ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief outline of subaltern studies. It provides a short history of this school of thought, including its political and intellectual beginnings, its turn toward more transparent, theoretical concerns during the late 1980s, and its gradual decline since the 1990s. The chapter discusses how different members of the collective addressed questions of the peasantry, the working class, gender, and nationalism, among other themes, in addition to evolving theoretical engagements with Marxism and post-structuralism. Subaltern studies are a school of historical thought established during the early 1980s. Originally comprised of scholars of South Asia, specifically India, it has since evolved to influence and include different intellectual genealogies and regional configurations around the world. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Group is the most distinctive formation outside of the original collective. Founded in 1992, it reportedly experienced early internal conflict, peaking in 1997, due partly to tensions between scholars based in the United States versus those based in Latin America.
