Subalterns and the Nation_ Mallon

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SUBALTERNS AND THE NATIONFlorencia E. Mallon

University of Wisconsin-Madison

I began my own personal research on and dialogue with the India-based school ofSubaltern Studies in 1987, as a result of an interest in popular notions of nationalism thathad emerged from my earlier dissertation research on central Peru. While initially anindividual project, informed by my concern with Marxist and post-marxist theory,feminist perspectives on nationalism, and Gramscian theories of hegemony and the state, Iexplored the work of subalternists and postcolonial theorists in my teaching as well. Thiswas, for me, the basis for the rethinking of nationalism, and of subaltern participation inthe nation, that became the anchor for my book Peasant and Nation. At about the sametime, when asked to participate in a forum in the American Historical Review on theimpact of Subaltern Studies outside their original geographical field, I was able tosystematize my understanding, from the perspective of a Latin Americanist historian, ofthe methodological and theoretical contributions and tensions of the schools founders.

The resulting essay fostered a great deal of debate, both among some Latin Americanisthistorians and among the group of scholars who had formed the Latin American SubalternStudies group, to which (contrary to the impressions of some of my historian colleagues) Inever belonged. While Latin Americanists in my own discipline criticized me for my lackof attention to empirical detail and my overly developed theoretical bent, Latin Americansubalternists found in my critique of their statements the makings of an empiricist turfwar. These debates were deepened by the appearance of Peasant and Nation.1

In this essay I take the opportunity to reflect on the influence Subaltern Studies has had on

interdisciplinary discussion and debate within Latin American studies, using as a majortheme a central point of tension in the subalternist perspective: the relationship betweenthe subaltern as an identity or social presence, and the modernist narrative of thenation-state. This is one of the most important questions I raised in my AHR article, andit also became a crucial bone of contention in the debates emerging around my book, notonly for interdisciplinary subalternists, but also for more discipline-driven historians. Byaddressing this topic in the context of the generational moment from which the debatesemerged and in which they were reflected, I think it is possible to explore the extent towhich discussions on the themes highlighted by Subaltern Studies, both between Northand South and among disciplines, have been productive. Although limits of language andmarket made Peasant and Nationmost easily available to North American scholars, one of

the best and earliest debates around the book, prompted by a long review essay written byTulio Halpern Donghi, appeared in the pages of Historia Mexicana.2 One of Halpernsmain points was that, historiographically speaking, my book worked better as anassessment or taking stock of the previous generation of intellectual production than it didas the beginning of a new analytical or theoretical stage. This was the case, Halpernargued, because I was unsuccessful at identifying a methodology that could withstand theweight of the critique I presented of my own generations theoretical production. Unlikelater historians, Halpern did not think this failure was the result of a lack of empirical


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workquite to the contraryhe emphasized that I worked archival sources with analmost athletic intensity (504). Nor was the problem a result of my uncritical acceptanceof a new theoretical model, whether it was postmodernism or postructuralism, for he sawin my analysis an intellectual honesty (515) that forced me to put maximum pressureon these analytical instruments, forcing them through the hardest possible test in order to

judge their capacity to clarify the processes she is interested in studying (514). Theproblem was, instead, that the methodological loot I was ab le to bring back from mytheoretical raidwhether through Gramsci, subaltern studies, or postmodernismwasexceedingly modest. Thus, while Halpern accepted that I had identified a problem andsuggested the need to find a different solution, I had not yet been able to find a productivepath toward it. John Tutino, the other participant in the debate, agreed with Halpern thatI had not been able to resolve many of the most important problems I raised, but heemphasized that my work provided new empirical and conceptual openings for futureresearch. While the book was not a final answer, Tutino concluded, it was a powerfulbeginning (560).

The main question to which both historians were referring was how best to explain thehistorical dynamic and political evolution of nation-states. I had been inspired analyticallyby my reading of the India-based school of Subaltern Studies to decenter the nation-stateand focus on both local and global processes in order to argue that peasant and othersubalterns had played a central role in the political struggles that made nation -states inLatin America. While the notion of subaltern agency in social and economic matters,especially through the medium of uprisings and social movements, was increasinglyacceptable to many Latin Americanist historians, the notion that less powerful ormarginal people could have made a major difference in the evolution of national politicalsystems was much more controversial. While a series of different explanations could begiven for what had remained an essentially dualistic or binary approach to politicsfrequently still organized around such dyads as modern/premodern,

political/prepolitical, communal/national, resistance/participation,charismatic/rationalthe end result continued to be a firm conviction that peasants inparticular, but subalterns more generally, remained caught within their smaller, moreparochial and immediate concerns and thus could not participate in either building orimagining the nation.3

