Colonial/ Post Colonial

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Michigan, AnnArbor

COLONIAL/POSTCOLONIALAuthor(s): José RabasaSource: Dispositio, Vol. 25, No. 52 (2005), pp. 81-93Published by: Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Michigan, Ann ArborStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41491788 .

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Dispositio/n 52, voLXXV 81-94 © 2005 Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan

COLONIAL/POSTCOLONIAL

José Rabasa UC Berkeley

ustavo Verdesio asks us to consider: ¿Por qué los subalternistas Я > sudasiáticos ignoran, en general, olimpicamente a sus pares lati-

noamericanos? [Why do the Indian subalternists ignore, generally speaking, in an olympian fashion their Latin American counterparts?]. This is a very embarrassing question; he is touching a nerve - a ticklish nerve I should add. In asking this question, Verdesio would seem to mock those of us who have worked with Latin American Subaltern Studies

Group, by the same token his question conveys the importance he grants to

recognition and conveys a perception from those in Latin American Studies outside the group. If all desire of recognition were narcissistic, wouldn't it

be further exacerbated in work on subalternity where elite scholars end up being the subject of debates circumscribed by metaphysics of dénégation and privilege? The "en general," the "generally speaking," offers some of us a space to wiggle out and claim exception to Verdesio's perception that the Indians have ignored the Latin American subalternists. Wouldn't this

recognition at the expense of the others suggest a token to which we sub- scribe all too willingly when we qualify our interventions with such

phrases: "in Latin America," "from a Latin American perspective," or "as a Latin American(ist)"? Is it that - as far as the Indians are concerned - one or two, perhaps three, Latin Americanists would suffice? Is Verdesio being excessively harsh on the Indians in his belief that they have ignored us

"olympically"? They have always struck me as a generous, if rigorous, bunch. In my case, melancholy for a lost affinity group leads me to reflect on my personal motivations and investment in the Latin American Subal- tern Studies Group. I resist mourning, letting go, but look towards mania as a resolution of melancholy that leads to a new form of activism and the per-



82 JOSÉ RABASA

verse: I cannot resist thinking of how the concept of the subaltern and the

enterprise as a whole have turned into an intellectual fetish. The easiest answer to Verdesio's question is that the Indians are just

ignorant, but that would not be satisfactory because they do read some Latin Americanist historians and anthropologists (e.g., Wolf, Scott, Mallon, Womack, Taussig), and not just the work of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. Verdesio may, perhaps, have in mind those working in

English departments - they are too busy establishing their primacy in the multiculturalist debates. But why should they bother with the intellectual

production of the Latin American subalternists when they can incorporate Rigoberta Menchú, Gloria Anzaldúa, and the great novels of the Boom into their versions of multiculturalism? Why should they read us? Why should we care? But by mimicking (even if willy-nilly) the Subaltern Studies

project, were we inevitably soliciting their acknowledgement and falling prey to one of the most famous phrases in postcolonial theory: "almost, but not quite"?1 Were we playing minors begging for the blessing of the new master? On the Latin American side, I cannot forget the dismissal of an

arrogant Argentinean historian who represented our relation to the Indian

group as one in which we borrowed a ready-to-assemble kit. I started producing academic work in the early 1980s under what has

come to be defined as postcolonial theory, then an emerging field with

ample visibility in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz where I was writing a dissertation on the inven- tion of America. It was part of the semio-sphere that enabled me to ask some of the questions that have determined my work. It was not called

postcolonial theory yet or at least in my absentmindedness I did not pick up on its aspirations to define a movement, perhaps because there were other

equally interesting approaches circulating in the program, namely Hayden White's work on historiography, James Clifford's readings of the poetics and politics of ethnography, and Donna Haraway's feminist history of sci- ence. Cultural studies as invented by the Birmingham School were also

very important. Little did I know that - by reading and reflecting on Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Peter Hulme, and Gayatri Spivak among others - I was inscribing my work under postcolonialism. Actually, I did not

grasp this term in its current definition until years later when a colleague of mine helped me articulate the ideological differences that had emerged in the aftermath of the national liberation movements that followed World War II, of which Franz Fanon was the emblematic thinker. My friend whis-



COLONIAL/POSTCOLONIAL... 83

pered in my ear, "don't say post- World War II, say postcolonial." So, this was what I had been doing all along! Obviously, questions of recognition haunted my project, but they had more to do with writing an acceptable dis-

sertation, finding a job, and publishing my work. It never occurred to me that I was courting the Indian group or that I was writing as a Latin Ameri-

canist). I discovered the Latin American Studies Association after my first

appointment at the University of Texas. Certainly, I was pleased to learn that some liked my work, invited me to conferences, published my work in

anthologies, and were willing to hire me in a Spanish department, but I never conceived of my project as seeking the recognition of a postcolonial elite recently arrived to the position of master discourse. My affinities were closer to those who were writing under the sign of minority discourse with no aspirations of constituting a new master code, of establishing a new paradigm unless this effort was understood as a new sensibility with little

patience for absolutes, models, or even concepts that claim universal applicability. Isn't the application of theory and concepts an unarmed discourse?

