Beverly Chapter 4

Beverley Chapter 4

“Hybrid or Binary? On the Category of “the People” in Subaltern and Cultural Studies”

This chapter was super interesting and made a lot more sense with the second reading. The part I find to be really intriguing is his bit on Cultural Studies as being built within a certain economic period.

He states:

· “That is because cultural studies is itself in part the consequence of the deconstructive impact of capitalist mass culture on the human sciences via the same process of comodification that postmodernist aesthetic ideology celebrates (or diagnoses) in its sense of the breakdown of the distinction between high and mass culture” (109).

sf It is incredibly interesting to think of cultural studies as being part of a long history of the Popular Front and this debate between the heterogeneity of the popular. Beverly's history really puts into perspective the long course of subaltern studies.

So, some questions:

Are we in a post-hegemonic age? How can we examine subaltern studies from a non-binary perspective? If no one can get out of ideology, then how should we study these texts?

· Ranajit Guha adds to his definition of the subaltern by saying “We recognize of course that subordination cannot be understood except as one of the constitutive terms in a binary relationship of which the other is dominance” (85).

· Inherently, he creates a binary relationship for the subaltern group and the dominant one.

· On the other hand, Homi Bhabha argues that resistance comes out of the margins of fixed identity. “The complex strategies of cultural identification and discourse address that function in the name of ‘the people’ or ‘the nation’” are “More hybrid in the articulations of cultural differences and identifications-gender, race or class-than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism” (86).

· So is a subaltern identity hybrid or binary?

· “Isn’t the whole point, as the passages above suggest, to undo the binary taxonomies that were instituted by previous forms of colonial or class power?” (87)

· Guha notes that colonial elite can be subdivided into 3 categories:

o Dominant foreign groups

o Dominant indigenous groups

o Elites at regional or local levels

· So, already there are some holes in Guha’s argument.

· “As Spivak notes, Guha’s identification of the people and the subaltern is the product of what is in effect a subtraction, rather than a positive identity that is internal to the people-as-subaltern” (88).

· Guha uses the term ‘the people’ which stems from the Popular Front (led by 1935 Bulgarian communist leader Georgi Dimitrov – it wanted to fixs the error of class against class line during the depression)

· “To combat the rise of fascism, Dimitrov argued, the broadest possible unity of democratic forces was needed, which required alliances with a wide variety of social forces, organizations, and political parties” (89).

· For Dimitrov – the category of the people is heterogeneous rather than unitary.

· He wanted a United Front style of government.

· Is the problem the idea of hegemony? – this is important

· “For Bhabha it is precisely the arbitrary or “ungrounded” character of signification revealed by semiotic and structuralist theory that permits subaltern resistance in the first place” (98).

· Bhabha speaks of a third space, “which represents both the general conditions of language and the specific implications of the utterance in a performative and institutional strategy.” The third space is the hybrid space.

· The subaltern knows that power is an effect of the signifier, if it didn’t it wouldn’t resist. – SUPER INTERESTING!

· “The negation of the dominant ideology is accompanied at the same time by the composition of another ideology, which posits as authoritative, authentic, and true other forms of identity, custom, value, territoriality, and history” (100).

· Spivak – subaltern studies cannot produce the subaltern as a full presence.

· For Spivak – subaltern studies can happen only in a process of continuous deconstruction that subverts binaries.

· Can subaltern studies contribute to a new form of hegemony from below?

· Cultural studies - “The popular front Marxism was more congenial to the development of cultural studies than Frankfurt School critical theory” (106).

· “That is because cultural studies is itself in part the consequence of the deconstructive impact of capitalist mass culture on the human sciences via the same process of comodification that postmodernist aesthetic ideology celebrates (or diagnoses) in its sense of the breakdown of the distinction between high and mass culture” (109).