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This essay examines some prominent conceptualizations of "subalternity" and "the subaltern" in the literature on subaltern studies. A predominant history of Subaltern Studies has emerged that narrates the theorization, and materialist, national-historical and political tracking of "the subaltern" through the work of Antonio Gramsci, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Spivak, and the South Asian Subaltern Studies collective. I investigation how the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group (SASS) came to achieve its celebrated postcolonial status, how it inspired the formation of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group (LASS), and why nevertheless the two circles remained more or less discrete. At the fore are issues concerning the constitution of "subalternity" and the agency of "the subaltern," as well as those related to the politics of academe. The secondary task of the article is to acknowledge the geographies of colonialism and how they respectively and collectively inform the distinct particularities in, as well as resemblances between the research interests of each group. It is then to account for the asymmetry between profiles of SASS and LASS within academe, and to discuss the hierarchy of epistemic privilege implicit/explicit in this relation and the implications it has held for institutional subjectivity. The reading concludes on an important note about how knowledge formation of Western modernity occurs within a spatio-temporal cartography of metropolitan-peripheral relations that erases a significant part of Occidental history, a history holding fundamental implications for how we conceive of certain crucial European originaries and thus hegemonic European realms of conceptual authority.

The author presents a post-colonial analysis of issues emanating from Iraq to illustrate the inadequacy of analysis within postcolonial perspectives in the case of the attack on Iraq, & the inadequacy of a postcolonial analysis that is exclusive of the contemporary practices of neo-colonialism. The dimensions of the attack on Iraq, the intensification of capitalist abstractions by neo-liberalism, & American empire are discussed in reference to modernities, late stage capitalism, cultural & economic imperialism on the war culture that has become Iraq. In conclusion, the author argues that post colonial scholarship is required to fully explain the enabling role of the terrorist attacks on the US, & the role of Iraq for American empire building. References. J. Harwell

Reflects on the personal experience of growing up in the UK as a person of mixed parentage, & how this experience compared to that of a female cousin who immigrated from Guyana to the UK. Because the cousin was an immigrant, she suffered many abuses & prejudices. While the author steered clear of these abuses as a young person, she began to feel a sense of displacement as she became older. If the nation is expressed in a particular culture, then the status of a native-born immigrant is necessarily one of displacement & homelessness while not belonging to the colonial culture of her cousin, neither did she belongs to the nation of the UK. The answer to this quandary is not the desire for a national home, which is considered a masculinist move typical of the hegemonic ideology of nationalism. Rather, the answer is to become comfortable living in a space of contingency, a postmodern space in which one's marginality might be embraced. 26 References. D. Ryfe