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Introduction: LATIN AMERICAN SUBALTERN STUDIES REVISITED: IS THERE LIFE AFTER THEDEMISE OF THE GROUP?Author(s): Gustavo VerdesioSource: Dispositio, Vol. 25, No. 52 (2005), pp. 5-42Published by: Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, University of Michigan, Ann ArborStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41491785 .

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Dispositio/n 52, vol XXV 5-42 © 2005 Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan

LATIN AMERICAN SUBALTERN STUDIES

REVISITED:

IS THERE LIFE AFTER THE DEMISE OF THE GROUP?*

Gustavo Verdesio

University of Michigan

5ome American

accomplishments

may ask, Subaltern

why

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(LASS)

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after

fate

Why two

of discuss the

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their its American Subaltern Studies (LASS) group now? Why discuss its

accomplishments and failures at this point, after two of their most prominent members have declared it defunct? Well, the answer is

simple: because the collective has been one of the most influential endeavors in the fields of Latin American literary and cultural studies in the

* I would like to thank some colleagues who made this issue of Dispositio/n possible. First and foremost, a big thank you to Ileana Rodríguez, without whose encouragement this volume would have never seen the light of day. In numerous and long conversations that took place at different geographic locations (East Lansing, New Orleans, Columbus, and Ann Arbor) and by more virtual media like the phone and e-mail, she was always ready to give, candidly, her invaluable input on, and support for, this project. Next, I would like to thank my friend and colleague Fernando Coronil, for finding time to write a brilliant and inspirational piece at a time that was not the easiest for him and his family. Another big thank you to my good friend, colleague and former landlord, Gareth Williams, for his willingness to discuss anything (from subaltern studies to 80s British pop, from Marxism to a certain soccer star who used to play for Manchester United) with me, with or without Scotch on the table. Thank you to my friend and colleague Javier Sanjinés, for his permanent good spirits and his great sense of humor, and for having made some time, in spite of his busy schedule and the huge pressure he was under, to contribute a very important piece to this volume. A final thank you to my personal Guru and Meiga, Cristina Moreiras-Menor, who was there all the time to support, feed and psy- choanalyze a very tired editor and friend.



6 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

United States. It has been, also, a very controversial intellectual enterprise that found the strongest resistance to it among some of the most important progressive intellectuals who work in Latin America. The name calling that took place - Latin America-based scholars used words as strong as "academic imperialism" to refer to their US colleagues' practices, while the latter called the former by such dismissive labels as "neo-Arielistas" or "neo-Criollistas" - should not stop us from analyzing the group's legacy from a calmer, more distanced perspective. This is possible, I believe, because, among other reasons, the worst of the name-calling has passed, and the time elapsed between the peak of the confrontation (the 1997 LASA conference in Guadalajara, Mexico) and the present allows us to have a more detached and productive view of the contributions of the

group. When I planned this issue I thought very carefully about both its

possible format and its potential contributors. I must admit that I tried to balance the need to be representative of all the tendencies that comprised the group and my personal opinions about who was influential enough to be asked to respond to a questionnaire. I finally decided to send it, also, to

people who were not members of the group but who, in my opinion, could make an important contribution to the evaluation of ten years of subaltern studies presence in the field of Latin American studies: Ishita Baneijee, Saurabh Dube, Enrique Dussel and Ernesto Laclau. Unfortunately, none of them were able to send their contributions at the time of the writing of this

preface. The other non-members I invited who contribute articles to this issue are Abraham Acosta, Bruno Bosteels, Horacio Legrás, Florencia

Mallon, Eduardo Mendieta, Daniel Mosquera, and Ximena Soruco. I invited some former members as well, like Gareth Williams and Alberto

Moreiras, who, for different reasons, ended up not contributing to this issue. The ex-members I invited who have contributed to this volume are John Beverley, Sara Castro-Klarén, Fernando Coronil, Walter Mignolo, José Rabasa, Ileana Rodríguez, Javier Sanjinés and Patricia Seed.

I also sent a questionnaire to all the participants. They were not

expected to respond to all the questions: it was just a way of

communicating to them what issues I was interested in seeing discussed. Here's the questionnaire:

¿Qué relaciones hay entre los estudios subalternos latinoamericanos y otras corrientes, tales como los estudios postcoloniales y los estudios



LATIN AMERICAN SUBALTERN STUDIES REVISITED:... 7

culturales? ¿Qué relación podrían tener con la crítica cultural

propuesta desde Latinoamérica? ¿Piensa usted que los estudios culturales y los estudios subalternos

latinoamericanos son proyectos con genealogías diferentes o están conectados de alguna manera?

¿De qué manera se relacionó o se debió relacionar el subalternismo latinoamericano con el sudasiático? ¿Por que los subalternistas sudasiáticos ignoran, en general, olímpicamente a sus pares latinoamericanos?

¿Qué ventajas o desventajas tuvo, en su opinión, el formato escogido para funcionar? Es decir: fue preferible ser un grupo a ser un movimiento más abierto?

¿Qué tipo de influencia han tenido los estudios subalternos latinoamericanos en el campo de los estudios latinoamericanos en general?

¿Han pasado la barrera de los departamentos de lengua y literatura? ¿Qué influencia específica han tenido en estos últimos?

¿Qué legado concreto ha dejado el grupo? ¿Es posible construir algo distinto a partir de lo producido hasta su disolución como tal? Es decir: ¿son posibles los estudios subalternos latinoamericanos sin que exista el grupo?

¿Qué limitaciones tuvo el grupo? ¿Qué pudo haber hecho y no hizo? ¿Por qué hubo y hay, en Latinoamérica, tanta resistencia a los estudios

subalternos latinoamericanos? ¿Cuál es el camino a seguir, hoy, por aquellos que siendo o no parte del

grupo simpatizan con la mirada subalternista? ¿Cuál debería ser el o los objetivos de una teoría o una corriente de

pensamiento que intente entender a Latinoamérica en el contexto académico de hoy?

[What relationship do you see between Latin American Subaltern Studies and other theoretical trends such as Postcolonial Theory and Cultural Studies?

What relationships do you see between these trends and the different kinds of cultural critique proposed from Latin America?

Do you think Cultural Studies and Latin American Subaltern Studies are connected somehow or are they projects with different genealogies?

How did Latin American subalternism relate-or how should it have related- to the South Asian one?

Why do South Asian subalternists olympically ignore the work by their Latin American peers?



8 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

What advantages and/or disadvantages had the group format? Was it preferable to be a group or to become a more open movement? What kind of influence has LASS had on Latin American studies at large? Have Latin American Subaltern Studies reached people beyond the

departments of language and literature? What kind of influence have said studies had on language and literature

departments? What are the legacies of the group? Is it possible to build something different in the future, the foundation being

the work produced by the group? Are Latin American Subaltern Studies possible without the existence of the

group? What were the limitations of the group? What could the group have done that it did not do?

Why was there so much resistance to the group in Latin America and why does such resistance still exist?

What are the paths open to those who were not members of the group but who sympathize with a subalternist perspective?

Which should be the goals of a theory or a thinking that attempts to understand

Latin America in the framework of today's academic context?]

As the readers will see later, some of these questions remained unanswered by some of the contributors. As a matter of fact, the question I

was most interested in, the one about the possible theoretical and academic roads we should walk today and in the fixture, was left unanswered by most

of them. Is this reason to worry about the future of a progressive academic

agenda that builds upon the advances contributed by theoretical endeavors such as LASS? Not necessarily. However, it is reasonable to ask yet another

question: are some of the contributors still so invested in past theoretical

practices that they cannot see what lies ahead? Or is it that we need to wait

yet some more time until the waters become even calmer?

Regardless of the answers one could give to all these questions, it

seems to me that the future of Latin American theoretical efforts in the

fields of literary and cultural studies is not clear. In the absence of new

theoretical agendas, I believe the responses LASS was trying to give to the

configuration of the world after the fall of actually existent socialism are

still worth our attention. The articles included in this issue of Dispositio/n touch upon so many

topics that it is difficult to give a comprehensive overview of their contents.




However, in this Introduction I will try to at least offer a precarious mapping of the standpoints and intents they reflect. Let us start with the articles written by commenting on the responses, direct or indirect, to the first series of questions I posed - those that deal with theoretical

genealogies. The personal narrative that has had the most exposure until now is that of Ileana Rodríguez, who has told the story of the group several times ("Reading Subalterns," "La encrucijada," "El grupo latinoamericano" and her contribution to this volume). This version has become something like the official history of the Group and it entails a narrative of origins as well as a theoretical genealogical tree. John Beverley's own memories on the creation and evolution of LASS and the ideological and theoretical

provenance of its members, did generally corroborate Rodriguez's version

(see, for example, the Introduction to his Subalternity and Representation). However, as we see in Sara Castro-Klaren 's and José Rabasa's contributions to this issue of Dispositio/n, there are other former members who have different stories to tell.

