Rethinking Subalterns, archives and histories in the present: A roundtable

Today, curious readers coming to this Roundtable might find in the mentionof thesubaltern a distant, ghostly echo resonant of bygone years. And so, too, SubalternStudies as a collective endeavour—one that explored such subordinate subjects—cansignal in the present something of a done-and-dusted doodah fromthe past. Yet, isitpossible for the figure of the subaltern to intimate instead a salient presence—exactlyin the here-and-now, amidst all our grave immediacies? Might we nowbe inthefaceof a spectral-substantive subaltern that acutely haunts and severally shapesourhabitations at large? Can the Subaltern Studies project in turn be approachedandunderstood as an “archival formation”, one that sheds light on the unravellingofhistoriographical worlds—and the human sciences at large—over the last five decades?The particular tasks and wider horizons at stake are neither “presentist” nor“antiquarian.” They point rather to careful histories and critical genealogies of thepresent, drawing in and turning on gender and race, indigeneity and indenture, ageand sexuality, slavery and apartheid, the Ádivasi and the Dalit,1 settler-colonialismsand nations, nature and environment, caste and tribe, diaspora and blackness, capital and property, science and technology, heteronormativity and queerness, andpolitics and justice. It is such questions and related issues that this Roundtablewishes to explore, focusing on The Routledge Handbook of Subalterns acrossHistory,2 which was published recently.