Abstract
The book under review is a second volume of anthology that has emerged out of a transnational and trans-disciplinary engagement of the scholars from India, Europe and United States, the first being the Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories: Investigations from India and USA which was published by Routledge in 2010. This publication series has generated an unprecedented interest in the newer dimensions and nuances of subaltern-school which had become almost dormant for about a decade. The editor of the volume, also a founder member of the subaltern collective has aptly explained the complex nature of the concept and its context in the very beginning pages:
We reiterated the position that ‘subalternity’, like ‘belonging’ is constantly negotiated (and differentiated), and stressed that it is not organized along a single axis, such as that of the economy. We also underlined the relevance of the concept to advanced liberal democracies and bourgeois societies today, no less than to the so called developing and under-developed countries of the Third World or to pre-industrial and pre-modern times.
He has further explained how this volume has intended to reexamine ‘the idea of “difference” in order to extend and deepen investigations of subalternity, and to return more sharply to the question that feminist and other oppositional movements have raised, of how modern societies and states take account of, and live with, difference’.
The book has been divided into three sections. While the first part deals with gender, sexuality and whole question of difference; second part consists of the chapters dealing with the making of subaltern identity or more specifically what is understood as ‘politics of belonging’. The third and the last section of the book have chapters based on ‘discourse of liberalism’ and articulation of difference in different spheres of life. Two core considerations which the editor of the volume has unambiguously demonstrated are to problematise the whole concept of difference and particularly with respect to the notion of subalternity. First, the very idea of ‘difference’ is fluid and therefore cannot be thought and organised along any single axis be it cultural or biological. ‘Difference’ therefore signifies a history and politics of ‘becoming’ rather than what is already normalised or immutable. Second, the editor with the help of empirical essays from India, USA, Britain and Ecuador, attempts to relate the issue of ‘difference’ to that of ‘subalternity’.
‘Difference’ usually become subordinated or subalternised, as against the so called established ‘standard’ or ‘normal’. Pandey has aptly demonstrated with appropriate examples, such as how ‘men’ are not different but the ‘women’ who are; the colonisers even while being in minority are not different but the large mass of colonised who are. Caste Hindus are not different; it is Muslims, dalits or tribals who are in Indian context (p. 3). And these subordinated and marginalised groups for more than two centuries have continuously strived for recognition as equals. ‘One man one vote’ ‘equal pay for equal work’ not only attempted to end the inherited structures of discrimination and denial but sought greater share in public resources and state power. And in the latter half of the twentieth century this battle further extended its self-conscious demand of acknowledgement as well as of even privileging of some kind of ‘difference’ (p. 3).
The very recognition of the term called ‘difference’ and deployment of this idea has created room for a claim of identity, unitariness, priority or privilege. The feminist scholarship, however, refused to see it as a dichotomy between claims to equality and claims to difference, rather they saw it as complementary and therefore argued that equality requires the recognition and inclusion of differences (p. 4). Pandey has further located how one of the prominent theme of the world history since eighteenth century remained the ‘emancipation’ particularly of the societies or groups that are usually dubbed as ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘backward’. He saw this genesis in the very process of ‘enlightenment’ and substantiates it with a suitable example of how the problematic of difference takes the political form of ‘Jewish Question’. Further, the editor has explained the theoretical foundations of the ‘politics of difference’ as they have played a great deal in making of the subaltern histories particularly in case of the dalits in India and Afro-American and women in the United States of America. These struggles obviously make one think of the libratory potentials of such movements transcending the confines of ‘enlightenment-discourse’.
A brilliant introductory essay by the editor has eloquently defined ‘black’, ‘dalit’, ‘women’ and laid theoretical foundations for questions arising out of subaltern studies and politics of difference. An ambitious attempt in the book is to capture themes arising from varied time and space. The first part of the book for instance, dealing with gender and sexuality does an excellent analysis but themes are picked up from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban India to twentieth-century California. But each essay in itself makes specialised reading on specific subject. It has been observed how in the United States of America, racism overshadowed, rather undermined any bonding between black women and white women on the basis of sex. But the scholars have also noted that the white women in the USA have widely served as agents of racism (p. 11). True, the category of ‘women’ or ‘women-rights’ is constituted only by suspending other differences, race being just one of them but the dalit women in India for instance claimed, they speak differently critiquing the notion of difference and endorsing a dalit feminist standpoint position. 1
Sharmila Rege, ‘Dalit Women Talk Differently – A Critique of Difference and Towards a Feminist Standpoint Position’, Economic and Political Weekly, xxxiii, no. 44 (October 1998).
Then, there lies also an issue of political and cultural difference and in order to make one understand, the editor has chosen ‘neo-Buddhist dalit’ as an appropriate example. Seeing no respite from the Gandhian method of ‘self-purification’ and dealing with the question of untouchability, B.R. Ambedkar resorted to his decision of leaving Hinduism and converting to Buddhism. And Ambedkar's conversion was necessarily a first step towards claiming a difference and that too, a political difference. Ambedkar saw caste formation in India as group or class formation from a sociologist's lens and his recasting Indian history as an extended and unfinished struggle between Brahminism and Buddhism that had an unprecedented implication. And a similar articulation of ‘political difference’ is evident from the assertion of The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. Du Bois in the United States.
Some of the essays included in the volume make appropriate case studies for curriculum for emergent interdisciplinary research. Colin R. Johnson's essay ‘Homosexuals from Haystacks: Gay Liberation and the Specter of a Queer Majority in Rural California, circa 1970’ has highlighted how San Francisco's Gay Liberation Front invaded a sparsely populated Alpine county in California making it a first gay majority county. This theme looks at critical questions of majority, minority and social difference (p. 42). Similarly, Christopher Krupa's essay ‘Mestizo Mainstream: Reaffirmations of Natural Citizenship in Ecuador’ has considered a case of the Mestizo groups in Ecuador who successfully co-opted protest tactics of the indigenous populace for claiming political citizenship. Krupa explores the inherently unstable nature of ‘citizenry’ (p. 150) and such notion has been highlighted other essays like Prathma Banerjee's on equality debates in nineteenth-century Bengal and Mary E. Odem's on Mayan immigrant organisations in Georgia. While Dilip K. Das's essay deals with construction of community based on their HIV status and how they become subject of exclusion like the prostitutes, the truck drivers, etc. Joseph Crespino's essay makes an imaginative engagement with memory of racial discrimination before the civil rights movement. This looks at the historical intersections of gender race and politics in the American south (p. 112). Pandey's own essay ‘Viola’s Story: Relocating Difference' has done a valuable reading of an unpublished autobiography of a black woman of American South (p. 167).
Finally, this is a volume that has brought a set of scholars form global north and global south across a table. This book is an indispensable intellectual contribution in a time when the discourse has not remained restricted to ‘politics of recognition and redistribution’ but it has transcended to ‘politics of representation’ and ‘politics of social justice’ as well. And the ‘politics of difference’ of course lies at the centre of all of these and more. With a range of essays dealing with varied subject, from the United States, Britain, India and Ecuador, Pandey has also attempted to establish the interconnectedness of ‘subalternity’ with that of ‘difference’. There is no denying the fact that collection will be of immense help for the students and scholars of race, caste, gender, cultural, social-exclusion and subaltern studies.