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This latter case brings us to one that hits closer to home for those of us working in the US academic system. I am referring to the new situation created by the passage of a law known as NAGPRA Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act , which has forced archaeologists and physical anthropologists to work together with Amerindians who were considered, before that law, as mere objects of study.

This law has made the positionality of Native American stronger than ever and their claims to ownership of their own history more effective, by taking into account their own views on indigenous pasts as knowledge to be considered as serious as that produced by Western science. I believe that we Latin Americanists can learn a lot from the struggles and the achievements of subaltern subjects in the framework of NAGPRA for a history and a study of the content of this act see: Trope and Walter R.

Ferguson, Roger Anyon and Edmund J. This raises the question about the role of Western science in the production of indigenous knowledge and the degree to which it could condition their writing of their own history.

That is a valid concern. However, it has, at the same time, the potential of helping different tribes to identify the cultural affiliation of human and associated remains of the past. It is, of course, a trade-off for the subaltern, but one with which some indigenous groups have started to experiment. This choice entails, of course, as Larry J. Zimmerman avers, the training of indigenous subjects in Western science so that they can apply it to the reconstruction of their own history In this way, these tribes are being able to write their own version of their very own pasts, as Rabasa proposes.

There is another side to this story and it has to do with the impact of the participation of subaltern subjects in the elaboration and control of our disciplinary agendas Zimmerman This would entail teaching an indigenous past that has nothing or very little to do with the one we have been telling hitherto—an indigenous past that would incorporate, now, the views of those subjects, the Amerindians, who had been hitherto considered as objects of study in our disciplines Zimmerman Science in general, Zimmerman tells us, must be put in a social context This should be interpreted, I believe, as a warning to any discipline that dispenses with the knowledge of subaltern subjects.

In his opinion, archaeology in particular would be able to realize its humanistic potential if it were at the service of the indigenous subjects it studies Of course, there are risks involved in a position like this. For example, it could degenerate into a position like Richard M.

Begay's, who expects archaeologists and other Western intellectuals to help Amerindians to reconstruct their pasts, but without having the chance to disagree with whatever the indigenous subjects they are working for want them to say This is very far from the way Dussel envisions the role of the Western intellectual with regard to the subaltern, as we saw in the previous paragraph. Begay's position is surprising because indigenous peoples have been able, for centuries, to live in, and to understand, two worlds, as Rabasa and others remind us see, for instance, the article by Jeffrey van Pelt, Michael S.

Burney and Tom Bailor— and, therefore, they know that other human groups have beliefs that differ from theirs. I seriously doubt that a dogmatic affirmation of only one of the possible worldviews is the best way to advance the cause of indigenous peoples. The resentment of indigenous peoples with regard to archaeology is very well founded historically see, for a review of the horrors committed in the name of science, the article by Robert E. Bieder and the book by David Hurst Thomas, among many other texts. Yet, this does not mean that archaeology as a profession with a long history of crimes and misdemeanors is the same as archaeology as a way of knowing.

In the same fashion, and despite all their differences as far as disciplinary frameworks and protocols go, literary and cultural studies can be of some help to subalterns. Admittedly, literary and cultural studies, unlike archaeology and Anthropology, do not always have subalterns as objects of study, but they are always, sometimes unwittingly, studying texts that either produce subalternity because of their endorsement of the official narratives of nationhood or represent it in various derogatory ways: Archaeology can also teach us some lessons because, although it is a discipline that has been forced by law to respect the subaltern, it has started doing it effectively.

Our discipline celebrated for decades a literary canon that exalted Western values and despised the marginal classes and ethnic groups of Latin America or represented them from an Occidental perspective, even in the case of the best intentioned of critics.

Today, the situation is different for Latin American literary and cultural studies: There is still another way of reaching out for the subaltern and it is related to what I proposed above which is what is being enforced in other disciplinary fields, as we saw in the case of archaeology under NAGPRA: This is not, as a colleague from the History department at the University of Florida told him, to make the indigenous subject a part of a circus or a freak show.

The conference he proposed to his colleague from history was intended, then, to give indigenous subjects the opportunity to express themselves in their own words and languages.

