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Intellectual Background: Foucault and the Subaltern Studies

Technical Report · February 2014

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.3016.5921

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Intellectual Background: Foucault and the Subaltern Studies

Camila Massaro de Góes

(MsC in Political Science USP)

Changes occurred inside and outside Subaltern Studies since their début in 1982. How

these internal changes are consequences of external changes is difficult to determine, once

both inside and outside the group, subaltern subjects were claimed and reinvented constantly.

In their earlier writings the Indian collective mainly participated in debates on nationalism

and insurgency – appealing, especially, to ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci – at

this point, however, it was already signaled a crisis between State power and social

movements. Throughout the 1980s, it is possible to observe this situation of crisis also in

historical and political studies. There is a shift from studies of revolution and class struggles

into the analysis of localized and personal resistance to the power of elites and states

(Ludden, 2002).

According to Spivak (1988), Subaltern Studies has its strength by locating the agent

of this change in the figure of the ‘insurgent’ or ‘subaltern’. With this, they brought

hegemonic historiography to crisis and simultaneously opened old debates between

spontaneity and consciousness, between structure and history – “if seen in this way, the work

of Subaltern Studies group repeatedly makes it possible to grasp that the concept-metaphor of

the ‘social text’ is not the reduction of real life to the page of a book” (Spivak, 1988, p.5).

Spivak also considers that the critical force of ‘bringing-to-crisis’ can be located on

the energy of the questioning of humanism in the post-Nieztche sector of Western European

structuralism – in the case of Subaltern Studies, mainly with Michel Foucault and the critique

of the sovereign subject “as author and subject of authority, legitimacy and power.” But why

Foucault is considered ‘anti-humanistic’? He refuses to put man in the center of the analysis.

  1  
Therefore, there is no ‘out’ of the system – looking for a transcendental human. The notion of

subject as agency and subjection, as well as the process of being a subject as you discipline

yourself allows the act. This way, power is productive – where is agency? In Foucault, the

issue of subjection marks agency – there is no agent that says no to power, it is intimately

involved with power, there is no pure agent.

Despite the fact these characteristics conflicts directly some elementary ideas of

Marxism, the Indian collective seems to don’t understand Foucault as an “anti-Marxist”, once

it is possible to assert that there is an exercise of power from a class point of view – so, this

standpoint is not abandoned, as they are not – Marx and Gramsci. It turns more difficult,

though, to comprehend politically what the group stands for from this point of view.1 Thus,

the Indian scholars went to an eclectic theoretical source, comprising mainly Marx, Gramsci

and Foucault. As Florencia Mallon (1994) argues, there is a tension in the work of Subaltern

Studies that claims that they are trying to ride “four horses of the apocalypse”, namely,

Foucault to underscore technique and genealogy, and Gramsci and Guha to highlight

subaltern consciousness and agency. According to David Hardiman, “one road leads towards

greater concentration on textual analysis and a stress on the relativity of all knowledge;

another towards the study of subaltern consciousness and action so as to forward the struggle

for a socialist society” (1986, p.290). Ileana Rodriguez puts in this way:

Regarding the relationship between methodologies and politics – the two

pairs of horses to which Mallon refers, with Derrida and Foucault on the
methodological side and Gramsci and Guha on the political – the question is
not one of privileging the political over the cultural but precisely the
opposite: of demonstrating the impossibility of disengaging one form of
representation from the other (RODRIGUEZ, 2001, p.6).

                                                                                                               
1  “My contention is that the relationship between First World anti-humanism post-Marxism and the
History of imperialism is not merely a question of ‘enlarging the range of possibilities’” (Spivak,
1988, p.19)  

  2  
 This eclecticism presented – inter-conflicting metropolitan sources – is a

characteristic, according to Spivak, of the “post-colonial intellectual” and “one must see in

their practice a repetition of as well as a rupture from the colonial predicament” (Spivak,

1988, p.10).

The international recognition of Subaltern Studies understood as a project of

resistance to nationalist and hegemonic discourses, through stories of “subaltern” – whose

identity is their difference – not surprisingly coincides with the emergence of post-

structuralism, the “critique of humanism” in the United States. There is an important

intersection between this more general movement of intellectual history and the subalternist

investigations. Since then, the reflection around power presents different shades, putting new

questions on the methodological and political agenda. The separation between power and

knowledge, as well as the idea of power as unity, becomes more difficult. The production of

common sense, in this sense, does not reside in an institution, to the extent that the power

would be present in all aspects of everyday life. It is around these issues that we can observe

the presence of Foucault among the Indian intellectuals.