The official narrative goes more or less like this: a group of Marxists disenchanted by the failure of actually existing socialist regimes finds itself in search of a new theoretical and ideological program. As Beverley says in the aforementioned book, Subaltern Studies is not a Marxist project but it can be considered, at least, a project that emerges from Marxism (21). It is, so to speak, the offspring of a disenchanted group of Marxist scholars. This

may have been so at the inception of the group, but as some other narratives of origins tell us in this issue - and other significant silences tell us as much or even more about this particular topic - others joined the enterprise for different reasons. As Castro-Klarén says, for example, her personal narrative "might illustrate the fact that not all scholars who find Subaltern Studies a productive and promising theoretical and political vantage point depart from the same location, sense of crisis or search" (96). She retraces her own intellectual itinerary as one that starts at a traditionally less

politicized point of departure: literary studies. More concretely, she starts

thinking the notion of difference and other topics that will later lead her to

join LASS thanks to her readings of authors like Julio Cortázar and José María Arguedas. The latter's work, according to Castro-Klarén, was a

challenge for the then predominant critical paradigms, which could not account for it satisfactorily. Cortázar and his treatment of the fragment were other sources of inspiration for her. She was, in her own words, "not so much concerned with the general dimensions of an epistemologica! and



10 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

thus a political crisis, as both Ileana Rodríguez and John Beverley state

they were" (99). Another member of the group, José Rabasa, was an intellectual

interlocutor of Castro-Klarén in the early nineties, a time when they coincided in the Washington DC area, where Judith Butler was teaching a seminar on her book Gender Trouble. Interestingly, Butler's syllabus did not include a single Latin American intellectual. This notorious absence will be discussed later in this Introduction when I address the reception of LASS among South Asian subalternists. But let us go back to Rabasa, who invited Castro-Klarén to the group. He, also, has a different genealogy to offer: he was doing postcolonial theory without knowing it (malgré lui?) and his affinities were closer to what was known at that time as minority discourse.

Others, like Walter Mignolo, do not give us his own narrative, but I can do it in his stead: he started as a semiologist from the French school who later opened up to other schools of semiotics and epistemological thinking, only to take a surprising turn at the beginning of the 1980s towards colonial Latin American studies. He can be considered, together with Rolena Adorno, as one of the founders of the most recent mode of intellectual production in that field. For reasons that he does not explain fully in his contribution to this issue, but which are understandable to

anybody who is familiar with his work, he ended up embracing the LASS cause. Patricia Seed and Fernando Coronil, unlike most of the ex-members of the group, come from a different discipline: historiography. This is not an insignificant difference, for the disciplinary background of the diverse members of the group was, at times, an issue. As Seed herself asks in the

piece she has contributed to this volume: why was subaltern studies so successful among literary scholars in the field of Latin American studies?

Why did not it have a similar reception among scholars from other

disciplines? These questions entail, I believe, a not-so-veiled critique of the

group for not being able to incorporate scholars from other disciplines outside literature or cultural studies. But this is a topic that I will go back to when I comment on Rabasa's musings about disciplinarity and its role in

partially determining the relationship between LASS and the South Asian Subaltern Studies group.

The official narrative also states that most of the founders of LASS had been political activists before they became academics. This narration is

given at length by Ileana Rodríguez, who provides a detailed list of former



LATIN AMERICAN SUBALTERN STUDIES REVISITED:... 1 1

activists/founders in "Reading Subalterns" (2-3). This narrative is corroborated by Seed's own account of the process through which she

joined the group (see her contribution to this volume). This may be true in most cases with regard to founders, but it may not be as accurate a

depiction of some of the members who joined later. In any case, this

emphasis on political activism, prevalent among the founders, would clash, over time, with other, newer members, in several occasions at the very few

meetings of the group that took place (see Rodriguez's description of those

meetings in, for example, "El grupo latinoamericano"). These confron- tations at the ideological or, if you prefer, theoretical level, led to a characterization of the internal conflicts of the group as follows: there was a core of people more interested in social activism (or in understanding the subaltern as a real-life, social subject) and another sector of the group that favored a more philosophical approach to subalternity. At least, this is the

way in which Ileana Rodríguez and Bruno Bosteels (see his contribution to this issue of Dispositio/n), in different ways and from very different

philosophical points of view, depict the major conflict at the core of the

group. The former has expressed, repeatedly, that confrontation between the deconstructionist wing (which according to Bosteels, was comprised of at least two people: Alberto Moreiras and Gareth Williams) and the Marxist one (that Bosteels, again, identifies with at least two people: John Beverley and Ileana Rodríguez herself) was one of the things that led to the demise of the group ("El grupo latinoamericano" 77, "A New Debate" 14-15). According to Rodriguez, for the deconstructionist wing, the subaltern was "a pre-text for flexing our intellectual muscle and using it as a way of

thinking the unthinkable" ("A New Debate" 14). This treatment of the notion allowed its practitioners to "play with logic and syntax and to come

up with prestigious texts that put us at an advantage in the market. In this

respect, the subaltern was used as exchange value and we cashed on it" ("A New Debate" 14). For others, "subalternity was a real and not only a discursive condition of subordination, and as such it stood for a social

position embodied in the oppressed, a condition that generated the

coloniality of power" ("A New Debate" 14). I quote Rodriguez at length because the following passage confirms

that Bosteels's assumption about her alignment with the Marxist wing is not

utterly whimsical: "These works were not characterized by their theoretical bent but by their interest in excavating sites and explicitly or implicitly setting up policy recommendations... We considered that making the



12 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

subaltern and the subaltern positions more visible was a way of demonstrating solidarity with the poor" ("A New Debate" 14). The first tendency could be characterized as the philosophy of praxis (because of its more theoretical orientation), while the other is better described as a praxis of philosophy, due to its more political or historical tendency ("A New Debate" 15)1. She continues: "those subalternists who are less politically or even historically inclined tend to dismiss as mere 'activism' the tendencies implicit in those more historically or politically oriented, while the latter, in turn, tend to see the work of those theoretically inclined as 'careerist', or merely academic exercises, mere academicism" ("A New Debate" 15). Finally, she states that while

some scholars were concentrating on the deconstruction of ideas and epistemes, others were still interested in subaltern consciousness and agency. The question was whether or not we could really limit ourselves to thinking the subaltern solely as a metaphor or negation and limit of hegemonic knowledge or whether we were willing to seriously entertain the agency of flesh and blood sufferers (15)

First, I must say that I do not agree with Rodriguez's representation of the motives of those she characterizes as members of the deconstructionist pole: I am persuaded that they were looking for the same kind of progressive thinking the Marxist sector was. The difference between the two factions could be found more in their theoretical preferences than in their intentions career-wise. I am persuaded that it would be unfair to say that the careers of the members of the more theoretical (the one Rodriguez calls deconstructionist) pole benefited more than the others from their embrace of subalternist theory. If the group had a positive effect-due to the aura or prestige that surrounded it at a certain historical moment-on academic careers, I think it is safe to say that it had it on all members of the group.

I strongly suspect that in Rodriguez's dichotomous presentation of the two main trends that coexisted in the group, Walter Mignolo, who would be surprised and probably hurt if he were labeled as a deconstructionist (which, he will hasten to say, he is not), would enter the ranks of those more preoccupied by theoretical issues than by the flesh and blood subaltern. Let me pause here to clarify why I am consciously going against Bosteels's recommendation in the first version of his paper (read at




the MLA Congress held in New Orleans, December 2001), to think without

relying on the proper name. I am doing so because not everybody is an insider (one of the most salient traits of the group, in my opinion, is that it

operated as an exclusive club - but more about this later) and most people who read these lines may not know exactly who is who in the divide

Rodriguez describes. Having said that, I acknowledge there is a very high probability that I am misinterpreting or misconstruing the situation. Nevertheless, I believe it is worth our time to try to unveil the identities of some of the key players in the creation, development and dissolution of the

group. Let us go back to Mignolo, whose case I am focusing on because I

think his situation could help me shed some light on the limitations of

Rodriguez's explanation of the distribution of forces within the group and the scholarly agendas and ideological tendencies that were part of it. As I mentioned earlier, his background is not that of the sixties activist that Seed, Beverley and Rodriguez talk about. It should also be pointed out that in his last book-length effort he has made it clear, repeatedly, that it is

necessary, in his opinion, to think outside the framework provided by Marxism, a school of thought he identifies with modernity and the West. Besides, he has always been considered a very (and in the context of a very anti-theory milieu - the world of Spanish programs in the US - perhaps "too") theoretical scholar. These considerations lead me to surmise that Rodriguez would include him in the ranks of those more interested in the subaltern as a category from which to think than in the group of those promoting a political activism that would result in activities that entail

solidarity with the flesh and blood subalterns of the world. Yet, as I said earlier, he cannot possibly be characterized as a deconstructionist.