Beyond a concern with being derivative, shouldn't we interrogate our desires to produce "paradigms" for others to derive their discourses? In the case of the Latin American group, setting models and concepts in English for others writing in Spanish - i.e. promoting derivative discourses - could not but be perceived as an imperialist gesture. But this was hardly the case of the South Asian Subaltern Studies project: they confined themselves to debates within India. Should we continue to read them with no regard for the particular appropriation of the Latin American subalternists, if anyone clinging to this affiliation still exists? What is retrievable in the work of the Latin American group? Have we claimed to go beyond the South Asian

proposals? Is this will to go "beyond" the South Asian group a textbook

sample of the master/slave dialectic? Would it manifest resentment over Verdesio's claim that we have been ignored olympically?

Some of us actually have been questioning the universality as well as the desirability of investments in the dialectic of the master/slave in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit , so dear to some of the practitioners of South Asian Subaltern Studies and postcolonial theory. The push for a "beyond" would inevitably invoke the rails of a dialectic in which one situates and defines one's project. Why not ignore the interpellation of the masters?

Why internalize the hate and the love speech-acts that solicit our investment in their claims to universality? The notion in Latin America of Indians as "refractarios" of modernity, an attribute often given to prove the inability



84 JOSÉ RABASA

of simultaneously being Indian and participating in modern life forms, should serve as an emblem to the idea of lending a deaf ear to the summons of those claiming power. We in subaltern studies have much to learn from the strategies of selective acknowledgement of interpellations. One of the reasons the South Asian scholars have ignored us is simply because at least some of us have different agendas, even if we have subscribed our names to a project that borrowed the term "Subaltern Studies" from the South Asian

group. I will suggest that it is precisely in the differences and not in the similarities between their projects and their specific colonial pasts that we ben- efit from reading their work. The call is for comparative studies, not for an

application and importation of theory. In my readings, oppressed indigenous groups in Latin American have

produced accounts of the European invasion since the sixteenth-century, not with the objective of being recognized as able to practice history as conceived by Europeans, but as devising native vocabularies that incorporated the new realities into their systems of representation and narrative structures, and as questioning or using symbolically the imported life forms. In

using western forms symbolically they codify systems of representation as emblematic and practices such as the confession and the inquisitorial pro- cesses attest to their ontological and epistemological pertinence and power. But then again, the Spaniards did not define their practice of history as a model, as the English did centuries later in the spirit of the Enlightenment, but rather sought to understand the indigenous arts of memory and systems of writing, which often held more authority than those texts written using the Latin alphabet. I refrain from speaking of native practices as history because I question the value of recognizing forms of memory, narrative, painting and normative systems in the European categories that define his-

tory, literature, art, and law: such gestures lead to the erasure of the specific indigenous practices. I cannot fully elaborate this point here but let me just add that there are no traces of an internalization of a European denial of the

practice of history, or of writing for that matter, among the sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century Nahua tlacuilos (native painter/writer) that I have studied, in the ways that one can trace an internalization of the values of

European history in Bengali historians of the nineteenth-century who felt

pressed to prove that Bengali was an appropriate vehicle for history and modern discourse in general. To my mind, the possible transformation of native languages for the transmission of modern thought should be obvious; however, this process might entail the loss of life forms particular to native




languages. I refer to this forms of life as linguistic, epistemological, and ethical elsewheres to Greco-Abrahamic categories, genres, and disciplines, regardless of the languages in which they are articulated - be they English, Spanish, Nahuatl or Bengali. Nahua tlacuilos in the sixteenth-century and their counterparts today practice their arts of painting, narrating, and justice without apology or a need to imitate and derive their discourse from Euro- pean models. If they request recognition, it is of their right to practice these forms of life without being subjected to criteria of universality defined outside their own horizons of universality. This is what I call radical relativism: the possibility of conceiving truth regimes within specific horizons of universality in any given language or style of thought. The objective is no longer to deconstruct truth statements, rather to envisage a plurality of worlds in which deconstruction would not make sense or amount to one more rhetorical practice. What would be the import of exposing the princi- ples grounding truth and authority in a situation in which one assumes a multiplicity of horizons for establishing truth and authority?

