Subaltern citizens and their histories : investigations from India and the USA / edited by Gyanendra Pandey.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The subaltern as subaltern citizen / Gyanendra Pandey -- Equal but separate? -- Can there be a subaltern middle class? / Gyanendra Pandey -- Race, power, and multipositionality: examples from the lives of black schoolteachers / Earl Lewis -- Recasting the women's question: the girl-child/woman in the colonial encounter / Ruby Lal -- Casual sex: subaltern sexuality 'on the road' in early twentieth-century America / Colin R. Johnson -- Writing the subaltern. The question of a prehistory / Milind Wakankar -- Writing ordinary lives / M.S.S. Pandian -- Subaltern city, subaltern citizens: New Orleans, urban identity, and people of African descent / Leslie Harris -- Culture/politics: the curious double-bind of the Indian adivasi / Prathama Banerjee -- The state and the people -- Subordination, governance, and the legislative state in early colonial India / Sudipta Sen -- Subaltern immigrants: undocumented workers and national belonging in the United States / Mary Odem -- Could slaves enfranchise themselves: rumours, narratives, and arenas of politics in the American South / Steven Hahn -- Democracy and subaltern citizens in India / Partha Chatterjee.

Deploying the provocative idea of the {u2018}subaltern citizen{u2019}, this book raises fundamental questions about subalternity and difference, dominance and subordination, in India and the United States. In contrast to other writings on subordinated and marginalized people, the essays presented here devote deliberate attention to diverse locations of subalternity: in the conditions and histories of slaves, dalits, peasants, illegal immigrants, homosexuals, schoolteachers, women of noble lineage; in the Third World and the First; in pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial times. With contributions from a diverse group of distinguished scholars, the anthology explores issues of gender and sexuality, migration, race, caste and class, education and law, culture and politics. The very juxtaposition of different bodies of scholarship serves to challenge common perceptions of inherited histories {u2013} claims to American and Indian {u2018}exceptionalism{u2019} {u2013} and promotes a new awareness, not only of shared histories and shared struggles in the making of the modern world, but of particularities and facets of our different histories and societal conditions that are assumed as being well understood, and hence often taken for granted. Subaltern Citizens and Their Histories will be essential reading for scholars of colonial, postcolonial and subaltern studies, American studies, US and South Asian social science and history.