Throughout the lessons taught by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1976,

Discipline and Punish (1975) was published. Therefore, it is possible to think the theme of

power and their mechanisms of action as one of its main concerns in this context. Foucault

articulates a critique of power analysis represented by sovereignty model, as well as a critique

of the so-called “scientific” knowledge. This is an important point of Foucault's argument,

which sets the main aspects of genealogy as an engagement of scholar’s knowledge and local

memories. That is, through the “essentially local character of criticism” and “twists of

knowledge”, genealogic activity should act against the effects of scientific discourse.

  3  
 His historical research located a break in the discourse of sovereignty and the

emergence of a “microphysics of power” at the end of the seventeenth and eighteenth century

in France and England. As Foucault places, the model of sovereignty – translated, in his

opinion, in the work of Thomas Hobbes – was not up to the problems of modernity, once its

preparation was done almost entirely around the royal power. According to Foucault, this

power was articulated in the “great buildings of thought and legal knowledge” either to show

in what legal armor real power was invested, that is, in what way the monarch was effectively

the living body of sovereignty, or, the contrary, to show how one should limit this power of

sovereign, to what rules of law it should submit, according to and within what limits he

should exercise his power to retain its legitimacy (Foucault, 2010, p.23).

Continue to assume, as performed by the English thinker of the seventeenth century,

the problem of sovereignty as the central problem of modern Western societies meant for

Foucault to understand that the discourse and the law technique had essentially function in a

way to “dissolve inside power the fact of domination, to make it appear in place of this

domination, which wanted to reduce or mask, two things: on the one hand, the legitimate

rights of sovereignty and on the other, the legal obligation of obedience” (Ibid., p.24 ).

What the French thinker proposes is the inverse of this model – assert domination as a

fact. It is through the relations of domination that is possible to reach a power analysis. In

place of “sovereignty and obedience”, the author addresses the problem of “domination and

subjection”. The basic precaution is that one should not make a deduction from power that

would leave from the center and then see how far it extends below to which it reproduces,

towards the more atomistic elements of society. It must, instead, make an ascending analysis

of power, i.e., from the infinitesimal mechanisms, which have their own history, their own

path, their own technique and tactics, and then see how these mechanisms of power that have

  4  
therefore its strength and, in a sense, its own technology, were and still are invested,

colonized, used, inflected, transformed, displaced, extended, etc., through even more general

mechanisms and forms of global domination.

Then, how to perform a specific analysis of the multiplicity of power relations? It is

clear that the juridical model of sovereignty, which Hobbes is its main exponent, is not an

appropriate model according to Foucault. In place of the preliminary threefold established by

theory of sovereignty – the subject, the unity and the law – the project is to show that “instead

of deriving the powers of sovereignty, it would deal more with the act of extract, historically

and empirically, power relations, operators of domination” (Ibid., p.38). It is in this sense that

subalternist researches from the late 1980s begin to take a new form. In this article, we will

deal with some implications of Foucault at the project of Subaltern Studies.

Power analysis in conflict: developing Foucault

Why Foucault become interesting for studies of colonialism? Once he didn’t make an

distinction between discourse and application, he resolutely moves away from a notion of

unity – his thoughts is always fragmented, variable – there is a permanent dynamics in his

accounts of power. Then, it becomes very difficult to think about one organization of

resistance – here, the idea of party is gone, as well as the idea of a kind of resistance that

could take only one form. This way, Foucault is useful for the purpose of codification

projects inside colonialism, in a way of understanding closely how identities were fixed.

As Partha Chatterjee (1988) argues, Michel Foucault has drawn our attention to the

‘capillary form of existence’ of power, ‘the point where power reaches into the very grain of

individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their

discourses, learning processes and everyday lives’. The eighteenth century invented,

  5  
following Foucault’s argument, a ‘synaptic regime of power’, a regime of its exercise within

the social body, rather than from above it. This more-or-less coherent modification in the

small-scale modes of exercise of power was made possible only by a fundamental structural

change. It was the instituting of this new local, capillary form of power, which impelled

society to eliminate certain elements such as the court and the king. Yet according to

Chatterjee,

Foucault has sought to demonstrate the complexities of this novel regime of

power in his studies of the history of mental illness, of clinical practice, of
the prison, of sexuality and of the rise of the human sciences. When one
looks at regimes of power in the so-called back-ward countries of the world
today, not only does the dominance of the characteristically ‘modern’ modes
of exercise of power seem limited and qualified by the persistence of older
modes, but by the fact of their combination in a particular state formation, it
seems to open up at the same time an entirely new range of possibilities for
the ruling classes to exercise their domination (Chatterjee, 1988, pp.389-
390).