I am trying to fit Mignolo in the taxonomy Rodriguez proposes only to show how reductionist it may be. I am persuaded that the intellectual, theoretical and ideological variety within the group was much wider, and richer, than Rodriguez's classification may lead us to believe. Her representation may be useful for a description of how two of the important trends at work in the group related to each other (maybe a relationship that was based on a struggle for leadership?), but it is wanting, nonetheless, as a

depiction of the wealth of theoretical trends and backgrounds that its members brought to the collective. We could also consider Castro-Klarén's case, who openly admitted, in her contribution to this volume, that politics and the left were not her main reasons to join the subaltern studies group.



14 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

Does this make her a member of the deconstructionists? I do not think so. What Rodriguez's depiction tells us is, I believe, how she views the forces at work in the group, and their struggles for leadership. Other members may view things differently, as some of the contributions to this volume suggest.

Another issue to take into account is the following: how would the so-called deconstructionist members react to Rodriguez's depiction of the distribution of forces in the group? Or, better yet, how would they describe themselves in theoretical and academic terms? Would they call themselves deconstructionists? Or would they imagine themselves in a more complex fashion? My guess is that they would not be very pleased by such a

simplified depiction of their theoretical interests. They might say, for

instance, that Marxism also informs their work. Moreiras, for example, has written an article strongly based on the Marxist notion of primitive accumulation and Williams considers himself a serious reader of Marx

(countless personal communications). Yet, this is just my take on what they could have said. My only excuse for putting words in their mouths is that

although they were invited to contribute a piece to this volume, they decided not to do so.

This brings us to another issue: the meaning of silence. Theirs- Moreiras's and Williams's- is symptomatic: the two so-called deconstructionist or theoretical members of the group decide not to talk about the deceased collective. This should be telling us something, but what? I honestly do not know for sure. What I do know is that it would have been very interesting to see what these two scholars had to say about, for

example, the process that led to the demise of the collective-or about how

they viewed the development of the group from its inception. Other silences that are also very significant and that I regret enormously are Dussel's and Laclau's. It would have been very interesting to see how these two important thinkers from outside the field of literary and cultural studies saw the contributions and limitations of LASS, and how they saw their work in relation to the collective's. As of today, we are left wondering about all these non-contributors opinions about the aforementioned-as well as other-issues. Yet, because I am not much of a mind reader, I will leave it at that.

Another point of contention that is not directly addressed by all the contributors I invited, is whether LASS comes from a US version of cultural studies or stems directly from the admiration some of its founders

professed to Ranajit Guha and the South Asian group. Beverley seems to




favor the first genealogy mentioned (in his Subalternity and

Representation , among other texts), while Rodriguez has clearly stated that the inspiration came directly (at least to her) from Guha's work - which seems to be the case of Seed too, according to her personal narrative

published here - as can be seen in her "El grupo latinoamericano" and other texts. In any case, for readers interested in the diverse personal genealogies, I refer them to the detailed ones with which some of the contributors have

provided us. An alternative way to understand the diversity within the group, as

well as the reasons that got it together, is to focus on several key topics they discussed throughout the years. In their respective solo efforts, the members of the group dealt with several issues that seemed to be crucial for

understanding the passage of a bipolar to a unipolar world, and the advent of what most people call globalization. One of them was the status of the Nation-State as both a vantage point from which to think and an object to be thought about. I am convinced that this is a productive site of inquiry and I am going to briefly explore it in the paragraphs that follow. However, I must warn the reader that the examination of this and other topics might reveal as many similarities as differences in the ways in which the collective's members dealt with the same issues.

As Florencia Mallon clearly states in her contribution to this volume, the relationship between subalternity and the Nation-State is much more

complex than some of the subalternists would desire. She reminds us that, according to Beverley, it is theoretically impossible that the subalterns play a significant role in the discourse of nation-building. However, in her

opinion, it is necessary to de-romanticize some of the conceptions certain intellectuals have of the subaltern, which present him or her as a pure subject that has been permanently left out of the structures and institutions

provided by the Nation-State. In her book and in her article for this issue of

Dispositio/n, she reminds us that subaltern subjects have been, on more than one occasion, complicitous with state power (172); that subaltern politics vis-à-vis the State have not always been, at least in Latin America, strictly based on negation (173). However, some subalternists do not want to admit that subalterns have often "sat down at the table of the nation-state" (172).

Beverley, for example, believes that to keep the antagonism people/ power block today is a way of legitimizing the state ( Subalternity and Representation). This statement, according to Mallon, comes from an

understanding of the state as a tool that serves only the dominant class.



16 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

Such an understanding forgets that in order to be effective, the state cannot

always act on behalf of the dominant class: the state needs to open the

possibility for other classes to have a say on the elaboration of policies and on the way state institutions operate - for example, by using one sector of the state against another (173).2 And as Mallon herself reminds us, the

Chiapas movement, considered as one of the most conspicuous "new movements" or new social agents, has been in constant negotiation with the Mexican state, of which it claims to be a part (173).

It is interesting to notice that despite Beverley's belief in the need to rethink the state from the vantage point of subalternity ( Subalternity and

Representation 151), he, at the same time, avers that subalterns cannot ever win even if they take over the state, because by doing so they become its other and, therefore, reaffirm the values and structures that had been the

stronghold of the dominant class ("¿Puede ser gay la nación?" 93; Subalternity and Representation 133). So, in order to become the rulers, the

argument goes, they have to embrace or reassert the values of the former

hegemonic block. This view of subaltern identity is, as Javier Sanjinés states in his

contribution to this volume, a synchronic one. In other words, it is a static view of subalternity and it does not allow much room for a diachronic

perspective or for historical change. I believe Sanjinés is right and I will add something to his argument: a representation of a subaltern culture as

something identical to itself throughout time, regardless of its development at different historical conjunctures as well as of its changing social

positionalities, entails several dangers. One of those dangers is that it freezes the subaltern as a pure essence that remains always identical to itself. Gareth Williams, for his part, rightfully warns against understanding the subaltern as an identity instead of as a series of practices (86). For him,

negative difference (of which the subaltern is an incarnation) is always a

practice, not an identity (90). This definition resonates with the one

proposed by Ximena Soruco in her contribution to this volume: to be an Amerindian (a subaltern) does not mean to be an essence, but to have a relational identity (232).

The most dreadful danger of imagining subalterns in terms of fixed identities is that it precludes any possibility of evolution for them. It

precludes, also, the possibility of any active role of the subaltern in the

framework of the state and its institutions. However, as Mallon ( Peasant and Nation) and other authors (such as Karen Spalding and Steve Stern,




just to name only two authors who have studied the relationship of Amerindian subalterns with the colonial and postcolonial states in the

Andes) have shown, subalterns have chosen, throughout history, to

negotiate with, and to participate in, state institutions when they thought such a strategy could be appropriate for the advancement of their cause. And from the very ranks of subaltern studies, Marcelo Bergman and Monica Szurmuk show, in their study on citizenship and new social movements in Argentina, that subaltern subjects are often trying to struggle for citizenship and they are doing it in the framework of the state and its

(bourgeois) legality (385). The legal, bourgeois rights they are fighting for are not a gift from the state, but a product of a political and social struggle that demands a space and a recognition for the individual within the framework provided by the law and their rights as citizens of a modern state

(389).3 Subalterns do not remain identical to themselves because, like any

culture or human group, they change over time. Institutions do not remain identical to themselves either, and the state is no exception to this rule. It seems to me that to declare, as Beverley does, that subalterns cannot

possibly win a war against the hegemonic block because that would turn them into something else (that is, they would lose their identity, which is conceived of as fixed) while at the same time affirming the need to rethink the state from a subalternist perspective is, at least, a contradiction. It is my contention that in that new state, subalterns could still be faithful to their cultural roots (what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls '4he time of the gods") while

being able to operate successfully from the structures of a state (a secular institution that belongs, again in Chakrabarty's parlance, to "the time of

history" - Provincializing Europe 72-96) that would now be at the service of the subaltern classes.