Verdesio's question conveys a perceived desire for recognition that has not been reciprocated. It is as if the Indian scholars have emerged as the new masters of academic discourse and we Latin American(ist)s must, at least as subalternists, seek their recognition. In this narrative, the Indian pursuit of recognition from the imperial masters reaped its rewards in the 1980s and 1990s as they constituted a new academic vanguard. The terms postcolonial and subaltern have achieved the questionable status of required citation. Obviously, some of us will say that we have been dialogu- ing with the Indian group all along and that we have not been ignored. Indeed, we might even share the olympian detachment and consider the work of the rest as not good enough. If you happen to be a historian you might face the consideration that your work is not "good history," a pre- ferred dictum of the Indian subaltern historians. Or be proud of the recognition of doing "good history." This might be the reason why some of us were ignored: we are not "good historians," but let us inflect this statement by adding that some of us don't care to be considered good historians. Indeed, one might actually view the institution of history as irremediably constrain- ing in its disciplinarity. Indeed, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group is on record for conceiving its work as non-disciplinary. In making this pronouncement we were not seeking the recognition of the Indian historians; it flies in the face of their disciplinary efforts. They are good historians, but few of us conceive of our work as history, hence we should not be



86 JOSÉ RABASA

surprised that they have ignored us. But this, again, is too easy. What about those postcolonial literary critics in English departments? And again, why should they pay attention to us? Wounded egos, unproductive narcissism that breeds resentment and insatiable thirst of recognition haunt us all in academia. The worm of desiring recognition, of jealousy, of possessive- ness, and the ambition of laying claim to the latest paradigm in Latin Amer- ican studies devoured the Latin American Subaltern Studies group. Instead of defining our work as singular enterprises with no expectations of consti-

tuting a paradigm but with the hope of providing good readings that would

provoke a reflection without apology or end, we vied for ownership. We lost track of the ways the singular both underlies and produces the commu- nal. We became petty as we struggled to possess the term "subaltern" to lay claims to its patent. In the end, subaltern studies no longer consisted of a

style of thought, a critical program, and a revolutionary movement which cannot be owned - but a name: a fetish? The project became a futile pas- sion, which should not be taken as synonymous of pretending to be able to write as if the momentous contributions of South Asian Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory are no longer of significance in what we say about colonial pasts and postcolonial presents and the intersection of the two tem-

poralities. They still matter.

Although I teach a course in Spanish on Colonial/Postcolonial studies, I always use the title in English. The term "slash," at least in its spoken form, doesn't translate well. Technically one could say "diagonal," and even though this geometrical term has much to offer for a topology of the colonial and the postcolonial, it lacks the directness, indeed the onomatopo- etic ring of the English "slash." Of course, one can speak in Spanish of the intersection of the colonial and the postcolonial, but the options in the bilin-

gual dictionary for slash, i.e., cuchillada, tajo, corte largo, cortadura, don't

quite translate the punctuation term nor its meaning. The entry does not include "diagonal," nor does " diagonal appear in Maria Moliner's entry for punctuation in her Diccionario del uso del español. The closest in

meaning is " cuchillada ," not as in knifing, but as in "costura," sewing,

which calls to mind suture and seam. But then again, what does a "/" do? In slashing the Latin American colonial and the South Asian postco-

lonial, one binds these two entities together. This brings me to the narrow definition of the postcolonial as that style of thinking we generally identify with studies of colonial pasts and presents defined by the imperialist dominions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, in particular the




work of Edward Said, Peter Hulme, Gayatri Spivak, David Lloyd, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Homi Bhabha, and Ranajit Guha, just to mention some of the most prominent in my own thinking. In naming these scholars, I map an area of inquiry and influence rather than imply a school of thought - they know each other, some are friends, some hold long standing debates. Here I am folding subaltern studies under the postcolonial. As for the Latin Amer- ican colonial, the readings include Spanish, mestizo and indigenous texts from the pre-colonial world up to the wars of independence at the turn of the nineteenth century. The point is not to apply postcolonial theory but to create a montage in which the production of meaning surfaces in disparity and friction. Again, the end is not to define nor to provide an exhaustive account of postcolonial or subaltern studies, but to interrogate both ends of the divide colonial/postcolonial. The course also incorporates Latin Ameri- can responses, dialogues, and challenges to Postcolonial Studies, e.g. Walter Mignolo, Ricardo Kaliman, Armando Muyulema, Ileana Rodríguez, and John Beverley. Comparative studies would have less to do with draw-

ing similarities than with learning from the differences. The question, then, would be what can we learn from the Indian group in as much as they differ from us (but note that the similarities might very well appear in the least

expected places, as with the Criollo and the Bengali middle classes), and

stop asking the futile question of the applicability of Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Theory to Latin America.

