Latin America Subaltern Studies Group

In the midst of redefining Latin American political and cultural space, the Latin America Subaltern Studies Group was founded in the early 1990s to study the subaltern in Latin America. They recognised the Indian Subaltern Studies Group and Guha’s work as a means to recover the cultural and political specificity of peasant insurrection through two components: identifying the logic of the distortions in the representation of the subaltern in official or elite culture; and uncovering the social semiotics of the strategies and cultural practices of peasant insurgencies themselves. They also recognised the role of the subaltern as not only a passive or “absent” subject that can be mobilised from above, but also produces social effects that are visible, if not always predictable or understandable. [1]

Latin American Studies has been involved with questions of subalternity since its inauguration as a field in the 1960s, a field constituted by a spectrum of academic disciplines ranging from the philosophical critique of metaphysics, to contemporary literary and cultural theory, to history and the social sciences. And the force behind the problem of the subaltern in Latin America arises out of the need to reconceptualise the relation of nation, state, and “people” in the three social movements that have centrally shaped the contours and concerns of Latin American Studies: The Mexican, Cuban and Nicaraguan Revolutions.

For the Indian Subaltern Studies Group, the inadequacy of elite leadership failed to represent the nation – the central problematic of postcoloniality. Whereas in the Latin American context, ‘the subaltern functions as a “migrating” subject, both in its own cultural self-representations and in the changing nature of its social pact with the state(s)’. [2] Here the subaltern is not one thing, it is a mutating subject and functions as a “migrating” subject. This suggests that the subaltern in the Latin American context is not pinned down to a specific group of people, but rather it is an attachable notion that moves with the people of different identities that are not area-elites.

The presence and reality of subaltern social subjects in Latin American history has been obscured by the domination of Creole elites, of how they manage other social groups or classes in their own societies. For the study group, the study cannot operate solely within the prototype of nationhood. Additionally, the migrating subject must be plotted against its position in the stages of development of a national economy, as ‘the consent of the subaltern classes and their identity as economic categories underwrite the increased productivity that is the sign of progress and economic stability’. [3]By calling the concept of nation into question, this in turn affects “national” notions of elite and subaltern. Lastly, the subaltern includes the masses of the labouring population and the intermediate strata, as well as the nonworking subjects: this requires the study group to explore the margins of the state with the premise of nation as a conceptual space that is not identical to the nation as state.

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[1]Latin American Subaltern Studies Group cites Guha’s “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency” in Selected Subaltern Studies p45-84, “Founding Statement”, The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, boundary 2, Vol. 20, No.3, Autumn 1993, pp.110-121, p111-2
[2]Ibid. p118
[3]Ibid.