashed and inspired research, especially in the colony and postcolony.

An important caveat refers to two interloping ponies occasionally found in the field. First, textual analysis sometimes slips from the contextualization, power relations, and commitment of an Edward Said to the abstracted “webs of meaning” of a Clifford Geertz. Second, agency recovering can sometimes mean less the “active subject” of Marx or Gramsci and more a celebration of choice and agency of a homo economicus—where peasants or migrants “take advantage” of market structures to secure rent tenancies or acquire credit—that is, sell themselves to landlords or contract unpayable debts. These ponies may be better put out to pasture elsewhere.

Finally, some horses are growing tired while others are waiting at the gates. First, determined antieconomism has been partly responsible for the occlusion of economic relationships, capital accumulation, and inequality from much of subaltern studies, which would therefore do well to rethink this outstanding exclusion. A good place to begin is Timothy Mitchell's Rule of Experts or even Mike Davis's City of Quartz. Second, determined antiessentialism has been partly responsible for obscuring how the hard edges of narrative and identity operate in both economic and political processes. Foucault's reading of politics as a continuation of war by other means in Society Must Be Defended can act as an underused inspiration here, his distinctive notion of “state racism” emphatically included.

Third and finally, a determined emphasis on theory, combined with a determined deconstructionism, combined with notions of the permanence of subalternity, has sometimes eclipsed the importance of rewriting the actual historical narrative—changing the story, if you will—at the level of social relations as a whole. Shahid Amin's work is an outstanding exception, pointing out how peasant activists in 1920s India clearly influenced middle-class nationalists, who appropriated their ideas. Amin thus changed our understanding of Indian history as a whole. Indeed, there is no need to romanticize power, which is partly constructed from multiple resistances. Subaltern studies might do well to see resistance not only as a diagnostic of power, as in Lila Abu Lughod's excellent study of rural--urban bedouin women subverting patriarchal and clan-based authority through neoliberal consumerism, but also as a diagnostic of resistance, wherein hegemonic structures of political order are transformed by their attempts to repress and harness multiple forms of opposition.