One would no longer speak of the postcolonial as an event or a cultural formation that comes after the colonial. The postcolonial marks the

place from which we write as it defines topics, ethics, psycho-biography, epistemology, aesthetics, in short a historical consciousness that emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth-century. A historical consciousness that is bound by advances in Euro-American philosophy (this term comprises the

philosophies produced in Europe and in the Americas, as well as their intersection in North American academic circles). If the genealogies of the postcolonial and Subaltern Studies have different origins (the former is

typically traced back to Franz Fanon and Edward Said, the latter to the

founding of the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective in the early 1980s

by Ranajit Guha), one often finds scholars working and identifying themselves with both movements. Literary types tend to fall under the Postcolo- nial, whereas historians and social scientist under Subaltern Studies. Both fall within and build on the debates in Structuralist, Poststructuralist and Postmodern theory: Benveniste, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, and



88 JOSÉ RABASA

Lacan, just to mention the most prominent European thinkers that have influenced the postcolonial and the subalternist projects. These projects share a strong Marxist ingredient, but tempered by the history of European imperialism there is a common agreement to question the "Eurocentric" Marx of, for example, the newspaper articles on India. I place quotes around "Eurocentric" not because I want to question the appropriateness of this attribute when speaking about Marx, but to underscore the Eurocentric- ity of the work done in Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies, perhaps nowhere clearer that in the phrase by one of its most influential exponents: "mainstream 'Indian' culture is as distant from the Aboriginal subaltern in India as Aristotle."2 There is no room for an Aboriginal subaltern in an India that circulates in mainstream circles and reads Aristotle without abdi-

cating his/her own world. Obviously by Eurocentricity I do not understand the work that privileges Europe as a geographic entity or as a paradigmatic history, but the privilege - if not the inevitability - of thinking with terms, categories, histories and epistemologies of what for lack of a better term I call the Greco-Abrahamic tradition.3 Needless to say, what I am doing right now is part and parcel of this Greco-Abrahamic tradition. But it does not suffice to acknowledge it, especially if one turns around and argues that

being educated is synonymous with being well versed in the Euro-Ameri- can understandings of culture and the cultured.

In passing let me observe that the South Asian scholars and the his-

tory they tell of elite groups (e.g., the Bengalis of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries) in India shares similar class determinants and impulses to transculturate European thought and institutions with those of the Criol- los of Latin America. Not unlike our debates over the derivativeness of Cri- ollo discourses, the South Asian scholars also alternate between critiques that expose the derivative nature of the Bengali middle class and readings seeking to recuperate their unique contributions. The great difference between India and Latin America apparently resides in the subaltern classes, at least with respect to the tendency among South Asian scholars to establish an absolute ontological break as constitutive of subalternity. The Criollos and the Bengali middle classes (even when conceived as subaltern vis-à-vis the imperial powers) have more in common than we have tended to assume.4 As I have pointed out above, indigenous peoples in Latin America cannot (there are exceptions, of course) be categorized as producing discourses derivative of European models, at least in writing and painting in their native languages. As for their participation in Greco-Abrahamic




culture, the same paradoxes and aporias of the Criollo sectors would haunt them. In participating in western life forms, (Amer)Indians express little or no concern with the derivative nature of their discourses. All forms pertain- ing to the Greco-Roman (including Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies) are

equally alien (hence appropriable). The Latin Americanism (derivative or

not) of the Criollos is as suspect - if not more so - than the western philo- sophical traditions that never thought in terms of "el problema del indio."5 In fact, why not go to the origin of the discourses and debates (Euro-Amer- ican discourses) rather than passively receive the mediated versions of the Criollos. We may further consider whether intellectual work inflected by the Greco-Abrahamic can be done other than from the space of the "Cri- ollo" (if you prefer, criollo being mestizo-with-an-emphasis-on-the-western, differing from mestizo-with-an-emphasis-on-the-native), which should not mean that by practicing western forms of discourse one would be doomed to lose the ability to dwell in and articulate other worlds. In participating in the debates of the Greco-Abrahamic one would aspire to the dis- solution of the violence it inflicts on life forms dwelling elsewhere. As