Based on a study of the conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in Bengali, Chatterjee

on More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry, proposes new ways of understanding

transitional historical process within this eclectic intellectual background – linking Marxian

social theory with Foucauldian notions of power to argue for “community” as the primary

organizing principle for political mobilization (Cf. Chatuverdi, 2007).

From 1925 to the participation of the province in 1947, the main factor in Bengali

politics was of the ‘communalist antagonism’ marked by a series of conflicts of unfounded

spreading and intensity. Chatterjee divides the explanations of this phenomenon in two types.

The first, “colonialist”, suggests that “communalist” identities and cleavages are inherent to

the essential character of Indian society. The second, “nationalist”, states that the

communalist division in India is a creation of colonial practices. There is also a left variation

of this last explanation, which argues that the real divisions in Indian society are those of

  6  
class and not community – consequently, colonial government and communalist ideologies

and leaders tried to mask real issues of class to emphasize the community divisions

(Chatterjee, 1988, p.352). Chatterjee believes that all these explanations confuse the vision of

the phenomenon, which properly belongs to two completely separate areas of political beliefs

and actions:

In all pre-capitalist societies in a process of transition to the forms of

organization of the modern state, ‘politics’ can only be understood in terms
of the interaction of these two contrary domains. In the first, in which
beliefs and actions are guided by popular consciousness, categories such as
‘communalism’ are utterly inappropriate. What may be properly called
‘community’ is indeed central to this consciousness, but it consists of
contradictory and ambiguous aspects. The other domain, shaped by the
representative politics of the modern state, is one in which new forms of
class domination emerge and consolidate themselves. It is the intersection of
these two domains, which becomes the main point of inquiry in the
transitional process (Ibid., p.352).

From this scenario, Chatterjee seeks to reflect upon basic conceptualizations of the

general problem of politics and state in large agrarian societies. By moving away from

deterministic analyzes focusing on technical and economic terms, the author investigates the

modes of power, i.e., the way in which individual or sectional rights, as well as duties and

entitlements are allocated on the authority of the whole social group, the community.

Chatterjee began by providing a typology of three modes of power — communal,

feudal, and bourgeois — to explain the “differential evolution” of social relations in India’s

‘countryside’. He suggested that all three modes of power could have coexisted with one

another within a given state form in colonial India as a direct result of British colonial

policies, which impacted different parts of the agrarian economy differently. Chatterjee was

interested in examining class relations and conflicts within each mode of power as a way to

demonstrate that even inside India there was indeterminacy in the transition to capitalism.

Yet, for Chatterjee, it was necessary to move away from a strictly Marxian framework of

  7  
class analysis by arguing for “community” as an organizing principle for collective action in

each mode of power.

Chatterjee (1988) pointed out that the indeterminacy of the transition of capitalist

development meant that it was not only plausible, but also likely that the characteristics of

one or more modes of power coexisted with the capitalist one. He argued that these

circumstances not only allowed the ruling classes to exercise their domination within a

capitalist mode of power in the form described by Foucault, but the ruling classes could also

rely on the persistence of other modes of power as well. Chatterjee’s theoretical piece

suggests that an understanding of the modes of power in Indian history helped to explain how

elites dominated, but equally it provided a complex background to the diverse ways in which

subaltern classes contributed to the making and dismantling of the modes of power and

explained the complexity of the transition question within colonial India. As Chatuverdi

argues, this way, “Chatterjee was perhaps the first Subalternist to engage with the writings of

Michel Foucault as a way to understand the capitalist mode of power within the Indian

context” (Chatuverdi, 2007, p.13).

Another investigation that illustrates well this point of view can be found in David

Arnold’s Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague, 1896-1900. Here, the author

tries to understand the plague epidemic – which began in 1896 and claimed by 1930 more

than 12 million lives – as a commentary upon the developing relationship between

indigenous elites, subaltern classes and the colonial state. According to Arnold, “the plague

dramatized the importance of the body – the body, that is to say, of the colonized – as a site

of conflict between colonial power and indigenous politics” (Arnold, 1988, p. 392).