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It was, too, a logical consequence of a subalternist agenda and a way to express solidarity with the descendents of the oppressed Amerindians he studies as a colonial expert In sum, LASS has been a very progressive attempt to open the fortress of the teaching machine to the subaltern. It has had, also, a significant influence both in the US academy and in Latin America.

It has, as Acosta has shown in his piece, the potential to help other disciplines Comparative Literature and English in the US academy to overcome some of their political and epistemological limitations. It shares, too, the ideals promoted by Mendieta as a spokesperson for Latin American post-occidentalism, and it contributes to what Mignolo, in his article published in this volume, calls an-other paradigm—that is, one that tries to understand subalternity and social injustice from the vantage point of the coloniality of power and the colonial difference.

That space gives us the chance to both revisit and vindicate those knowledges produced by subalterns that Western society has dismissed, ignored or destroyed. I am referring to what Michel Foucault called subjugated knowledges, those that have been de-authorized by the dominant epistemic rules and discourses for being local and partial. The subaltern as a place from which to think gives us the vantage point needed to criticize our present. As Linda Martin Alcoff's interpretation of the role of subjugated knowledges in Foucault's work suggests, the historical a priori, the social conjuncture, can only be subverted from the outside, from beyond what that historical conjuncture can comprehend or accept Alcoff Those knowledges deserve, then, a respect that it is based not only on ethical but also on epistemic grounds.

Without a basic respect for the oppressed and their knowledges, it will be impossible to take their contribution to humankind seriously.

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This respect should be the point of departure of our research, understood less as a merely academic enterprise than as a de-totalizing practice of solidarity with the Other. I believe this line of thought is not alien to, or at least not incompatible with, some of the agendas proposed and embraced by diverse members of LASS. In spite of all the praise the trajectory of LASS deserves, it is true that, as some of its members admit, there were internecine disputes and terrible struggles over power within the group.

As Rabasa tells us in the article published here: That self-perception—that is, of being the most revolutionary ones—together with a sense of belonging to an exclusive club, may have been some of the causes behind the numerous attacks the group suffered from Latin Americanists based in both Latin America and the US academy.

Then we started to catch on. Mignolo and Alberto Moreiras joined. And Duke comes into the picture with its great resources, and there is this big conference. Whereas our previous meetings had been very informal, low budget affairs. We would sit down for a weekend at someone's campus and talk like you and I are doing now. Audiences were not invited to come or anything like that. So the Duke thing was much more dramatic and ambitious interview Because it was a political project.

And later he adds, in praise of resentment: It would have been perceived as yet another high-level academic project with little force behind it other than careerism. So you can say there was an element of subalternity operative in our own project. I am not trying to make any special claim to political correctness here. We were all college-educated, middle-class, etcetera. But there is relative subalternity and relative resentment. We are going to do our thing, we are going to do it differently, collectively.

Others, like Bosteels, who were not part of the collective, sees generational differences in the ranks of LASS , but they are, in his opinion, less important than the uneasy encounter that took place between the two strands of thought the Marxist and the Deconstructionist that predominated in the collective and the challenge to articulate them Basically, he asks himself how to achieve the fusion of theory and practice His take, like mine, is that we don't need to choose between the two forms of subalternism, but to seek a harmonic combination of both He is proposing, in sum, a theorization of the death of revolutionary politics of the past and a politicization of the deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence Instead of looking for that harmony, the members of LASS kept upping the ante in the debate regarding politics, trying to show who is the most revolutionary thinker.

Although it is a simplification to present the group as one comprised only of Marxists and Deconstructionists, it is undeniable that the tension between two theoretical tendencies lies behind the demise of the group. In other words, it could be said that it was their inability to bridge the theoretical gap, the theoretical differences between the main-albeit not the only-two strands that comprised LASS that led to its dissolution. All these internal criticisms show us a portrait of LASS as a project that included members with very different and divergent views, who provide us now with conflicting versions or accounts of the process that led to its demise, and that lay bare its several flaws and problems.