The limitations of some subalternist thinking involving the Nation- State are shown, also, in the article by Ximena Soruco included in this volume. In this piece, the author shows how misleading it can be to neglect to take into account the national histories of the different Latin American Nation-States. In her analysis of Beverley's classification of the Quechua play Ollantay as a case of transculturation from below, she avers that the

way in which that kind of transculturation is conceived ends up essentializing subalternity (229). In her opinion, Beverley's thinking is based on an opposition of fixed identities that depends on the power relations between a given pair of subject positionalities (230).4 To classify



18 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

the play as subaltern because of the language in which it is written, without

taking into account the social context of its reception during post- independence times, is a way of both essentializing the play and making the

position of subalternity a fixed one (230, 234). In Soruco's opinion, subaltern products are not frozen in time but are, instead, negotiated constantly. This is why she finds the concept "transculturation from below"

wanting: because it omits the struggles for power that underlie the product and its successive uses (230). Her study of the reception of the play by the Cuzco elites in need of recognition before the national hegemony exerted from Lima's elite shows that Ollantay was reappropriated by the lettered

city and incorporated into the canon of Peruvian national literature. That is, her study shows the long and changing life and meanings of subaltern cultural products in the framework imposed by the Nation-State and its national narratives.

Finally, I would like to refer to the ideas advanced by my dear friend and colleague Gareth Williams (who excused himself when invited to contribute a piece to this issue of Dispositio/n ), because he, like those who

penned the "Founding Statement," sees a logical relationship between the vindication of subaltern histories silenced by the Nation-State and a tout- court rejection of dependency theory, because this theoretical corpus rests

upon a worldview that presents a center/periphery model (Williams 84). It has always mystified me that most of the subalternists are so persuaded that the subalternization of subjects by the Nation-State somehow precludes any consideration of the unjust international division of labor that organizes the world. What I mean is that by rejecting the basic tenets of dependency theory, they forget that whatever processes of subalternization the Nation- State undertook in Latin America, they were often strongly encouraged, and most of the time directly engineered, from outside those Nation-States. The center/periphery model proposed by dependency theory is vilified, I

believe, for reasons similar to the ones Williams himself uses to explain the limitations of Nestor Garcia Canclini's thoughts on citizenship and

consumption. Williams states that the Argentinean critic too readily accepts the intellectual rules of the game proposed by neoliberalism - that is, the

categories and concepts with which neoliberalism wants us to understand the world (84). I believe Williams himself too readily accepts the death certificate the international right has issued to dependency theory and to

center/periphery models. Like James Petras, I am convinced that some intellectuals from the left end up accepting, and using in their own work,




the notions and categories, the knowledge and the protocols produced and / or recommended by the right (Petras 1-2).

The attitude of most of LASS's members against dependency theory (with the exception of Beverley, who, at least since Subalternity and

Representation, is rethinking the relationship between subaltern studies, the Nation-State, and the popular front - see 103-104, for example) seems to be to fall into this trap: they accept, at face value, the advent of a world organization and a conceptual framework that makes the center/periphery model unthinkable and obsolete. The authors who adhere to this portrayal of the way in which the world works give very few arguments and zero data to support their statements on the demise of domination of poor countries

by the rich ones. At best, their arguments circle around invectives against either dichotomous thinking or models based on fixed positionalities.5 But nothing is said about how the economic systems of the world and the

policies they enforce work. For this reason, their opinions on this topic are nothing but opinions or, better yet, a matter of belief. In the same vein, and without feeling compelled to respond to belief with data or science, I, as a believer as well, but of a different creed, consider theirs simply wrong and dare to affirm: there still are countries that impose policies and rules of behavior on others; there are countries at the center of the world system and others at its margins. The last war on Iraq should have made this very clear by now.

There would be much more to say about this complex and slippery subject - the relations between the nation, subaltern studies and subaltern nations - but let us now move to another, somewhat related, relevant topic: the relationship between LASS and their Latin American colleagues working in Latin America. The polemics that took place after the reading and publication of some papers by Mabel Moraña and Hugo Achugar in the Latin American Studies Association meeting in Guadalajara, in 1997, have been extensively commented upon by some subalternists, among them, John Beverley (see, for example, his discussion of what he calls Neo- Arielismo in Subalternity and Representation 18) and Ileana Rodriguez. I would like to point out, very briefly, that I see a milder, less confrontational tone in their contributions to this volume. Beverley, for example, says that the things that unite Latin American critics to their North America-based ones are, in the long run, more important than those that separate them (70). And Rodriguez dedicates a long paragraph to point out the points of convergence of both camps (43). Of course, both Beverley and Rodriguez



20 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

keep voicing their differences with Latin American critics, occasionally labeling them under not very flattering terms such as Neo-Arielistas or social-democrats (Beverley 70; Rodriguez 50; both in this volume). However, there are signs of tiredness and a growing awareness that the differences of the recent past, whose causes are complex and related to the new international distribution of intellectual power - a globalization that

displaces Latin American intellectuals and depletes the economies of the universities they work for (Beverley 70, this volume) - should be overcome. They do not say it in so many words, but this is what I read from the tone in which their most recent pieces are written.

As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I decided to put together this issue of Dispositio/n is my feeling, shared by many colleagues of my generation and younger, that these disputes between intellectuals from the North and the South and, to judge from the demise of LASS itself, between intellectuals who work in the North, are in the end internecine disputes whose only consequence is to debilitate the intellectually progressive forces in the face of the multiple threats posed to education by the most recent version of the corporate university: the neoliberal one. This is why I have been always mystified by the violence of the debate between Latin America-based and North America-based Latin Americanists, and by the

worhip some members of LASS showed for intellectuals so far removed from their more immediate intellectual and professional ties.

I am referring, of course, to the admiration shown by some members of LASS for intellectuals like Ranajit Guha and other members of the South Asian Subaltern Studies group. Rodriguez has explained in several venues

(in most of her pieces quoted in this Introduction) what attracted her and/or the founders (sometimes it is not clear who she is speaking for) to the South Asian collective. I understand some of her reasons but still remain skeptical about the convenience of naming the group after its South Asian

counterpart. Fernando Coronil, in his contribution to this volume, brilliantly analyzes the consequences of the act of naming after a role model that does not belong to one's family - family, in this case, standing for the Latin American intellectual tradition, of course. In his opinion, LASS established affinities with distant subjects at the risk of not

acknowledging how much it owed to their own intellectual ancestors in the field of Latin American studies (339). To LASS's credit, though, Coronil

avers, they did not copy either the structure or the disciplinary orientation of the South Asian group, but took their work just as a source of inspiration




(340). For example, LASS did not have a leader like Guha nor did it take the form of an editorial collective (340). It was the spirit or the drive behind the South Asian group that prompted the founders to name their Latin American group after them.

There is still another issue related to the relationship between both

groups that I would like to touch upon. I am referring to the evident lack of

reciprocity between both groups. I can say, without hesitation, that this is the first time that I see members of the group addressing this issue.

Rodriguez, for example, has admitted, in her answer to my question about the one-sided nature of the relationship between the groups, that the South Asians never showed, to her knowledge, any intellectual interest in

engaging the work of LASS (55). She attributes this lack of interest to the structure of area studies, which is a consequence of the coloniality of power (55). It is interesting to see that several ex-members (Sanjinés, Castro-

Klarén, Rodríguez) and non-members (Abraham Acosta) responded to my questionnaire having recourse to this term - coloniality of power - that

Mignolo - who first borrowed it from Aníbal Quijano - elaborated on in his Local Histories/Global Designs. This is a very useful concept coined by a Latin American intellectual producing in Latin America and it illustrates, partially, what Coronil means by the risks, and the potential losses, of

ignoring the intellectual legacy coming from one's own intellectual family. Rodriguez continues her acknowledgement of the lack of reciprocity

in the relationship between the two groups of subalternists by remembering that

they always dismissed us by sustaining that ours was "a different thing," but they never took the trouble of seriously engaging in a conversation on the nature of that "difference." So, while we did our thing they did theirs, and in so doing, we all remained locked within our own forms of localism.... That was our loss. We transnational peripheral intelligentsia missed the opportunity to converse (55).