At the same time, however, the publication of Peasant and Nationmarked the beginning ofan extremely productive period in which numerous works began to explore popularnotions of nationalism and citizenship in the process of nation-state formation. Historiansworking on Argentina, Cuba, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru have utilized notions such assubalternity, nationalism, hegemony, and the decentralization of power to examine a

variety of cases in which subalterns have participated in making and transformingnational politics and political coalitions. From an early moment in which subalternparticipation in national politics seemed counterintuitive, the question of subalternpolitical agency has become almost common sense in a historiography undergoing adramatic expansion.4

At the same time, however, an important gap in my analysis pointed out by Halpernthat is, my inability to link convincingly the complexity of local cultural and political


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processes to an equally complex treatment of such processes at the center of the politicalsystemhas remained open. The expanding literature on citizenship and popularnationalism has not effectively been connected to another emerging literature oncitizenship, elections and the public sphereone that has tended to focus almostexclusively on the center of the system.5 From the standpoint of a historian, the two

perspectives might indeed have certain topics in common, such as the examination of theelectoral sphere as a constructed space of contention among political factions, or theshared finding that, in many Latin American countries, suffrage was more limited in thelate nineteenth century than at the beginning.6 But the methodologies and goals of the twoliteratures are quite different. The researchers focusing on citizenship and the publicsphere, because they emphasize the specific institutional practices through which a moregeneral political culture was formed, tend to trace these exclusively at the centers ofpower, be they in state institutions or capital cities, leaving aside possibly related events orpractices at the periphery of society. Scholars investigating rural, regional, or subalternparticipation in nation formation work from the margins, exploring the often hiddeneffects of the excluded on the formation and transformation of political discourses andpracticesin so doing, however, they tend to stop short of reconnecting their findings to adetailed analysis of central state institutions.

Perhaps it is inevitable that a breach should exist between these two approaches.Historians focused on the public sphere and on the center of political systems tend to usemore established or traditional empirical sources, such as newspapers and statedocuments. While researchers working at the margins of the nation-state also readavailable mainstream sources against the grain (a term made popular by India-basedsubalternists), the very nature of their work, which aims to uncover hidden ormarginalized voices, to dig deeply to find forgotten connections and effects, necessitatesthe use of less traditional sources. For those who draw more narrow boundaries aroundwhat is considered appropriate data for historians, the end result of such marginal and

unorthodox research does not constitute bona fide historical evidence.

A particularly dramatic example of this rejection of less traditional sources and analysescan be found in economic historian Stephen Habers recent intervention in a debate on theso-called new cultural history of Mexico.7 Habers role in this debate turned out to be, ineffect, that of a discipline-based border police. He demands from other authors andworks that they maintain epistemological consistency according to his objectivist model ofempirical falsification of proposed hypotheses. When he does not find what he is lookingfor, he dismisses the entire group of analystswhom he calls new cultural historiansbecause they lack logical consistency and because, instead of arguing from empiricalevidence, they do so through the citation of authoritative theoretical texts. A detailed

summary of different authors responses to Haber is beyond the scope of this paper, 8 butit is important to emphasize that, when Haber concludes from his critique of culturalhistory that the evidence and methods employed by new cultural historiansfail,however, to satisfy the epistemological standards set by established schools of history,9he appoints himself the gatekeeper for the discipline as a whole and announces hisintention to stop all unauthorized traffic with neighboring approaches. And what isperhaps most fascinating about his perspective is that it finds its counterpart in the


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reactions to my book precisely from that neighboring discipline to which, perhaps, Haberwould have preferred I belong: literature.

Methodology and Interdisciplinary Travel

My encounter with the world of literary studies began with a debate engendered by myAHR essay on Subaltern Studiess importance for Latin American historiography.10Responding to my comments about the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, severalof its members emphasized what they saw as my attempt to mark disciplinary territory byasserting the intellectual superiority of the archive. This is what Jos Rabasa and JavierSanjins called my supposed privileged access to materiality.11 With this commentRabasa and Sanjins flattened out an entire discussion about the contradictions andcomplexities that form a part of all methods and theories, leaving aside my suggestionthat the archive, rather than giving us a privileged access to materiality (or truth),sometimes provides an opening toward a better understanding of the power relations inthe society that produced it in the first place. If, for Haber, my lack of objectivistepistemological criteria bars me from participating in historical debate, for Rabasa and

Sanjins my insistence on the critical use of different kinds of sources, including thearchive, makes me into a positivist historian not all that different from Haber and hisallies.