During the early phase of the epidemic the body had a specific medical,

administrative and social significance: much of the interventionist thrust of the state was

  8  
directed towards its apprehension and control, just as much of the resistance to plague

measures revolved around bodily evasion or concealment. The body, however, highlights

Arnold (1988), was also profoundly symbolic of a wider and more enduring field of

contention between indigenous and colonial perceptions, practices and concerns – “the

exercise of British power touched in many ways upon the issue of the Indian body” (Ibid.,

p.392).

The Foucauldian analogy between the prison and the hospital, between penology and

medicine, was most evident in the recourse to hospitalization and segregation. In the colonial

perception India’s social and physical environment was seen as injurious to bodily and moral

well being, constituting both the cause and the context of crime and disease. Arnold (1988)

reminds that this attitude gave rise not only to the prison but also to the reformatories and to

the settlements for ‘criminal tribe’.

Although opposition to segregation and hospitalization was commonly expressed in

the idiom of male pollution and deprivation, it was the seizure of women and their removal to

camps and hospitals that provoked some of the fiercest resistance. Opposition to Western

medical intervention was strong too, among those Indians who saw the plague as a form of

divine punishment, as a visitation against which the use of Western medicine was bound to

be either impious or ineffective.

Nor was the living body alone subjected to insults and indignities. The examination

and disposal of corpses figured prominently in early plague policy. Arnold (1988, p.403)

emphasizes that the colonial assault on the body was not the only cause of opposition to the

government’s anti plague measures. There was a concern, too, for the loss of property and

possessions, destroyed or pilfered during the plague operations – but the author argues that

“above all else it was the actual, threatened or imagined assault on the body that aroused the

  9  
greatest anger and fear in the early plague years and was the commonest cause of evasion and

defiance” (Ibid., p. 404).

In conclusion, Arnold argues that the early years of the Indian plague epidemic have

provided an important illustration of the complex interplay of coercion and co-operation,

resistance and hegemony, class and race in the colonial situation. After analyzing closely the

plague control measures applied by the British rule and trying to give a political

understanding involved with Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, Arnold concludes that:

The force of the Indian reaction resulted in a reassertion of political over

sanitary considerations and the shift to a policy of accommodation directed
primarily at winning over middle-class support and co-operation. Coercion
was tempered with consent. Subaltern resistance played an important part in
wresting these concessions from colonial state, but middle-class hegemony
was the greatest beneficiary. While the initial conflict over the plague
administration opened up a significant racial and political division between
rulers and ruled, it also revealed the importance of an increasingly assertive,
if as yet unconsolidated, middle-class ascendancy over the Indian masses
(Ibid., p.426).

Yet directly following Foucault’s work and with his own interpretation of Colonial

India centered in themes such as the medicine, the prison and the colonization of the body,

Arnold seeks in another piece, The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge, and Penology in

Nineteenth-Century India to contrast the French paradigmatic view of prison discipline and

institutional surveillance with a different perspective drawn from colonial India.

As Arnold (1997) argues, for Foucault, the prison was more than a penal institution

and penology more than a discourse about prisoners and punishment. Throughout the

nineteenth century India, there were many occasions when prisoners overpowered the guards,

took the prison and temporarily dictated terms to the authorities. These episodes illustrates

the difficult that authorities found to exercise disciplinary control over the prisoners,

especially in the first sixty years of this century – the prison, this way, had become a symbol

  10  
of rebellion against the British. In this context, Arnold’s main aim is to identify what it was

specifically colonial about the prison systems in India. To do this, first, his argument lies

against Foucault and his notion that one can find abundant evidence of resistance and evasion

in the Indian prison system and a network of power and knowledge over which the prison

authorities exercised scant control.

For Arnold (1997), this limited authority and control was partly the result of a

pragmatic choice by the colonial regime, a recognition of its practical and political

constraints, and partly, the frank expression of its limited interest in the stated purposes of

penal discipline and reform. However, agreeing with Foucault, the author argues that:

The prison was nonetheless a critical site for the acquisition of colonial
knowledge and for the exercise – or negotiation – of colonial power. If one
of Foucault’s main ambitions was to show how a body of knowledge is
created and structured, how a particular understanding of human society and
the world comes into being, then, like Foucault, I see the prison not as an
isolated institution, but as something representative of the ways in which
colonial knowledge was constructed and deployed. In making this
connection with colonial power, I am well aware that the system of
knowledge and power Foucault described was not defined by the operations
of the state or by the aspirations of a single class (…) Overall, then, I would
argue that Foucault’s broad conspectus remains highly relevant to any
discussion of what might be termed “the colonization of the body” (Arnold,
1997, p. 148).