José Rabasa also responded to my question about the silence kept by South Asian subalternists on LASS. He asks himself whether I am mocking the ex-members of the Latin American group (for the record: I am not) and states that I grant importance to recognition. I shall admit it: I do. I believe that one should not pay homage, endlessly, to people one does not even know without at least having some significant feedback. This has never



22 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

happened, as Rabasa himself acknowledges: there has been no reciprocity (84). On the contrary, in the occasions that South Asian subalternists have been invited to contribute a piece to a volume edited by a member of LASS

(I am thinking of the volumes compiled by Rodriguez), they have written about whatever problems they were concerned with and never addressed

any issues that could possibly be considered of mutual interest. Good

examples of what I am saying are the articles by Guha and Chakrabarty in the collections edited by Rodriguez. Honestly, I, as a Latin Americanist, have no use for those pieces. They reflect no interest whatsoever in

dialogue with LASS and the theoretical problems they posed. I must admit that I am almost certain that no South Asian subalternist

will ever read these lines, but that should not stop me from pointing out their lack of interest - and I would dare say sensitivity - towards their Latin Americanist counterparts. Besides, this text is mostly - albeit not

exclusively - intended for a Latin Americanist audience, given the fact that

English language and Comparative Literature departments have shown no interest whatsoever in any theoretical elaboration coming from Latin Americanism. The article by Abraham Acosta in this collection states, precisely, how much Comparative Literature loses by ignoring, at its own

risk, the contribution of LASS. In Acosta's opinion, this discipline is

reaching an impasse that could only be solved by questioning two of its most solid foundations: the notions of literature and the nation. The work

by some members of LASS, in Acosta's opinion, could be of great help to

accomplish such a questioning of the discipline. According to Rabasa, in his contribution to this volume, the

subalternists working in English - and I will add, following Acosta's reflections, Comparative Literature - departments, are too busy with their multicultural debates and do not have any need to incorporate other theoretical contributions coming from Latin Americanism: it is enough, for them, to incorporate the novels of the Latin American literary boom (I suspect Rabasa is thinking here mostly of Magical Realism and "lo real

maravilloso") and the testimonio of Rigoberta Menchú (82). He also

suggests that the lack of interest of the original South Asian subalternists

may come from their disciplinary background as historians (85). Most LASS members, Rabasa avers, are not good historians in the sense given to the expression by the South Asian group. Actually, this should not surprise anybody, because most members of LASS were not very interested in

producing good history or in confining themselves to that or any other




discipline: they defined the group as non-disciplinary, so as to be able to transcend the constraints of the disciplinary boundaries and protocols (85).

This brings us to another question: did a desire for non-disciplinarity preclude the possibility of incorporating non-literary critics to LASS? Was it precisely the corporate interests of its members, who came in their

majority from literature departments, what determined the composition of the group? Did non-disciplinarity end up meaning no other disciplines? This has been a shortcoming of the group, I believe, and it has constrained its efforts to the limited world of literature departments. To be more precise, it has limited its area of influence mostly to Spanish literature departments. There were, of course, the token historians, like Coronil and Seed, but the

group never went out of its way to incorporate anthropologists, archaeologists, political scientists or economists to its ranks. It is my impression that a more multi-disciplinary constituency would have made it easier to live up to the promise of an eventual non-disciplinary work. Then

again, this is contrary to fact and we will never know if this conjecture is correct.

Eduardo Mendieta, a non-member who comes from another

discipline, philosophy, seems more inclined to put emphasis on the intellectual heritage produced by Latin Americans to which Coronil was

referring. In Mendieta's contribution, that shows a clear support of the work

by Argentinean philosopher Enrique Dussel, a rather thorough overview of the different phases of Latin Americanism is offered. He is more interested in the movement he calls post-occidentalism, which encompasses the theories developed in Latin America in the 1960s. Post-occidentalism was, according to Mendieta, an epistemological revolution that took place much earlier than postcolonialism and subalternism, both produced by Indian intellectuals in more recent times (195). In his view, postcolonial theory is so young and it is concerned with such a recent historical period that, as a

consequence, it is not capable of offering a long-term view of the

development of colonialism (196). He follows arguments advanced by Mignolo when he states that postcolonial theory is concerned only with the second wave of colonialism and that is why its practitioners have developed an obsession for the issue of the nation and the national (197). He also takes issue with the solutions given to the problem of the subaltern by Indian scholars. He believes that respecting the absolute alterity of subaltern

subjects leaves the status quo intact, and that the solution is to respond to them without trying to assimilate them. This latter solution was, in



24 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

Mendieta's opinion, directly addressed by Dussel's ethics of liberation

(197). To sum up Mendieta's position, let me quote him directly: "The

critique of the political economy of knowledge that is developed by the

postoccidentalist critique proceeds further by stepping back farther since it seeks to begin from the crisis of reason itself at the moment of its inception, before the thrust to turn narrative into onto-logical ineluctability is ever launched" (198, emphasis in the original). That is, the advantage of post- occidental thought over postcolonial theory is that its point of departure is the study of the first form of colonialism. This position is very close to the one Mignolo has been maintaining since, say, The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Although there are differences between Mignolo's views and

Dussel's, they have been known to work together and even to co-teach a seminar at Duke University, so Mendieta's views could be viewed as akin to

Mignolo's. Post-occidentalism for Mendieta holds the promise of future

universality enunciated from a world that is multiple and one in its

plurality. If I am not mistaken, LASS recovered or revisited, without

acknowledging it, the spirit of post-occidentalism. To my knowledge, the

only subalternist who found some inspiration from Dussel was Mignolo -

an inspiration that still shows in his contribution to this volume, which is, by the way, one of the two articles written in Spanish. He has been, also, the

only one to wonder (in print) why LASS never found inspiration in Dussel's work in spite of the fact that the collective had goals and views so similar to the Argentinean philosopher ("Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation" 40-41).

I believe that Mendieta, by not acknowledging the genealogies and contributions of other theoretical traditions, and by refusing to see the similarities between the ideas and intent of Dussel and LASS, is making a mistake similar to the one made by LASS when it did not recognize its debt with Latin American thinking. The fact that he criticizes the South Asian subalternists but does not address directly the tenets advanced by LASS, prevents him from acknowledging the contribution of LASS, which, in my opinion, is different from the ones that can be credited to the Indian collective. As a matter of fact, I would even go as far as to respond affirmatively to the question Rabasa asks himself (83): has LASS gone beyond the goals and objectives of the South Asian group?

One of the reasons why I am responding yes to this question is that it is people like Rabasa himself who think, unlike people like Chakrabarty, that it is possible for subalterns to write their own history without the




mediation of intellectuals educated in the Western tradition ( Writing Violence 275, 277-278). For Rabasa, subaltern subjects have been and are still capable of inhabiting two worlds at the same time since the beginning of colonization in the sixteenth century ( Writing Violence 283; "Los Franciscanos" 385 and passim). Those Amerindians who were able to remain loyal to "the time of the gods" while being able to negotiate their way out of the problems posed to them by secular or historical time are worlds apart from the passive subalterns in need of Western-educated intellectuals presented by Chakrabarty ( Writing Violence 284). Rabasa is thinking mostly of colonial times Amerindians, but his thoughts are applicable to present-day ones too. I am thinking, for instance, of people like Roger-Echo Hawk, who is a Pawnee Indian who not only writes

history but who also repatriates indigenous remains successfully. In him we see Western science at the service of the subaltern, but this time it is not the non-subaltern intellectual who masters the hegemonic knowledge - and uses it to graciously help the subaltern - but the subaltern himself in his role as historian.

There is also another aspect in which LASS has gone beyond, in my opinion, the South Asian group's agenda. The project was presented, in a

special issue of Dispositio/n , as one that should go beyond the boundaries of the disciplines and reach for the flesh and blood subaltern subjects: one of the group's tasks was to elaborate strategies for local struggles and for the new forms of social agency, as well as to develop new forms of thinking and acting politically (Rabasa and Sanjinés v, vii). This agenda is partially confirmed by the "Founding Statement" reproduced in that very same issue, where one reads that the group does not intend to elaborate a new form of viewing or understanding the subaltern, but to build new forms of

relating to that subject (10). This plan is completed by their call for solidarity with the academician's Others (see Rabasa and Sanjinés x). None of these goals and plans are at odds with Dussel's ideas, which makes more notorious the lack of awareness of his works and ideas in the texts penned by former LASS members, with the exception, as we already saw above, of Mignolo.