Perhaps the most systematic critique of my work from a literary studies perspective can befound in the pages of John Beverleys complex and multifaceted analysis of the importanceof a subaltern perspective for our understanding of Latin America.12 Beverley repeatsRabasa and Sanjinss suggestion that I have embarked on a disciplinary turf war, andasks himself whether it is possible to represent the subaltern subject, as I attempt to do,from the perspective of the disciplinary historian, since by doing so one necessarilyadopts the institutional position of the dominant culture.13 For Beverley, my insistence

on the importance of the archive and of fieldwork inherently means that I see history inthe light of an implicitly positivist model of scholarly objectivity that places [me] at thecenter of the act of knowing and representing.14 In fact, for Beverley, this means thatthere is no contradiction between my revindication of the archive and David Stollsinsistence, in his critique of Rigoberta Menchs first testimonio, that the anthropologistmust establish disciplinary and intellectual authority over all subaltern voices.15

Beverley hits his stride when he confronts what he considers to be the general project ofPeasant and Nation. My book, he argues, is a biographyof the nation-state, showing inthat narrative the presence of forms of subaltern agency that other accounts the statesown official historymight have ignored. The problem with such a project, Beverley

asserts, is that it leaves intact the frame of the nation, and thus also its inevitability, aswell as the authority of history and of the historian. And he concludes:

In a sense, Peasant and Nation solves the problem of the disjunction between whatChakrabarty calls the radical heterogeneity of the subaltern and the monism ofthe historical narrative of the nation-state and modernity by demonstrating thatpeasants and rural people actually did have a role in the formation of the modernstate in Peru and Mexico in the nineteenth century, that they were not just acted on


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passively or negatively by the state and its agents. But, to use a Lacanian metaphor,this sutures a social and conceptual gap that in some ways it might be better toleave open. Peasant and Nation thus partially occludes precisely what it wants tomake visible: the dynamics of Negation in subaltern agency.16

This is the essential difference that separates me from Beverley. Beginning from theearliest works of Ranajit Guha, founding member of Indias Subaltern Studies group,Beverley prefers to think of subaltern politics, and especially the politics of peasants, aspre- or anti-national, since the nation as a legal abstraction (and more particularly, thecolonial or postcolonial state) is experienced as a hostile and unrepresentative space bypeasants. Indeed, according to Beverley,

The historical insurgencies that Guha studies could not move from a position ofsubalternity to one of hegemony. They remained subaltern in the very act ofcontesting domination because they could not encompass (or create) the nation.That is because, as Gramsci understood, the nation is (or has been) the form ofterritoriality that corresponds to hegemony (and, vice versa, the nation is in a sensethe effect of hegemony).17

In such a context, it is theoretically impossible that subalterns could play an important rolein constructing the nation, whether they live in India or Mexico, Peru or Guatemala. And ifit is theoretically impossible for subalterns to do more than negate state power (a positionwhich, interestingly enough, allows the subaltern to retain a certain romantic purity,untouched by the corruption of state power, and thus possibly remain a source of futureutopias), then the problem with my narrative must be in my methodology. According toBeverley, I do not let subalterns speak for themselves, but simply represent them in theway that is most functional to my project.

For Beverley, therefore, I am still a positivist historian who insists on seeing history as adiachronic narrative that unfolds toward the future, and thus on occupying, almostalways, the position of the omniscient narrator. He dismisses my insistence that subalternhistory requires a dialogue among intellectuals, not because he doesnt agree, but becausehe doesnt accept that this is really part of my project. To represent historicalrepresentation itself as dialogue, Beverley insists, would have required a verydifferent kind of narrative and narrative form, one in which the writing of the historian(Malln) was interrupted by other forms of oral or written narrative and other teleologiesof intellectual practicethose of the local intellectuals.18 Similarly to Haber, but withina very different epistemological framework, Beverley evaluates how correct mymethod is from the perspective of his own discipline. When he finds a commitment to

narrative across time, and not enough evidence of the interruption of my narrativeform or teleology of intellectual practice, he finds in favor of positivism. It is interestingto note, in this context, that another historian influenced by cultural analysis reachesexactly the opposite conclusion about my work, especially concerning my relationshipwith schoolteacher and local intellectual Donna Rivera Moreno. By including other voicesand knowledges in her text, William French writes,


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And in the strategies that she uses to present evidence, with extensive quotationsfrom local petitions and sources, she can also be seen to be attempting the kind ofdialogic reading advocated by Dominick LaCapra in a recent articleAs in somerecent life historiesreaders are provided with enough voices to carry out adifferent reading than the one intended by the author and, thus, to draw their own

conclusions.19

It is difficult not to conclude that interdisciplinary dialoguewhich is, in the end, at thecore of this discussionbecomes all that much more difficult when we establish rigidrules about what is the correct way to present and legitimate arguments and evidence.Perhaps the disciplinary turf war is not only the province of historians. And perhaps wewould benefit most if we were able to elaborate a more comparative and democraticperspective on how different disciplines have built distinct criteria, methods, andteleologies of intellectual practice as they gather, evaluate, and legitimate their variousforms of evidence.