Here we find clear the tension between a commitment with methodologies that may

have distinct political understandings of the same phenomenon. Arnold points out that the

emphasis on the psychological impact of colonialism preferably shows the middle-class

rather than subaltern experience, and it tends to pass over unproblematized the question of the

body, of its physical appropriation and ideological implication in the manifold processes of

colonial rule and Western hegemony. By introducing the phrase “the colonization of the

body” Arnold intends to emphasize three main elements: the process of physical

embodiment, the process of discursive and ideological incorporation and the area of

  11  
contestation between different understandings of the body, involving competing claims to

speak for the body of the colonized and for its material, social and cultural needs.

In India, the prison system helped draw the line of demarcation between colonial rule,

which saw itself as the uniquely rational and humane, and the “barbarism” of an earlier age

or “native” society. The prison emerged as a British concern in extracting taxes and

maintaining “law and order”. However, Western pressures to create a more efficient and

“human” prison system provoked changes. Despite the retention of many “barbaric” vestiges

of an earlier age, British claimed to have introduced a more humane regime of punishment

than India had ever previously known.

Until the middle of the nineteenth century, India’s prisons were uncertain places of

incarceration, requiring security and institutional identity. Women, in this context, formed

only a small part of the prison population, and so little was done to their separate

accommodation and supervision, and usually they were relegated to the worst parts of the

prison. Another demarcation areas were related to offspring and race. European prisoners

invariably received preferential treatment. The control of the white working class was kept

for special practices and institutions – orphanages, workhouses, asylums and repatriation.

The administration thought it was politic also to recognize the importance of caste among the

prisoners, although not officially, caste was nevertheless seen as too potent a factor to ignore

in daily prison life. As Arnolds points out,

If the colonial prison provided an orientalist model of a society constructed

around an essentialism of caste and religion, it also, increasingly as the
century progressed, became a model for the ordering of society according to
dictates of medical science and sanitation. One of the few areas where the
colonial state had relatively unobstructed access to the body of its subjects,
the prison occupied a critical place in the development of Western medical
knowledge and practice in India (Ibid., p.166).

  12  
 David Arnold concludes that, paradoxically, prison, especially in the last decades of

the nineteenth and early twentieth century, was the place where colonialism was able to

observe and interact with their subjects in an exceptional level. The body of the prisoner was

disciplined, but this occurred less in the service of a moral reform than in the question of

remuneration of labor. While the need to respect the essential attributes of caste and religion

was recognized and kept in prison manuals, the body of the prisoner could also serve as a

place of intense medical research and experimentation. The body of the prisoner and cultural

practices around it were constantly related to higher perceptions and imperatives, likewise

between colonized and colonizers (Ibid., pp. 171-172).

The body has an essential role in the work of one scholar that follows a Foucauldian

point of view in what concerns the exercise of power. Guha was also one of these scholars,

involved with Marxist ideas, who have developed some of the methods and themes that

Foucault’s readings arouse – mainly, the issue of the body as the site where the colonial

domination lies. In Chandras Death, the editor of the collective (Subaltern Studies I, II, III,

IV, V e VI)) analyses three depositions of a woman’s death in 1942, that of Chandra Chashini.

Here, according to him, the ordinary apparatus of historiography has little help to offer. As a

result,

… Historical scholarship has developed, through recursive practice, a

tradition that tends to ignore the small drama and fine detail of social
existence, especially at its lower depths. A critical historiography can make
up for this lacuna by bending closer to the ground in order to pick up the
traces of a subaltern life in its passage through time (GUHA, 1997, p.36).

Yet with all its authenticity, the testimonies analyzed stills failed to satisfy, in Guha’s

opinion, an important condition required by the “normal practice of historiography” – the

condition of contextuality. Guha believes that it would be of great help to find a way of

neutralizing the effects of this descontextualization by situating the fragment in a series. For

  13  
the principles according to which a series is constructed and the character of the constructing

authority are all relevant to one’s understanding of what is serialized. That search is made all

difficult by the mediation of the law. Here, Foucault has an important role, once Guha

highlights that:

Each of the statements in this document is direct speech, but it is speech

prompted by the requirements of an official investigation into what is
presumed to be a murder. “Murder is the point at which history intersects
with crime”, says Foucault, and the site of that intersection is, according to
him, the “narrative of crime” (Ibid., 1997, pp. 37-38).