I would like to move now to the question of the concrete political strategies that should arise from a dialogue like the one I have just described. On this subject, there are at least two possible attitudes: the one expressed by John Beverley, who avers that subaltern studies is a project within the university that, despite proposing a certain solidarity with



26 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

subaltern subjects, does not need to leave its academic home to go out and

reach for said subjects ( Subalternity and Representation 38; and in the

interview included in this issue - 354). The other attitude, as we already saw, is the one advanced by Rabasa and Sanjinés in the Intro to the issue of

Dispositio/n on subaltern studies (v, vii) and by the "Founding Statement"

(10): one that attempts to transcend the physical and ideological boundaries

of the university in order to be able to enter in a dialogue and in a

relationship of solidarity with the subaltern. Although it is not easy to

elaborate strategies to have an impact on society and to escape the teaching machine prison house, I believe that the democratization of the university that Beverley proposes (< Subalternity and Representation 38) does not need

to be the scholar's only educational goal. On the contrary, there is a lot left

to do with regard to both the knowledge we produce in universities and

what we do with it. To help change, as I propose elsewhere ("Todo lo que es

sòlido"), the curriculum at the primary and secondary levels of the

educational system is a doable task that does not imply an attitude like the

one promoted by narodism, a movement - ridiculed by Beverley, by the

way - which defended, for example, the idea that intellectuals should work

in the fields with the peasants (38). It is my contention that we need to develop an agenda for the

intervention of scholars of Latin American studies that goes beyond the

boundaries of the academy. Such an agenda necessitates, in my opinion, a

subalternist inflection. However, it is important, first, to review some of the

limitations of the subaltern studies project. One of those is the lack of

concrete political strategies or plans that has characterized the Latin

American Subaltern Studies group's activities. This is surprising, because

of the positions we saw both the "Founding Statement" and the

aforementioned Introduction by Rabasa and Sanjinés advanced. To this lack

of concrete political strategies one can add the striking lack of monographs that actualize the theoretical foundation of the subalternist project. One of

its former members, Alberto Moreiras, wrote once that the moment had

come to stop writing metacritical papers and start writing monographs about case studies. Otherwise, the use of a subalternist perspective will

never be demonstrated (141). To this limitation, one could add another, which is the shortage of studies based on empiric data produced by subalternist scholars. A consequence of this limitation is that there are very few Latin American subalternist studies on the materiality of social life,




past or present (for a call to give more importance to the material in our studies, see my 'Todo lo que es solido" and "En busca de la materialidad").

Although as academics we have less contact with flesh and blood

people, as Clifton Poodry rightly states (29), I believe that projects that

promote solidarity with subaltern subjects are still possible for us. For

example, a project that attempts to retrieve from oblivion the role of the labor and the knowledges of indigenous peoples across the Americas in the

emergence of modernity may be a way of practicing solidarity with the subaltern. An activity of this kind may have very immediate consequences for those Amerindian groups who struggle for their rights, today, from a

position of subalternity against the dominant system. 'Of course, the

incorporation of subaltern knowledges and cultural production to our research agendas should be done in the understanding that they deserve the status of critical discourse, as Horacio Legrás proposes in his contribution to this volume, instead of being regarded as "hallucinated difference" (211).

Additionally, there are other kinds of academic work that could have

consequences for the different indigenous groups of the Americas. I am

referring to studies like the one by André Luis R. Soares on the Guarani from Brazil, that purport to demonstrate, through a study of that ethnic

group's material culture, the continuity of some of their cultural traits and

practices throughout a period of sixteen centuries. A work of this kind, that establishes ties between Guarani societies from the distant past and from the present, could be used both to substantiate their land claims and to

legitimize the rights of one of the ethnic minorities of modern-day Brazil. This latter case brings us to one that hits closer to home for those of

us working in the US academic system. I am referring to the new situation created by the passage of a law known as NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), which has forced archaeologists and physical anthropologists to work together with Amerindians who were considered, before that law, as mere objects of study. This law has made the positionality of Native American stronger than ever and their claims to ownership of their own history more effective, by taking into account their own views on indigenous pasts as knowledge to be considered as serious as that produced by Western science. I believe that we Latin Americanists can learn a lot from the struggles and the achievements of subaltern subjects in the framework of NAGPRA (for a history and a study of the content of this act see: Jack F. Trope and Walter R. Echo-Hawk).



28 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

Since, and even before that legislation passed in congress, some

indigenous groups, like the Zuni, the Hopi, and the Navajo, have been

organizing their own archaeology programs (see, among many other

articles, the ones by T.J. Ferguson, Roger Anyon and Edmund J. Ladd; Billy L. Cypress; Richard M. Begay). This raises the question about the role of Western science in the production of indigenous knowledge and the

degree to which it could condition their writing of their own history. That is a valid concern. However, it has, at the same time, the potential of helping different tribes to identify the cultural affiliation of human and associated remains of the past. It is, of course, a trade-off for the subaltern, but one with which some indigenous groups have started to experiment. This choice entails, of course, as Larry J. Zimmerman avers, the training of

indigenous subjects in Western science so that they can apply it to the reconstruction of their own history (301). In this way, these tribes are being able to write their own version of their very own pasts, as Rabasa proposes.

There is another side to this story and it has to do with the impact of the participation of subaltern subjects in the elaboration and control of our

disciplinary agendas (Zimmerman 300). This would entail teaching an

indigenous past that has nothing or very little to do with the one we have been telling hitherto - an indigenous past that would incorporate, now, the views of those subjects, the Amerindians, who had been hitherto considered as objects of study in our disciplines (Zimmerman 302). This is why archaeological knowledge is now supplemented by oral indigenous traditions, whose degree of trustworthiness and historical content can be

distinguished from its "fictional" or ornamental parts6 - that is, those

segments storytellers employed both to entertain their audiences and to make their stories more memorable - if analyzed through methods that follows certain reasonable rules, as Roger Echo-Hawk has shown

("Ancient History" and "Forging a New Ancient History"). Science in general, Zimmerman tells us, must be put in a social

context (303). This should be interpreted, I believe, as a warning to any discipline that dispenses with the knowledge of subaltern subjects. In his

opinion, archaeology in particular would be able to realize its humanistic

potential if it were at the service of the indigenous subjects it studies (304).7 In other words, archaeology and the disciplines in general would be better served and would be much more dignified if they were put at the service of the subaltern. This way of reasoning is very close to that of Paul

Feyerabend's, whose ideas on the responsibility of scholars vis-à-vis the




general public could serve, despite their hyperbolic formulation, as

inspiration for our academic practices. His rule R5 states that the important issues in any given society must be considered and decided upon by the

people affected by them and not by abstract agencies or distant experts ("Notes on Relativism" 48). This is very close to Dussel's opinions on the role of the philosopher of liberation: he or she should "never propose the

guidelines 01 the goals but will instead reflect in solidarity and, from the rear guard, justify theoretically (or introduce suspicions into) the decisions of a given community" ("Epilogue" 272).

Of course, there are risks involved in a position like this. For

example, it could degenerate into a position like Richard M. Begay's, who

expects archaeologists and other Western intellectuals to help Amerindians to reconstruct their pasts, but without having the chance to disagree with whatever the indigenous subjects they are working for want them to say (165). This is very far from the way Dussel envisions the role of the Western intellectual with regard to the subaltern, as we saw in the previous paragraph. Begay's position is surprising because indigenous peoples have been able, for centuries, to live in, and to understand, two worlds, as Rabasa and others remind us (see, for instance, the article by Jeffrey van Pelt, Michael S. Burney and Tom Bailor - 171) and, therefore, they know that other human groups have beliefs that differ from theirs. I seriously doubt that a dogmatic affirmation of only one of the possible worldviews is the best way to advance the cause of indigenous peoples.