Another literary scholar who confronts my work, although he limits himself to my AHRarticle on Subaltern Studies, is Walter Mignolo. When he adds my work to his argumentabout the geopolitics of knowledge, Mignolo places it in the category of U.S.-based areastudies and thus within his frameworksquarely within colonial knowledge. He usesas his source the polemic that appeared, concerning the Spanish translation of my article,in Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Rossana Barragns introduction to the Spanishtranslation of key texts from the India-based Subaltern Studies school, where they insistedthat I ignore Latin American traditions concerning postcolonialism in order toconcentrate on the academic debate in the North. In response to this, Mignolo asks:

(1) Why does Mallon remain silent about the dialogue between North Americanscholars for whom Latin America is a field of study, and South Americanscholars and intellectuals for whom Latin America is not just a field of study but a

place of historical and political struggle? (2) Is Mallon assuming that Latin Americais only a place to be studied and not a location for theoretical thinking and, by sodoing, recasting the ideology of area studies in the vocabulary of subalternstudies?20

Given that his goal is to map the geopolitical distribution of intellectual power, Mignolowants to emphasize that, in Latin America, the postmodern and the postcolonial must ofnecessity be two sides of the same coin since we must pay as much attention to theinequalities between North and South as we do to the hierarchies internal to any givenLatin American society. Thus, if we do not recognize the theoretical contributions of LatinAmerican intellectuals, those of us who use the subaltern model will reproduce a system

of colonial power which, according to him, was present in the field of U.S.-based LatinAmerican Studies since its inception. But here as well it would be helpful to reflect from aninterdisciplinary perspective.

On one side, Mignolo, and especially Rivera and Barragn, are correct when they notethe distance that exists between the intellectual preocuppations of the U.S. academy,largely separate from political action and more intensely concerned with internalcontroversies among disciplines, and the intellectual worlds that exist in Latin America,


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where, despite the political crises of recent decades, the connections among academicdisciplines, and between academic knowledge and politico-intellectual commitment,are much stronger. To a certain extent, these differences were also reproduced in thediscomfort some North American academics expressed about Peasant and Nation, a textthey saw as neither a historical monograph nor a strictly postmodern literary analysis.

On the other side of the North-South divide, we see among politically committedintellectuals like Rivera and Barragn a need to criticize the irref lexive adoption ofNorthern intellectual fads, which seems to have resulted, according to these authors, inan attitude among some Latin American academics to simply wipe out (borrn y cuentanueva) our own intellectual traditionsand Marxism is one of these[an attitude] thatimpoverishes Latin American debates and gives them a particularly fragmentedquality.21

While I dont agree with Rivera and Barragn that my essay on Subaltern Studiesexemplifies this tendency to ignore the diversity of Latin American intellectual traditions, Iwould like to take an example from their essay to show how Latin Americanists whoinhabit the U.S. academy can also be impoverished by our distance from Latin Americanintellectual worlds. Among the Latin American intellectual traditions that Rivera andBarragn suggest can help us think about colonialism is Pablo Gonzles Casanovas use ofthe concept of internal colonialism. When I first read this section of their essay I rejectedthis concept immediately because, in my mind, it was still associated with its emergence asa rather rigid, structural, and problematic attempt to apply dependency theory to ananalysis of social relations. But afterwards I realized that, in the context of newly militantindigenous movements in the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of internal colonialism hadtaken on new and more dynamic meanings which gave new relevance to Gonzlesspioneering work. Seen in this light, the concept can also be productively connected tonotions of orientalism and western constructions of the Other, not only in the Andes,but in other parts of Latin America. Those of us who do not form a constant part of Latin

American political and intellectual discussions can lose track of these important cross-fertilizations.22

At the same time, however, debates and differences between North and South not onlyhave geopolitics, but also a very complex geohistory that is not fully recognized by Riveraor Barragn. This geohistory is crucial if we are to understand Latin American studies as afieldnot only in todays globalized context, but also at the moment when many of uswere actually formed as intellectuals, before the fall of actually existing socialism, whena rather different set of struggles and solidarities seemed possible. As Rivera and Barragnsuggest, Marxism emerged as a truly Latin American tradition in the debates anddiscussions of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s when the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions

revitalized leftist activism and international solidarity across the entire westernhemisphere. This international solidarity, and the intellectual collaboration thataccompanied it, was grounded in three central principles. First, an agreement about thepolitical importance of intellectual activity that managed, at least for a time, to penetrateU.S. universities as well. Second, a preference for those topics of research and academicdebates directly relevant to the social struggles of the time, and in a strong commitment tothe theoretical and methodological transformation of intellectual activity from within theivory tower. And third, a deep intellectual and political exchange, not only between


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North Americans and Latin Americans, but also among different parts of Latin Americaitself. This latter exchange was based not only in mutual support of the socialmobilizations of the 1960s and 1970s, but also of the exiles of the 1970s and 1980s thatcreated multinational diasporas of Latin Americans from Toronto to Havana, from NewYork to Mexico City. In this mutual intermingling we were almost able to create, for a

short period of time, a truly postcolonial space of collaboration around a common projectfor social transformation. Although shaped during that generational moment, Peasant andNation was nevertheless written, and later read, in an intellectual world recently re-segregated by the defeat of socialism and the victory of the market and of globalization.The contradictions and challenges of intellectual debate in this newly ruptured world aremany, but we cannot truly confront them if we lose track of what preceded them.

