subalternitet

Subalternitet, or subalternity, is a concept in postcolonial theory that describes social groups positioned outside the dominant power structures and official discourses of a society. In Antonio Gramsci’s framework, the subaltern denotes those with limited access to civil society and political power, often marginalized within state and cultural hierarchies. The term gained prominence with the Subaltern Studies collective in the 1980s, including historians such as Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarti, who sought to recover histories and perspectives of marginalized groups under colonial rule.

The approach emphasizes how colonial and national power shapes knowledge, memory, and representation, aiming to foreground voices that conventional histories overlook. A central debate concerns whether the subaltern can or does speak within dominant discourses. Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” argues that subaltern voices are frequently mediated, misrepresented, or silenced within Western intellectual frameworks, complicating claims to autonomous agency. Critics have challenged some conclusions, advocating more nuanced accounts of subaltern agency and attention to intra-group differences and political strategies.

Subalternitet is used across disciplines—history, anthropology, literary studies, and political science—to analyze caste, class, gender, race, ethnicity, and colonial legacies, focusing on exclusion from formal decision-making and everyday forms of marginalization. It remains an analytic tool rather than a fixed category, highlighting power asymmetries and the limits of representation. See also Gramsci, Spivak, Guha, and postcolonial studies.