such, the constitution and reflection on the Greco-Abrahamic in indigenous categories, languages, and life forms remains a possibility when not already an actuality. In constituting the subaltern in absolutist terms, the South Asian subalternists ban the possibility of dwelling in multiple worlds. The loss of this ability sets the tone for a postcolonial melancholy that ends up constituting personal psychobiography as a norm circumscribed by an inev- itable telos. Colonial legacies haunt the postcolonial project to the extent that the latter proposes alternatives to the civilizing missions of imperial projects. The desire to educate subalterns (in the ways of the Greco-Abra- hamic discourses and the western forms of democracy) inevitably carries the burden of an internal colonialism, of a "let me do it instead." As such, the promise of learning from tribal groups and indigenous peoples amounts to a pious gesture, to a "learning to learn from below," which in the end amounts to "teach me how to teach you." The pedagogical imperative either displaces the role of vernacular languages or, as in the case of India, it furthers the agenda set up by the British - as in Thomas Macaulay's Min- utes on Indian Education - to create a class of Indians that would make

indigenous languages suitable vehicles for implementing modernity. I am

merely touching on this sensitive point and would ultimately refer readers to the critiques by Indian scholars who have said it much better than I.6 It is not my purpose to undermine these projects nor the accomplishments of



90 JOSÉ RABASA

those who developed modern vocabularies and grammatical structures in

vernacular languages, but to note the colonialist impulse that emerges when

(native) versions of modernity seek to constitute themselves as the only valid representations and supplant indigenous forms of life. This position dismisses all speech of indigenous forms of life as anthropologisms.7 There

seems to be nothing worse for an Indian postcolonialist than to become an

anthropologist: as pedagogues and policy makers there is little room for

learning from indigenous peoples in and on their own terms. This hubris

would find its limit in indigenous intellectuals who cross the limits of the

Greco-Abrahamic without finding the imperative to impugn and abdicate

indigenous forms of life, which would furthermore reflect and represent the

Postcolonial intellectual in their own terms and languages. But this would

entail subjects whose psycho-biography is grounded in the indigenous and have learned to resist the interpellations of a version of modernity that demands the abdication - if not the hatred - of one's own. In this respect, the Indian elite and the Latin American Criollos partake of similar assimila- tionist policies: by conceiving tribal societies and (Amer)Indians as prob- lems, they (at best) inadvertently play into a bio-politics that proscribes the

right of indigenous peoples to exist. In cutting the postcolonial from a colonial period strictly defined as

under the direct tutelage and sovereignty of another nation, the postcolonial situation can very well be neocolonial. Indeed, the slashing of the postcolonial conveys a condition in which the possibility of reiterating the categories, the subordination, the mentality, and the oppression of the colonial is

an ever-recurring legacy. The awareness of this legacy, however, involves

an ethical commitment to interrogate the linguistic, historical and philo- sophical categories upon which we build our postcolonial discourses. Thus, a reflection on the colonial period entails an awareness of the implications of one's statements for the present. As such, the colonial/postcolonial would not aspire to create a current or a paradigm. Rather, movements, cur-

rents and paradigms in their insistence on being anti-colonial would reiter- ate the same colonial impulse they set up to overturn. In retaining the slash

or "/", the gesture is counter-colonial in being aware of the inevitability of

the colonial in our reflection and practice. Ethical rigor would consist of the

tenacity to denounce and to make manifest the colonialist impulse in para-

digms. This is an anarcho-communist proposal that would not exclude the

possibility of a movement, better yet, of a multitude, comprised of strong




subjectivities - clearly, not a mere multi-cultural assemblage under some common banner. Indigenous peoples would not be educated in the ways of

democracy and secularism given that the multitudes they would comprise would speak in the vernacular and would demand a right to practice their own normative systems within their own horizons of universality. The slash of the colonial/postcolonial should also remind us that there is no pure state but a plurality of worlds in which there is porosity between the modern and the non-modern through which information, categories, ideologies and con-

cept travel back and forth without erasing the pores - the limits that define elsewheres to the Greco- Abrahamic and the modern.