American Diasporas: Generational Politics and the Contextualization of Difference

The problem of location, both geographic and national, of Peasant and Nation was alreadypresent in the debate with Tulio Halpern, who clearly disagreed with Rivera andBarragn that Marxism was truly a Latin American traditionat least after the 1960s.

Indeed, for Halpern, the fact that I was still preoccupied with criticizing the rigidities oforthodox Marxismespecially with regard to the nature of the state, the class content ofpolitics, the lack of attention to gender and racial/ethnic hierarchies, or the exclusion ofpeasants and indigenous peoples from politicsmarked my work as belonging to the lesstheoretically sophisticated U.S. academy. In my response I emphasized the importance ofthe Cuban revolution for young people and the new left throughout the Westernhemisphere, and suggested that it had helped create an alternative Marxism that was trulyAmerican, in Jos Marts definition of this last term. My attempt to open up space in thetheoretical traditions associated with Marxism does not come from the innocent U.S.tradition, I emphasized,

But rather from an encounter with these Latin American diasporas and with theU.S. movement in solidarity with the peoples of the Americas. Both have a longerhistory than we realized in the Latin American southern cone, when I was growingup in Chile and Argentina. And I got to know both traditions quite intimately as acollege student, for I began my studies in the United States during the Vietnam warand did graduate work in my native land after Augusto Pinochets military coup.23

I cite myself extensively here, something that, to be perfectly honest, bothers me a greatdeal when someone else does it, to make a simple point. In my original text, the last phrasein the quotation was different. It said, did graduate work after Augusto Pinochetsmilitary coup in my native land. I can only imagine what happened in between. Perhaps

a dedicated editor, while correcting the text, thought that even though my Spanish waspretty good, I must have made a mistake there in the order of the phrasing, since I hadtransformed myself into a Chilean. This grammatical correction, however, had the effectof changing the real location of my birth, thus changing as well the geographical location Ihad always given myself within evolving American diasporas, recreating the gringaidentity Halpern had attributed to me and against which I had been arguing against in thefirst place.


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There are a number of things at play in this example. Beyond the cultural assumptions orstereotypes that underlie all processes of cultural exchange, it is also true that, in manycases, when wishing to deny legitimacy or authority to a controversial argument oraction, it is enough to say that it is foreign; or in Latin America, to say that it comes fromthe U.S. In postrevolutionary Mexico, the parallel accusation was malinchismo, a

reference to Hernn Cortss female translator and lover, Malinche or Malintzn,something that recent Chicana literary criticism has demonstrated is problematic aswell.24 Given the diasporic experience of an entire American generation, the ground uponwhich these identities are established can quickly be transformed into quicksand. Wherewould we locate, for example, an exiled Chilean writer who, rather than return to hernative land under insecure or politically frustrating conditions, decides to write aboutChile from Europe? Or a Peruvian who finds in the New York intellectual world afreedom to think and write that had eluded him in Fujimoris Peru and contributes to hisdecision to stay? Their compatriots who remained in Chile or Peru might look upon theseindividuals with some suspicion or unease; but this does not make the exiles simplySwedish, French, or gringo.

What is also at play here is the present tendency to reconstruct more rigid geopolitical andcultural identities, which contrast dramatically with the more flexible forms of belongingthat were permitted in an earlier political climate, when people from different parts ofthe hemisphere could potentially share a commitment to the liberation of the oppressed. Inorder to enter that now extinct international community all you needed was a passportthat documented your anti-imperalist credentials, with a dose of Marxism preferred butnot required. It was in such a space that, perhaps in a previous life, Silvia Rivera and Ishared in the extremely rich intellectual and political debates underway in Lima in the1970s, and were both inspired to write our own books about the historical importance ofAndean forms of popular resistance.25