The resentment of indigenous peoples with regard to archaeology is

very well founded historically (see, for a review of the horrors committed in the name of science, the article by Robert E. Bieder and the book by David Hurst Thomas, among many other texts). Yet, this does not mean that

archaeology as a profession (with a long history of crimes and misdemeanors) is the same as archaeology as a way of knowing.8 It is as a way of knowing that archaeology holds some promise for the subaltern. In the same fashion, and despite all their differences as far as disciplinary frameworks and protocols go, literary and cultural studies can be of some

help to subalterns. Admittedly, literary and cultural studies, unlike

archaeology and Anthropology, do not always have subalterns as objects of

study, but they are always, sometimes unwittingly, studying texts that either produce subalternity (because of their endorsement of the official narratives of nationhood) or represent it in various derogatory ways: either as background (almost like part of the landscape or decorative folklore) or as a



30 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

lack that should be eliminated in order for progress to develop. However, as I argued elsewhere ("Forgotten territorialities" and "Todo lo que es sòlido"), we can give the tools traditionally used to dominate subaltern subjects a different role: we can put them to work for a research agenda that would be at the service of the subaltern.9

I have said elsewhere, also, that despite its problems, there is one thing archaeology can do for Latin American literaiy and cultural studies scholars: to put us in contact with the actual objects, with the material aspects of a culture that we usually study only through textual production ("Todo lo que es sòlido"). Archaeology can also teach us some lessons because, although it is a discipline that has been forced by law to respect the subaltern, it has started doing it effectively. Its trajectory could be compared to our discipline's: their long process of disregard for the Amerindian ended up in this current, albeit forced, collaboration with their victims of yesteryear. Our discipline celebrated for decades a literary canon that exalted Western values and despised the marginal classes and ethnic groups of Latin America or represented them from an Occidental perspective, even in the case of the best intentioned of critics. Today, the situation is different for Latin American literary and cultural studies: we can be proud to have witnessed the development of LASS with its proposals of voluntary solidarity with the subaltern, shown by several means, one of which is worth mentioning: to get out of the teaching machine and reach for the flesh and blood subaltern. There is still another way of reaching out for the subaltern and it is related to what I proposed above (which is what is being enforced in other disciplinary fields, as we saw in the case of archaeology under NAGPRA): to bring subalterns, or their opinions, to academia, in order to get their input about our research

agendas so that they can be a part of the process of shaping them. This is, if I interpret him correctly, Alvaro Felix Bolaños's proposal

in his article published in this issue: to bring the subaltern (the real person, flesh and blood) to the university. This is not, as a colleague from the History department at the University of Florida told him, (286) to make the indigenous subject a part of a circus or a freak show. Or as Beverley would have it, "some kind of radical otherness that can be brought into the classroom in the manner of a scarecrow" (interview 362). It is, on the contrary, an attempt to make the people we have, as university professors, contributed to oppress, to the very same place that creates subalternity, so that they can at least express their own demands in their own words in a




framework and a milieu that has almost always been deaf to their message. The conference he proposed to his colleague from history was intended, then, to give indigenous subjects the opportunity to express themselves in their own words and languages. It was, too, a logical consequence of a subaltemist agenda and a way to express solidarity with the descendente of the oppressed Amerindians he studies as a colonial expert (287). The

apparently respectful attitude of the history professor (who did not want to make Amerindians be part of a denigrating show) has at least two

problems, according to Bolaños: first, it fosters a comfortable passivity on the academic's part or, even worse, an avoidance of the "bothersome contact" with subalterns; and second, the foreclosure of any possibility of

solidarity with subaltern subjects coming from scholars and professors (293).

In sum, LASS has been a very progressive attempt to open the fortress of the teaching machine to the subaltern. It has left, as Coronil and

Rodriguez in their contributions to this volume rightly point out, a legacy to

younger generations. It has had, also, a significant influence both in the US

academy and in Latin America. It has, as Acosta has shown in his piece, the

potential to help other disciplines (Comparative Literature and English) in the US academy to overcome some of their political and epistemological limitations. It shares, too, the ideals promoted by Mendieta as a

spokesperson for Latin American post-occidentalism, and it contributes to what Mignolo, in his article published in this volume, calls an-other

paradigm - that is, one that tries to understand subalternity and social

injustice from the vantage point of the coloniality of power and the colonial difference. But most of all, it has given us a lever to help us produce a

thinking, a space from which to imagine things otherwise, a sort of external

negativity - as Horacio Legras ("Subalternity and Negativity"), and before

him, Enrique Dussel, have proposed - that makes a critique of Occidental reason possible, a limit, as Gareth Williams declares, to constituted power from which to create constitutive alternative ways of thinking and acting (11)-

That space gives us the chance to both revisit and vindicate those

knowledges produced by subalterns that Western society has dismissed, ignored or destroyed. I am referring to what Michel Foucault called

subjugated knowledges, those that have been de-authorized by the dominant epistemic rules and discourses for being local and partial. However, they, unlike Western dominant knowledge, do not construct



32 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

unitary, totalizing theoretical systems that seek to subsume all local elements within a single umbrella, and their validity, according to Foucault, is not dependent on the approval of the prevalent regimes of thought. It is here, in "these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work" ("Two lectures" 21).

The subaltern as a place from which to think gives us the vantage point needed to criticize our present. As Linda Martin Alcoffs interpretation of the role of subjugated knowledges in Foucaulťs work suggests, the historical a priori, the social conjuncture, can only be subverted from the outside, from beyond what that historical conjuncture can comprehend or accept (Alcoff 261). This Foucauldian position is akin to Enrique Dussel's in that the latter 's philosophical project presupposes a criticism performed from an exteriority - that is, an outside that is not only ideological but also material, whose ultimate instance is life itself (Dussel, "Epilogue" 273). And it is from the realm of the material, more concretely, from the material recognition of the suffering of the oppressed that, according to Dussel, many critical movements have departed ("Epilogue" 274). 10

For Linda Martin Alcoff, there are at least two good reasons for the assignation of epistemic privilege to marginal or subjugated discourses: the way in which they relate to power - they require less violence than Eurocentric knowledges - and the fact that they allow for a more effective critique of totality due to their exteriority (262). Those knowledges deserve, then, a respect that it is based not only on ethical but also on epistemic grounds. Without a basic respect for the oppressed and their knowledges, it will be impossible to take their contribution to humankind seriously. This respect should be the point of departure of our research, understood less as a merely academic enterprise than as a de-totalizing practice of solidarity with the Other. I believe this line of thought is not alien to, or at least not incompatible with, some of the agendas proposed and embraced by diverse members of LASS.

In spite of all the praise the trajectory of LASS deserves, it is true that, as some of its members admit, there were internecine disputes and terrible struggles over power within the group. As Rabasa tells us in the article published here: "The worm of desiring recognition, of jealousy, of possessiveness, and the ambition of laying claim for the latest paradigm in Latin American Studies devoured the Latin American Subaltern Studies group" (86). It is also true that, as Rodriguez admits, some members of the




group who thought of themselves as the left of the left, manifested symptoms of a vanguardism that we should dispense with (see her contribution to this volume, 50). That self-perception - that is, of being the most revolutionary ones - together with a sense of belonging to an exclusive club, may have been some of the causes behind the numerous attacks the group suffered from Latin Americanists based in both Latin America and the US academy. If you add to these signs of disfunctionality Rodriguez's declaration that the internal differences were never discussed in public and that the lack of internal dialogue precipitated the end of the group ("El grupo Latinoamericano" 77), it is clear that the group had real problems as a collective.

Beverley, for his part, offers (in the interview by Fernando Gómez published in this issue) a different, very personal interpretation of what happened to the group due to what he seems to characterize as a certain flirting with elite institutions that took place at a certain moment of the group's life:

that position of our own manufactured relative subalternity in the profession energized, I think, the work of the initial group. Then we started to catch on. Mignolo and Alberto Moreiras joined. And Duke comes into the picture with its great resources, and there is this big conference. Lots of money. Big names. MLA-style. Whereas our previous meetings had been very informal, low budget affairs. We would sit down for a weekend at someone's campus and talk like you and I are doing now. Nobody gave papers. Audiences were not invited to come or anything like that. So the Duke thing was much more dramatic and ambitious (interview 358).

A little later in the interview, Beverley remembers that the Dean of Humanities at Duke announced that Subaltern Studies was going to be the model for the Humanities at said university and that they (the members of LASS) "did not want to resist that [that is, being welcome to the house of knowledge and power], because in a sense we took seriously that Subaltern Studies wanted to hegemonize the field by providing a new paradigm. Because it was a political project. We did not want to be abject and humble" (358). And later he adds, in praise of resentment:

I think if we all had been at prestigious Ivy League institutions and had been getting grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, our



34 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

work would not have the kind of consequences that it had. It would have been perceived as yet another high-level academic project with little force behind it other than careerism. So you can

say there was an element of subalternity operative in our own

project. I am not trying to make any special claim to political correctness here. We were all college-educated, middle-class, etcetera. But there is relative subalternity and relative resentment. We say to ourselves "how come they are getting all the grants? O.k. Fuck them. We are going to do our thing, we are going to do it differently, collectively. We are not into academic ego-trips, nobody will present papers, we are going to be more like a sixties- style affinity group" (366).

