ABSTRACT
In 2006, almost sixty years after the Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci
began using the term “subaltern” to signify those made subordinate by
hegemonies of power (of state, class, patriarchy, gender, and race, for
example), one can fi nd that “subaltern” has proliferated as a noun and
adjective in contemporary discourse, indicating everything from the position
of the average contemporary artist in Chicago (see www.subaltern.org) to
a description of street food in Calcutta (Mukhopadhyay 2004). Gramsci
originally used the term in some of the key, brief essays that he wrote during
his eleven years in prison, beginning in 1926 under Benito Mussolini’s fascist
regime. Though Gramsci’s choice of terms was perhaps meant to evade the
attention of Italian state censorship, which a word such as “proletariat” would
certainly have attracted, the term “subaltern” came to have other advantages.
The term could encompass spheres outside capital and labor (which was