When and why did things change? It is important not to romanticize the unity of thisearlier period, which was only partial and often skin-deep, with hierarchies of class, race,gender, and economic dependence strongly present. But we must also avoid thetemptation to dismiss as simply colonial or imperialist the attempt to form aninternational community of solidarity around the idea of Latin American studies, aninternationalism which was based at that point on the Cuban revolutions vision of arevolutionary continental unity. While it was still possible to nurture the hope of aradical project of inclusion and democracy, it was also possible to rationalize a decisionto silence or bury other differences that, in such an optimistic moment, might have seemedless important. It was the failure of the national-popular model, in conjunction with thecollapse of the socialist model, that convinced Latin American activists and intellectuals

that the conditions for citizenship historically offered by these projects for inclusion,whether socialist or liberal-populist, demanded too great a sacrifice. They thus began topay greater attention to those identities that could not easily be folded into a class-firstmodel. Politicizing and making more visible gender, national, race, and indigenousidentities transformed the very way in which politics was understood. At the same time,however, the power of the rupture sometimes kept younger activists and intellectuals innew social movements from fully understanding, in all its dimensions, the previouspolitical experiment.


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Peasant and Nation belongs to this moment of deep rupture and rapid transition.Conceived when we still dreamed of the participation of all the oppressed in an inclusivenational-democratic project, the book represents the desire to excavate and understand thehistorical discourses and practices of the subaltern in order to imagine more clearly how

subaltern peoples might, after conquering the space to do so, create their own alternativepolities.26 If the book had been conceived entirely after the rupture, it is entirely possiblethat the excavation would itself have seemed a great deal less relevant. At the same time,however, it is possible to see in its pages the marks of the new conjuncture. I was writingabout nineteenth-century peasant struggles while the Berlin Wall was coming down; aboutthe construction and revindication of communitarian forms of liberalism while the wholeworld confronted the victory of the neoliberal market. Thus there is also an intense searchfor new conceputal directions, especially as they relate to political action and strategy. Thissearch is centered on a deconstruction of all political transparency, whether withincommunities or within the State.27 The most important goal of the search was, andcontinues to be, to de-romanticize subaltern politics by analyzing its internal fissures andhierarchies, as well as its historical complicity with state power.

Inhabiting the border between an old populist and deeply modernist commitment to masspolitics on the one hand, and a new and profound questioning of all political formsconstructed by modernity on the other, Peasant and Nation rejects not only positivist andelitist assumptions about popular politics, but also the preferences of some radicalanalysts. I agree with radical theorists who emphasize that the rural masses were neithervictims of, nor passive witnesses to, the great changes brought on by modernity. But byexploring the complexities of subaltern participation and complicity in the construction ofthe nation, I part company with many analysts of subalternity (among others) whoemphasize the notion of subaltern politics as Negation, because they want to believethat subalterns have not yet sat down at the table of the nation-state.

This is, in my mind, a central point of disagreement between myself and John Beverley,which results in a series of ambivalences in Beverleys text concerning my work. On theone hand he sometimes uses my work as data, even though he has gone to great pains todismiss its more general theoretical or methodological project. Thus, for example, whendiscussing texts concerning the Tpac Amaru civil war, he writes that the idea of thenation does not belong exclusively to the creole elite that formed the Peruvian nation-state.It can also be, as Mallon has shown in Peasant and Nation, a production of subalternknowledge and desire.28 And yet, only a few pages before, he dismisses my projectthevery one that allows him to argue for the potential subaltern imagining of the nation assimply a biography of the nation-state that leaves its frame intact. On the other side he

also makes reference, when it fits into his argument, to my re-vindication of empiricaldata. Thus, when addressing the distinction social theorist Richard Rorty makes, in hisanalysis of the construction of knowledge, between the desire for solidarity and thedesire for objectivity, he asserts that my project is driven by the desire for objectivity,reserving the more desirable desire for solidarity for what he defines as the project ofSubaltern Studies. But immediately afterward, on the same page, he admits that solidaritycannot begin with the romanticization or idealization of the subaltern, but rather (citingliberation theologist Gustavo Gutirrez) from a concrete friendship with the poor. He


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then concludes that, in that sense, Mallon may have a point about the limits of textualityand the virtues of fieldwork.29

It seems that Beverley is prompted to dismiss my project theoretically andmethodologically because it is different from his, only to then use elements of it to fit into

his argument. Part of this may be the problem of interdisciplinarity discussed earlier. But Ialso wish to suggest that part of the reason for this combination of rejection andreincorporation is that Beverley also wants to highlight the novelty of his argument thatto construct the people/power bloc antagonism today, under the conditions ofglobalization and in the face of the neoliberal critique and privatization of statefunctions, requires, by contrast, a relegitimization of the state. This argument rests, inmy opinion, on two faulty assumptions.