To assume criminality and yet to exclude that “particular will” of the so-called

criminal and substitute the empty factuality of a “mere state of affairs” for the “sole positive

experience” of Chandra’s “injury” would keep their authors and their experience out of

history.

Chandra’s family belonged to the so-called Bagdis. They were among the lowest in

class and caste; in a way that one authoritative description in official literature placed them

beyond the pale of the dominant caste Hindu society and another outside history itself. The

comprehensive exploitation – economic and cultural – to which they were subjected robbed

them of their prestige as well. According to Guha (1997), it was the upper-caste landed elite

over this community that made Bagdi women a “prey to male lust”; yet they figured in

patriarchal lore as creatures of easy virtue all too ready to make themselves available as

objects of “sexual gratification”.

The pressures exerted by such patriarchal morality could strain the resources of an

entire community of Bagdis to the breaking point and that seems to have happened in the

instance given in the text analyzed by Guha. Chandra got pregnant in an “illicit love affair”

and received medicine in order to have an abortion but ended up dying with the procedure.

Chandra’s mother, a widow, led the family in the center of this crisis – Chandra’s pregnancy

  14  
and the efforts to terminate it involved the rest of the family an their kin in the developments

that followed. Gayaram, her son, being married, mobilized family assistance of his wife. His

brother in law, his uncle and Gayaram alone were responsible for removing the corpse of and

buried it. That is, the gap of a male authority in the widow's family, had to be made up by

another family allied by marriage.

The solidarity inspired by this crisis had its territorial basis grouping villages.

Together, these formed a region of Bagdis kinship made up of six families, all endangered by

Chandra’s illicit pregnancy – that is, socially forbidden. At this point, Guha (1997) proposes

a parallel with Foucault’s analyses of the “deployment of sexuality” in Europe to understand

the Indian history:

in nineteenth-century India sexuality was still subsumed in alliance for all

social transactions – for marriage, kinship, and “transactions of names and
possessions” – and for all the theories that informed them. The control of
sexuality therefore devolved on those authorities and instruments –
panchayats (village councils), prescriptions, prohibitions, and so on – that
governed the system of alliance. Speaking specifically of rural Bengal, one
could say that government of sexuality there lay within the jurisdiction of
samak (community, a term in which the institutional aspects of society and
their moral and political attributes are happily collapsed) (Ibid., pp. 45- 46).

The recollections of that night of violence – of Chandra’s body – combine to produce

an announcement that defies the ruse of the law and confers the dignity of a tragic discourse.

Historically, abortion was the only means available for women to defat the truly morality,

that made the mother alone culpable for an “illicit childbirth”. It is the domain of the female

body, as Guha points out, where “pregnancy is above all a drama that is acted out within the

woman herself”, quoting Simone de Beauvoir.

***

Foucault irreverently sought to contest the idea of a “central power”. From a critique

of classical theory, he has criticized the paradigm of the sovereignty as the legitimate body

  15  
that has the task of organizing the relations of power around the law and the sovereign

institutions. This critique can be extended to other currents such as Liberalism and Marxism,

once both sustain the notion of “centrality of power”. Liberalism, since the eighteenth century

sought the legitimacy of power in the contract. Marxism, in the other hand, established the

centralized power as an oppressive and illegitimate arrangement (Newman, 2004).

While addressing his critique to the traditional way of thinking about power and

politics, Foucault sought to establish a new form of power analysis, seen as decentralized,

diffuse and methodologically organized around relations of antagonistic forces.

In this article, it was possible to observe how the Foucauldian methodology was

fruitful on some of the Subaltern Studies contributions, in a way of problematizing the

interpretation of Indian history. The power analyses presented was intimately embayed with

his suggestions regarding a modern model of analyzing power relations. It is clear, though, a

tension between another great influences on Subalternist project, mainly represented by Marx

and Gramsci. It seems that around questions of agency, the Marxist point of view remains as

the decisive one, but it will need a more detailed investigation around this issue.

  16  
Bibliography

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Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial. London: Verso, 2000.

______________. Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague. In: Guha, R.
Spivak, Gayatri. Selected Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

______________. The Colonial Prison: Power, Knowledge, and Penology in Nineteenth-

Century India. In: GUHA, R. Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986-1995. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1997.

BARATTA, Giorgio. Prefazione. In: SCHIRRU, Giancarlo. Gramsci, le culture e il mondo.

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