This essay examines some prominent conceptualizations of “subalternity” and “the subaltern” in the literature on subaltern studies. A predominant history of Subaltern Studies has emerged that narrates the theorization, and materialist, national-historical and political tracking of “the subaltern” through the work of Antonio Gramsci, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, and the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective. I investigation how the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group (SASS) came to achieve its celebrated postcolonial status, how it inspired the formation of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (LASS), and why nevertheless the two circles remained more or less discrete. At the fore are issues concerning the constitution of “subalternity” and the agency of “the subaltern,” as well as those related to the politics of academe. The secondary task of the article is to acknowledge the geographies of colonialism and how they respectively and collectively inform the distinct particularities in, as well as resemblances between the research interests of each group. It is then to account for the asymmetry between profiles of SASS and LASS within academe, and to discuss the hierarchy of epistemic privilege implicit/explicit in this relation and the implications it has held for institutional subjectivity. The reading concludes on an important note about how knowledge formation of Western modernity occurs within a spatio-temporal cartography of metropolitan-peripheral relations that erases a significant part of Occidental history, a history holding fundamental implications for how we conceive of certain crucial European originaries and thus hegemonic European realms of conceptual authority.
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