Subalternity as Margin and Center of Anachronistic Discourse

Subalternity is a concept that has taken on many different meanings across multiple schools of thought. Beginning with Gramsci, subalternity described the unique position of rural workers as powerless and problematic to the Marxist dialectic. Following the English translation of Gramsci, the Subaltern Studies group extended the position of the subaltern into the post-colonial heterogeneity of rural space. Within this context, through Gayatri Spivak’s concept of the subaltern as rural postcolonial woman, subalternity becomes a condition of speechlessness. From Spivak’s reworking of subalternity, US third world feminism has developed a theory of difference and a mode of resistance. Meanwhile, Gramsci scholars have criticized these transformations of Gramsci’s concept of subalternity as anachronistic. They contend that each of the appropriations from Gramsci have further obscured Gramsci’s concept of subalternity producing a theory far from that envisioned by Gramsci. However, as specified by Gramsci, faithful readings and applications of outdated concepts becomes an “anachronism in one’s own time” (Gramsci, Selections, 628). Thus, while the Subaltern Studies group, Spivak and US third world feminism have resignified Gramsci’s subalternity from the rural south of Italian agricultural workers to the voicelessness of the post-colonial woman, their resignifications of subalternity are a development of theory that transcends the texts of Gramsci. This paper argues that Spivak’s and US third world feminism’s revision of subalternity avoids the Gramscian anachronism while developing a theory of both the state of subalternity and the escape of subalternity on “the long road toward hegemony” (Spivak, A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason, 310)