ABSTRACT
During the past two decades, there has been an increased interest in providing studies that recover the agency of the “other,” the subalterns who were once considered the passive recipients of Western-oriented epistemologies. Authors such as Said (1978), Spivak (1988), and Bhabha (1992) are only some of the interdisciplinary writers who have provided provocative readings that invite us to rethink the ways that we write about disparate power relations, discursive social constructs, and effective postcolonial resistance. Whereas some writers believe that we need to give voice to the “other” through the study of alternative histories that come from those who might be engaged in activities such as peasant uprisings in India (Guha, 1983), other authors focus their attention on the contrapuntal readings of “colonial discourse” (Moore-Gilbert, 1997, p. 19). While many of these authors have disagreements about preferred methods of analysis or choice of artifacts that need deconstructing, they share the common goal of demonstrating the ways in which subalterns have some active social agency and control over their circumstances. The cumulative effect of introducing these postcolonial themes and methods is that scholars and researchers have a much more nuanced understanding of how “development” programs (Spivak, 1999) and other ostensibly neutral Western projects are tied to a host of ideological prefigurations, politicized histories, and polysemic international texts.