Elsewheres give the possibility of dwelling in a plurality of worlds without incurring a contradiction. The concept of elsewheres enables us to conceive indigenous understandings of modernity in which native subjects would not respond to the interpellations of modernity that demand the abandonment of their life forms. There would be a give and take - a light treading on the limits of modern and the non-modern - that would entail

moving beyond melancholy for a lost world and the trauma of colonization to the mania of insurrection and the perversity of laughter at the hubris of

(neo- or internal) colonialist impulses to redeem the subaltern.

NOTES

1 In Bhabha (199?) this formulation takes an additional turn in a racial variation, "almost, but not white" that he derives from a most unfelicitous passage from Freud's essay "The Unconscious": "We may compare them with individuals of mixed race who taken all around resemble white men but who betray their colour by some striking feature or other and on that account are excluded from

society and enjoy none of the privileges" (Quoted by Bhabha, 89). 2 1 derive this passage from an essay by Spivak (2000: 337) in which she

addresses "the new location of subalternity" in bio-politics and issues concerning the education of the ST (Scheduled Tribal). This essay is in the background of the comments that follow. Also see Spivak (1988).

3 1 have explored the concept of elsewheres and the Greco-Abrahamic in "Elsewheres: Radical Relativism and the Frontiers of Empire" (n/d).

4 The most important studies of the Bengali middle classes are Chatterjee



92 JOSÉ RABASA

(1986, 1993), but also see Guha's (1997) essay "An Indian Historiography of India."

5 For a critique of the privilege granted to the "Latin" in prescribing solu- tions to "Indian problem" in Criollo discourses, see Muyulema (2002).

6 Even if the Spanish missionaries adapted Indigenous languages to con-

vey Christian concepts, these tended to incorporate words and phrases that con-

veyed concepts alien to Native cultures. There was no effort to transform the

syntax of native languages to create more efficient vehicles of Christianity and

modernity. In fact, the effort pointed towards an indianization of Christianity (but one could add of pagan writers like Ovid who were translated into Nahuatl) that

required understanding and practicing rhetorical and grammatical forms that would not sound false or make absurd statements. In this respect there is no equivalent yet of the simultaneous edition of the South Asian Subaltern Studies volumes in native

languages. For collections of essays that document the debates in the Indian Group, see Chaturvedi (2000) and Ludden (2001). Ileana Rodríguez has edited two volumes (2002a, 2002b) that collect essays representative of the debates among the Latin American subalternists and their Latin American critics.

7 See Chakrabarty's (2000) brilliant discussion of Guha's treatment of the Santal's rebellion as "a combination of the anthropologists politeness . . . and a Marxist (or modern) tendency to see "religion" in modern public life as a form of alienated or displaced consciousness." Chakrabarty goes on to say: "Here is a case of what I have called subaltern pasts, pasts that cannot enter academic history as

belonging to the historian's own position" (105). Is it that a Santal must stop being a Santal to do history or is it that when he or she does history she inhabits another

space wherein the Gods must not speak because the Greco- Abrahamic prescribes a secular history? There is no reason for the Santal to stop being as a Santal who invokes the Gods when he practices history, if there remains the option of exposing the pretence and violence of secularity in writing history. Then, again, he or she

might simply ignore the precepts of "modern" history and do something else, culti- vate another genre with little or no concern for the recognition of the master historians. Also consider Spivak: "The single female of the Lodha tribe who made it into the university - studying, heartbreakingly, anthropology - hanged herself under mysterious circumstances some years ago" (334).




WORKS CITED

Bhabha, Homi. 1994. "Of Mimickry and Man." The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Pp. 85-92.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe : Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chaturvedi, Vinayak, ed. 2000. Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London: Verso.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

, 1986. Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A derivative discourse . Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Guha, Ranajit. 1997. "An Indian Historiography of India: Hegemonic Implications of a Nineteenth-Century Agenda." Dominance without Hegemony : His-

tory and Power in Colonial India. Pp. 152-212. Ludden, David, ed. 2001. Reading Subaltern Studies : Perspectives on History,

Society , and Culture in South Asia. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Muyulema, Armando. "De la Cuestiûn iondígena al indigena como cuestiûn."

Rodriguez 2002a: Nelson, Cary, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. 1988. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Rabasa, José. N.d. "Elsewheres: Radical Relativism and the Frontiers of Empire." Rodriguez, Ileana, ed. 2002a. Convergencia de tiempos. Amsterdam: Rodopl. , ed. 2002b. The Subaltern Studies Reader. Durhama: Duke University

Press.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. 2000. "The New Subaltern: A Silent Interview." Chaturvedi 2000: 324-340.

, 1988. "Can the Subaltern speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice." Nel- son and Grossberg 1988: 271-313.



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