Others, like Bosteels, who were not part of the collective, sees

generational differences in the ranks of LASS (149), but they are, in his

opinion, less important than the uneasy encounter that took place between the two strands of thought (the Marxist and the Deconstructionist) that

predominated in the collective and the challenge to articulate them (149). Basically, he asks himself how to achieve the fusion of theory and practice (149). His take, like mine, is that we don't need to choose between the two forms of subalternism, but to seek a harmonic combination of both (150). He is proposing, in sum, a theorization of the death of revolutionary politics of the past and a politicization of the deconstruction of the metaphysics of

presence (150). Instead of looking for that harmony, the members of LASS

kept upping the ante in the debate regarding politics, trying to show who is the most revolutionary thinker. If I read him correctly, what Bosteels is

proposing as a cause of the group's demise is its inability to solve the tension between a logic that remains transcendental and forms of thought that are sequential and "evenmental" and thus are to be thoroughly historicized without renouncing the rigor of deconstructive negativity (157). Although it is a simplification to present the group as one comprisec only of Marxists and Deconstructionists, it is undeniable that the tensior between two theoretical tendencies lies behind the demise of the group. Ir other words, it could be said that it was their inability to bridge tht theoretical gap, the theoretical differences between the main-albeit not the

only-two strands that comprised LASS that led to its dissolution. All these internal criticisms show us a portrait of LASS as a project

that included members with very different and divergent views, who

provide us now with conflicting versions or accounts of the process that led to its demise, and that lay bare its several flaws and problems. However, it




is my contention that the group's complex and rich legacy cannot be thrown

away just because it had the aforementioned problems and because it has

been recently declared defunct. There must be life after the demise of the

group. As Mosquera states in his contribution to this volume, following Beverley: one can still be loyal to a subalternist agenda - a more modest

one - by keeping a constant watch on its genealogy, its methodologies and

affiliations (270). Some people would like to see a new edition of the

group. Among these people is Ileana Rodríguez, who believes that there is a

need to rethink the project and its structure; that it is necessary to avoid the

mistakes of the past (see her contribution to this volume 59). She also

believes that if a new group is to emerge, it will be necessary both to write a

new manifesto or founding statement and to find new leadership (59). Her

opinion is based on the assumption that without a structure there is no

subaltern studies project (59). Others, like Coronil, believe that the

influence exerted by the group and the plethora of works it inspired, made

subaltern studies outgrow "the confining framework of its Founding Statement... It is perhaps the multifarious richness of these openings that made it difficult for the Group to contain them" (341). The very structure of

the group, then, was not able to comprehend the wide variety of subaltern studies it triggered: "the project it allowed [us] to imagine exceeded its incarnation in the group and even its identification as "subaltern studies"

(338). Subaltern studies, in his opinion, is "the promise it [the group]

generated but could not quite contain" (341). And he concludes, "free from

parental tutelage, subaltern studies may now grow ever stronger and

perhaps eventually, like its parent, will shed its skin and give rise to even more empowering engagements under different outfits from locations no

longer identified by our familiar cartography" (341). Whether practitioners of the discipline decide to continue their efforts

individually or whether they prefer to create a new group, the legacy of LASS cannot be ignored by those who believe their work is not just a mere intellectual exercise or a way to be protected from the ills of everyday real- life.11 Beverley says at the end of his essay that perhaps a certain

melancholy perceptible in some of the recent work of the founders is

peculiar to their generation:

The nature of the impasse our own work has contributed to

produce, plus the clear signs of mid-life crisis in our discourse, produce a kind of melancholy or desengaño which is not necessarily shared by our younger colleagues, who bring new



36 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

energies, new experiences and new imaginarles to the field. Perhaps the time has come for them to take the banner from our hands and to find some way of changing the terms of the debate (75).

Whether one agrees or not with Beverley about the role his

generation needs to play in the present (I, for one, wish they would stay around and keep contributing to the field's theoretical debates), it is also true that the legacy of LASS needs to be re-actualized by younger scholars. And when I say younger, I really mean it: I am referring to young assistant

professors and graduate students. This would bring fresh air to the space opened by the group. This would also be a celebration of, or a homage to, not only LASS, but also to the Latin American post-occidentalist tradition. As Fernando Coronil aptly puts it: "However brief and stormy, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group had a fecund life. This note celebrates its achievement and the mutable vitality of subaltern studies; it is post- obituary, not an obituary. We are dead. Long live subaltern studies in the Americas!" (341).

I am one of those who are willing to help contribute to the after-life of the spirit, or if you prefer, of the inspiration that brought LASS into

being. This special issue is an attempt to discuss the history, the multiple agendas, the limitations and the various legacies of the group. Hopefully, more venues will offer their pages to a renewed and refreshing debate about this seminal group and the theories that came from Latin America in the sixties. Those who believe, like Choctaw archaeologist Joe Watkins states in Indigenous Archaeology , that our role as members of a privileged segment of society is to "feed the hungry, clothe the poor, and establish

global peace" (170), will share Fernando Coronil's post-obituary's optimistic ending. However, if you find Watkins's wishes too ambitious, here's what he has to say about it: "Okay, perhaps the heading for this section is a rather tall order, but sometimes I feel that that is what final

chapters are supposed to be" (170). I, too, sometimes feel that the ending of

papers or introductions should take the form of a rather tall order.

Otherwise, why bother?

Long live critical thinking that seeks the liberation of the poor and the oppressed.




NOTES

1 It is interesting that Beverley says, in the interview published in this very same issue of Dispositio/n , that in his own articulation of subaltern studies "there is a moment in which deconstruction and subaltern studies move away from each other. And this has to do with a recognition of the limits of critical thinking and the limits of intellectuals. I think one of the key issues that brought together initially the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group was a sense of the limitations of intellectuals as agents of history and hegemony" (348). He also states, later in the interview, that "deconstruction is still an ideology of intellectuals that is text centered, still essentially framed by the legacy of European Humanism, in the sense of creat- ing a way to read texts to educate an elite no longer adequately educated in princi- ples that derive from theology and scholasticism" (353). He adds that "deconstruction becomes for me the new ideology of the literary at a moment when the literary itself has come into crisis. Deconstruction offers itself as a way of sav-

ing the essential impulse in literary criticism and therefore redeeming the role of intellectuals" (354).

2 1 discussed precisely this kind of situation that consists of a sector of the state operating against the rest of the state apparatuses in an article on the rein- forcement of the social fabric promoted from the Municipal Government of Mon- tevideo ("La democratización de Montevideo").

3 See also Rabasa's study of a rebellion in Tzepotlan, Morelos, where the Amerindians are shown fighting a battle in the legal framework provided by the Mexican state without losing sight of their own traditional legal and political practices ("Beyond Representation?" 193, 208 and passim).

4 Interestingly, Beverley himself has insisted on the fact that subalternity is not a fixed identity but a relational position {Against Literature 104; Subalternity and Representation 30).

5 Williams, for example, states that the center/periphery models isolate the object as a specific position, defined as a particular place within a network of global objective relationships, which corresponds to a belief in the singularity of cultural identities. Well, I beg to differ: the domination exerted by central Nation- States on the peripheral ones has very little to do with identity and much more with the power relations that develop between states as a consequence of a history of colonialism and neocolonialism.

6 1 add the quotation marks to the word "fictional" which is used, in Echo- Hawk's study, in a somewhat naïve and uncritical way.

7 This is a view shared by, among others, Cecile Elkins Carter (154-155).



38 GUSTAVO VERDESIO

8 About which, mind you, I have also my reservations, as I have shown in "Todo lo que es sólido."

9 See the case I mention in "Forgotten Territorialities," where cartogra- phers put a science (cartography) traditionally oppressive to subalterns at the service of an indigenous people from modern-day Guyana.

10 Again, I have been calling for a focus on materiality and material culture in at least three articles: "Todo lo que es solido," "En busca de la materialidad," and "Forgotten Territorialities." Daniel Mosquera also calls, in his contribution to this volume, for an emphasis of the study of material culture.

11 There is a mystifying article by one of the founders of LASS, Robert Carr, who is apparently in possession of information that nobody I have consulted seems to be aware of. He declares, throughout his contribution to a recent LASA Forum , that there is already an evil version of LASS conspiring against the spirit of the original LASS. Let us hope that, if this is true, Carr tells the public where this

group operates, what kind of work it publishes and who are its members.

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