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SOUTH ASIA
Subaltern Studies X: Writings on South Asian History and Society. Edited by GAUTAM BHADRA, GYAN PRAKASH, and SUSIE THARU. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. ix, 252 pp. $29.95 (cloth).
The first four volumes of Subaltern Studies, published by 1985, managed to draw sharp responses from conventional Marxist and nationalist historians of India. This was to be expected as both Marxist (primacy given to economistic logic) and nationalist (primacy given to elite mobilization) interpretations of modern Indian history were the chief targets of the early volumes and the contributors, by and large, wrote for an Indian audience familiar with this literature. Several commentators have pointed out that there has been a shift in the orientation of the articles published in the subsequent volumes. One member of the editorial collective, Dipesh Chakrabarty, has attributed this shift to the series' encounter with the likes of Gayatri Spivak and Edward Said. Spivak's analysis of the project was published as a chapter in volume four. It was reprinted as the introduction to Selected Subaltern Studies, a 1988 volume jointly edited by Ranajit Guha and Spivak. Edward Said wrote the foreword to this volume meant for readers in America.
The joint influence of Spivak's and Said's engagements with the work of the collective meant...