ABSTRACT
Following in the footsteps of their South Asian counterparts, exponents of the Latin American subaltern framework are currently engaged in a quest for evidence of an authentic and thus empowering rural consciousness/agency, as manifested in ancient/indigenous nationhood, the carnivalesque, and literary accounts projecting the ‘voice from below’. The consequent essentialization of peasant economy/culture (= subaltern identity) and agency (= subaltern resistance), however, reproduces a specifically plebeian form of conservative discourse, a pro-peasant ideology that has deep roots in Latin American history. This epistemological fusion is attributed here to a failure on the part of the subaltern approach to differentiate the peasantry in terms of class, as well as to decouple Marxism from populism, and fascism from feudalism.
