A position embedded in identity: subalternity in neoliberal globalization

ABSTRACT

Gayatri Spivak asserts that subalternity is a position without identity and has no examples. This paper demonstrates that identities – imposed and subscribed to, contingent yet naturalized – have to be taken into account, particularly when we consider that such identities are inscribed into a war of positions. It argues that the notion of ‘subaltern’ in Gramsci, followed through in the idea of ‘subjugated knowledges’ in Foucault, read commonly as marginality, intervenes in established social relations to expose that Time is asynonymous with History. Subalternity, emblematized through positions, which are held by identities, plays a crucial role in negotiating that discontinuity between Time and History. The paper ‘relocates’ subalternity by redefining it as a process – in order to convey this, I use ‘subalternized’ instead of ‘subaltern’; identity, then, is also necessarily a process, captured temporarily in the course of political–cultural engagement. The essay reads the positions of racialized and gendered subalternized knowledges in the contexts of neoliberal globalization, in North America and South Asia, through the processes of identity-makings of two groups – the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center (Minneapolis, USA) and the Feminist Dalit Organization (Lalitpur, Nepal).