The first is a vision of the state which still seems to share a great deal with the originalMarxist idea that it was simply the arm or committee of the dominant class. As severalcritical theorists have argued, even if we agree that the main purpose of a state was and isclass rule, in order to be effective it cannot simply act in the narrow interests of thedominant class, which in many cases will be against the systems long -term ability toreproduce itself. But once we open up the possibility that a state must represent morethan the narrow short-term interests of the dominant class, we also open up the possibilitythat other classes, including subaltern groups, may find an occasional foothold in statepolicy or institutions, and even use one sector of the state against another. It is in this sensethat Nicos Poulantzas concluded that the struggles of the oppressed were woventhroughout the fabric of the state, and could not be separated from it.30 Seen from thisperspective, the dynamic of subaltern politics in relation to the state was never one ofNegation. And that brings me to the second faulty assumption, which is that earlierattempts to construct the people/power bloc antagonism were all that different fromthe strategy Beverley recommends for today.

An excellent example of how todays attempts to build something new by defending thestate turn out to have messy and contradictory roots in the old can be found in Chiapas. Astubborn and heroic guerrilla movement has negotiated with the government, acceptedwatered-down agreements (which were, of course, subsequently not honored), and evensent masked indigenous leaders to address the Mexican Congress. While the EZLNsrevindication of indigenous demands for autonomy has been an important and dramaticpolitical move, which has helped to fortify the indigenous movement in other parts ofMexico as well in the southeast, its overall project revindicates the popular strands of the1910 revolution and the negotiations of popular movements with the emergingpostrevolutionary state. What does Beverleys recommendation that we need to create anew kind of state mean in such a context? It is much easier to become enthusiastic about

the potential success of such a project if subalterns had not already defended earlier stateforms, for only in such a context could a more convincing utopian case be made fortodays subaltern engagements with the state. The problem with such an approach is thatit expunges earlier, messier, more complicitous and partial attempts at engagement and,by not playing with a full historical deck, surely dooms us once again to failure. This is notto say, of course, that simply understanding history will keep us from repeating itImpostmodern enough to avoid such an old positivistic chestnut. But I am also stillmodernist enough (as is Beverley) to continue yearning for a project that successfully


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unifies the people, following Laclaus definition of populism.31 This contradictionbetween a modernist yearning for political inclusion, and an equally strong postmodernand postcolonial critique of its limits, is at the very core of the Subaltern Studies project.As the India-based schools founders understood from the outset, such a project ignoreshistory at its own peril, yet is equally doomed if it takes history at face value.

NOTES

1 Florencia E. Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), and The Promise and Dilemma ofSubaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History, American HistoricalReview, Vol. 99, No 5 (December 1994), pp. 1491-1515. The same essay has appeared twicein Spanish translation, once in the Boletn del Instituto de Historia Argentina yAmericana Dr. Emilio Ravignani, No 12, 2ndSemester 1995, pp. 87-116; and IleanaRodrguez (ed.), Convergencia de tiempos: Estudios subalternos/contextoslatinoamericanos. Estado, cultura, subalternidad(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), pp. 117-54.

2 Vol. XLVI, No. 3, Jan.-Mar. 1997, pp. 503-580. All translations from Spanish to English inthis essay are mine, unless otherwise noted.

3 See, for example, the debate among Heraclio Bonilla, Nelson Manrique, and myself, bestsummarized in Peasant and Nation, pp. 1-4, 326-27; Steve J. Stern (ed.), Resistance,Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 213-79. A recent example of such areconstructed binary is Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideologyand the Mexican Struggle for Independence, 1810-1821 (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2001).

4 See, in order of publication: Peter F. Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation ofMexicos National State: Guerrero, 1800-1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996);Mark Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of PostcolonialNationmaking in Andean Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Mary KayVaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); Ada Ferrer, Insurgent Cuba: Race,Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898 (Chapel Hill y Londres: University of North CarolinaPress, 1999) Charles Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of RepublicanPeru, 1780-1840 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Greg Grandin, The Blood ofGuatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); Ariel dela Fuente, Children of Facundo: Caudilllo and Gaucho Insurgency During the Argentine

State-Formation Process (La Rioja, 1835-1870) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); andLynn Stephen, Zapata Lives! Histories and Cultural Politics in Southern Mexico (Berkeley:University of California Press, 2002). Interesting treatments of the same theme appearedin Spanish in Leticia Reina (ed.), La reindianizacin de Amrica, Siglo XIX (Mxico D.F.:Siglo XXI and CIESAS, 1997). Thurner, Ferrer, and de la Fuente also treat war as a momentwhen nation-state formation, especially from below, can be especially intense. For adifferent perspective on this theme, see Miguel Angel Centeno, The Centre Did Not Hold:War and the Monopolisation of Violence in Latin America, in James Dunkerley (ed.),


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Studies in the Formation of the Nation-State in Latin America (Londres: Institute of LatinAmerican Studies, 2002), pp. 54-76.

