Subaltern (postcolonialism)

Subalternity (Latin subalternus "child ", " lower- ranking " ) referred to pejoratively submissiveness and servility or with less pejorative connotation an inferiority and lack of independence.

Subalternity in Gramsci

In deviating from the conventional meanings of social and cultural scientific sense subalternity is a translation from the Italian a term used by Antonio Gramsci coined to describe social groups, where access to hegemonic sectors of society is closed. Subaltern social classes according to Gramsci by hegemonic structures and the exercise of power in other parts of society severely limited in their capabilities, their interests and their potential political strength to become aware and politically and publicly to articulate. Examples of Gramsci for subordinate parts of companies are the slaves in ancient Rome and small farmers and workers in capitalist societies during his lifetime Gramsci. The subalternity is based according gramscianischem understanding not only of direct violence, but particularly on the economically based civil society hegemony of civil society communication and its (mostly hidden ) control by the ruling class uses.

The term was picked up by the Subaltern Studies Group, a group of South Asian historians in the 1980s. In a review of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on this group in her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? excluded them from the concept towards naturalizing notions and found that subalternity is a result of hegemonic discourses and ( exclusion ) is produced socially by the practice of social exclusion. With this definition of subalternity as a social construct of the term is often used in the research on post-colonialism.