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In critical theory and postcolonialism, subaltern refers to the populations that are socially, politically and geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure of the colony and of the colonial homeland. In describing "history told from below", the term ''subaltern'' is derived from Antonio Gramsci's work on cultural hegemony, which identified the groups that are excluded from a society's established structures for political representation and therefore denied the means by which people have a voice in their society. The terms ''subaltern'' and ''Subaltern Studies'' entered postcolonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group, a collection of south Asian historians who explored the political-actor role of the men and women who comprise the mass population—rather than the political roles of the social and economic elites—in the history of south Asia. Marxist historians had already been investigating colonial history as told from the perspective of the proletariat, using the concept of social classes as being determined by economic relations. In the 1970s, ''subaltern'' began to denote the colonized peoples of the Indian subcontinent and described a new perspective of the history of an imperial colony as told from the point of view of the colonized rather than that of the colonizers. In the 1980s, the scope of enquiry of Subaltern Studies was applied as an "intervention in South Asian historiography". As a method of intellectual discourse, the concept of the ''subaltern'' is problematic because it originated as a Eurocentric method of historical enquiry for studying the non–Western people of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. From its inception as an historical-research model for studying the colonial experience of South Asian peoples, subaltern studies transformed from a model of intellectual discourse into a method of "vigorous post-colonial critique". The term "subaltern" is used in the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, human geography, and literary criticism.〔Prakash, Gyan. "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism", ''The American Historical Review'', December, 1994, Vol. 99, No. 5, 1475–1490, 1476.〕 == Denotations == In postcolonial theory, the term ''subaltern'' describes the lower classes and the social groups who are at the margins of a society—a subaltern is a person rendered without agency due to his or her social status.〔Young, Robert J. C. ''Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction''. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.〕 Nonetheless, the literary critic Gayatri Spivak spoke against a too-broad application of the term in 1992, In Marxist theory, the civil sense of the term ''subaltern'' was first used by the Italian Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). In discussions of the meaning of the "subaltern" in Gramsci's writings, Spivak and others have argued that he used the word as a synonym for the proletariat (a code-word to deceive the prison censor to allow his manuscripts out the prison),〔Morton, Stephen. "The Subaltern: Genealogy of a Concept", in ''Gayatri Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason''. Malden, MA: Polity, 2007: pp. 96-97; and Hoare, Quintin, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. "Terminology", in ''Selections from the Prison Notebooks''. New York: International Publishers, pp. xiii-xiv〕 but this interpretation has been contested, with evidence indicating that it was a novel concept in Gramsci's political theory.〔Green, Marcus E. "(Rethinking the Subaltern and the Question of Censorship in Gramsci's Prison Notebooks )," Postcolonial Studies, Volume 14, Number 4 (2011): 385-402.〕 In several essays, the postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha, emphasized the importance of social power relations in defining subaltern social groups as oppressed, racial minorities whose social presence was crucial to the self-definition of the majority group; as such, subaltern social groups, nonetheless, also are in a position to subvert the authority of the social groups who hold hegemonic power.〔Garcia-Morena, Laura and Pfeiffer, Peter C. Eds. "Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism", ''Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities''. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1996: pp. 191–207 and "Unpacking my library . . . again", ''The Post-colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons''. Iain Chambers, Lidia Curti, eds. New York: Routledge, 1996: 210.〕 In ''Toward a New Legal Common Sense'' (2002), the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos applies the term ''subaltern cosmopolitanism'' to describe the counter-hegemonic practice, social movement, resistance, and struggle against neoliberal globalization, especially the struggle against social exclusion. Moreover, de Sousa Santos applies ''subaltern cosmopolitanism'' as interchangeable with the term ''cosmopolitan legality'', to describe the diverse normative framework for an ''equality of differences'', in which the term ''subaltern'' specifically denotes the oppressed peoples at the margins of a society who are struggling against hegemonic globalization. Yet, context, time, and place (but perhaps not the Marxist emphasis on the economic relations) determine who, among the peoples at the margins of a society, is a Subaltern; in India women, dalits, rural, tribal, immigrant laborers are part of subaltern; within Punjab, India, the most oppressed are the rural folk, the dalit, and illiterate women. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Subaltern (postcolonialism)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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