5 Examples of this other literature would include: Antonio Annino, Soberanas en lucha,in Antonio Annino, Luis Castro Leiva y Franois-Xavier Guerra, De los Imperios a las

Naciones: Iberoamrica (Zaragoza: IberCaja, 1994), pp. 225-253; Vincent C. Peloso yBarbara A. Tenenbaum, Liberals, Politics, and Power: State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), and Hilda Sbato, TheMany and the Few: Political Participation in Republican Buenos Aires (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 2001).

6 A point I make in Peasant and Nation, and which Sbato also makes in The Many andthe Few.

7 Hispanic American Historical Review, Special Number entitled Mexicos NewCultural History: Una lucha libre?, Vol. 79 No 3 (May 1999).

8 See especially, among the essays in the special number of the Hispanic AmericanHistorical Review cited above, Florencia E. Mallon, Time on the Wheel: Cycles ofRevisionism and the New Cultural History and Claudio Lomnitz, Barbarians at theGate? A Few Remarks on the Politics of the New Cultural History of Mexico,, pp. 331 -51and 367-83, respectively. A deeper reflection on the generational context for this debatecan be found in Steve J. Stern, Between Tragedy and Promise: The Politics of WritingLatin American History in the Late Twentieth Century, in Gilbert M. Joseph (ed.),Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North (Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2001), pp. 32-77, especially 43-53.

9 Stephen Haber, Anything Goes: Mexicos New Cultural History, in Hispanic

American Historical Review, op. cit., pp. 309-30, direct quotation on p. 329.

10 Mallon, The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies, op. cit.

11 Jos Rabasa and Javier Sanjins, Introduction: The Politics of Subaltern Studies,Dispositio/n, Vol. 19, No 46 (1994), pp. vi-vii.

12 John Beverley, Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

13 Beverley, p. 20. In all fairness, Beverley expresses the same doubt about the possibility

of representing the subaltern from the perspective of the literary critic, since his objectionhere is more generally an objection to representation from a disciplinary perspective. Atthe same time, however, and as will become clear below, Beverleys critique of myapproach is itself limited by the boundaries of a literary perspective.

14 Beverley, p. 37.


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15 Beverley, p. 79. Perhaps it is important to point out here the rather extreme implicationthat any insistence on empirical verification thus leads us toward the kind ofneoconservative and counterinsurgency political messages contained in Stolls work.

16 Beverley, p. 36 for all three previous quotations.

17 Beverley, pp. 134 and 135, respectively, for the previous two quotations.

18 Beverley, p. 36.

19 William E. French, Imagining and the Cultural History of Nineteenth-CenturyMexico, Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 79 No 3 (May 1999), pp. 249-67, directquotation on pp. 255-56.

20 Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, SubalternKnowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 184-87, direct quotation on p. 187. The previous quotations can be found in Silvia RiveraCusicanqui and Rossana Barragn, Presentacin, Debates Post Coloniales: UnaIntroduccin a los Estudios de la Subalternidad, Rivera and Barragn, eds. (La Paz:Editorial historias, SEPHIS, Ayuwiyiri, 1997), p. 14.

21 Rivera and Barragn, Presentacin, p. 19.

22 Seemin Qayum, for example, who spent many years living in the Bolivian intellectualcommunity, uses the concept of internal colonialism very productively, connecting it toSaids orientalism, in her essay Nationalism, Internal Colonialism and the SpatialImagination: The Geographic Society of La Paz in Turn-of-the-Century Bolivia, enDunkerley (ed.), Studies in the Formation of the Nation-State, pp. 275-98.

23 Florencia E. Mallon, En busca de una nueva historiografa latinoamericana: Undilogo con Tutino y Halpern, Historia Mexicana, Vol. XLVI, No 3, January-March 1997,p. 577.

24 See, for example, Norma Alarcn, Chicanas Feminist Literature: A Re-vision throughMalintzin/ or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object, in Cherre Moraga and GloriaAnzalda (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), pp.182-90; and Rachel Phillips, Marina/Malinche: Masks and Shadows, in Beth Miller (ed.),Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1983), pp. 97-114.

25 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Oprimidos pero no vencidos: Luchas del campesinadoaymara y qhechwa de Bolivia, 1900-1980 (La Paz: HISBOL/ CSUTCB, 1984), and FlorenciaE. Mallon, The Defense of Community in Perus Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle andCapitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983).

26 Mallon, Peasant and Nation, p. 19.


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27 Mallon, En busca de una nueva historiografa latinoamericana, p. 578.

28 Beverley, p. 55.

29 Beverley, p. 39.

30 Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: New Left Books, 1978), and alsoPolitical Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973). See also ErnestoLaclau, Hacia una teora del populismo, in Poltica e ideologa en la teo ra marxista:Capitalismo, fascismo, populismo, 2nd Spanish edition (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1980),pp. 165-233.

31 Laclau, Hacia una teora del populismo.

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