There must be life after the demise of the group. As Mosquera states in his contribution to this volume, following Beverley: Some people would like to see a new edition of the group. She also believes that if a new group is to emerge, it will be necessary both to write a new manifesto or founding statement and to find new leadership Her opinion is based on the assumption that without a structure there is no subaltern studies project The very structure of the group, then, was not able to comprehend the wide variety of subaltern studies it triggered: Whether practitioners of the discipline decide to continue their efforts individually or whether they prefer to create a new group, the legacy of LASS cannot be ignored by those who believe their work is not just a mere intellectual exercise or a way to be protected from the ills of everyday real- life.

Perhaps the time has come for them to take the banner from our hands and to find some way of changing the terms of the debate Whether one agrees or not with Beverley about the role his generation needs to play in the present I, for one, wish they would stay around and keep contributing to the field's theoretical debates , it is also true that the legacy of LASS needs to be re-actualized by younger scholars.

And when I say younger, I really mean it: I am referring to young assistant professors and graduate students. This would bring fresh air to the space opened by the group. This would also be a celebration of, or a homage to, not only LASS, but also to the Latin American post-occidentalist tradition. As Fernando Coronil aptly puts it: This note celebrates its achievement and the mutable vitality of subaltern studies; it is post- obituary, not an obituary.

Long live subaltern studies in the Americas! I am one of those who are willing to help contribute to the after-life of the spirit, or if you prefer, of the inspiration that brought LASS into being. This special issue is an attempt to discuss the history, the multiple agendas, the limitations and the various legacies of the group. Hopefully, more venues will offer their pages to a renewed and refreshing debate about this seminal group and the theories that came from Latin America in the sixties.

However, if you find Watkins's wishes too ambitious, here's what he has to say about it: I, too, sometimes feel that the ending of papers or introductions should take the form of a rather tall order. Long live critical thinking that seeks the liberation of the poor and the oppressed. And this has to do with a recognition of the limits of critical thinking and the limits of intellectuals.

Well, I beg to differ: Let us hope that, if this is true, Carr tells the public where this group operates, what kind of work it publishes and who are its members. Enrique Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation. Lanham, Boulder, New York, Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield, Stepping Stones to Common Ground.

Nina Swidler, Kurt E. Dongoske, Roger Anyon and Alan S. Waltnut Creek, London, New Delhi: U of Minnesota P, Arguments in Cultural Theory. U of Nebraska P, Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: The MIT P, Latin American Subaltern Studies Group.

The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. U of California P, Coloniality, Subaltern Knowl- edges and Border Thinking. Literacy, Territoriality and Coloni- zation. U of Michigan P, Enrique Dussel's Phi- losophy of Liberation.

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Burney and Tom Bailor. Legacies of Pain, Visions of Promise. The Politics of Subaltern Studies. Peru's Indian peoples and the challenge of Spanish conquest: Hua- manga to U of Wisconsin P, The Materiality of Indigenous Pasts. Views from South 2. Entre la sociedad de control y la comunidad que viene.

American Indian Values and Scientific Practice. The Other Side of the Popular. Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America. Lincoln and Lon- don: Perhaps the impetus behind this set of questions is to make us ponder the commonalities of our efforts as Latin Americanists and to make us realize that, in fact, we belong to one and the same field and share the same genealogies. The sec- ond group aims at establishing the particularities of the relationship between the South Asian Subaltern Studies Collective and LASS, and points in the direction of a desencuentro between the two groups.

The third refers to the organizational structure of LASS, its advantages and disadvan- tages, and wonders if it would have been better to choose a different for- mat—an open rather than a closed structure, a movement rather than a group. And finally, the fourth set asks for the conditions of possibility of continuing the subaltern studies discussion by other means, with other peo- ple, and under a different format.

Naturally, engaging in this dialogue implies, were we to comply with the request of the editor, to discuss the errors committed, speak about the possibilities overlooked, and re-examine the limitations of our collective practice. The nature of LASS and the type of work it did is gathered in the volumes we published. In this piece I am interested not only in revis- iting the proposal of subalternism as an alternative and counterhegemonic epistemology that for me marked the continuity of the legacy of Marxism by other means, but also in presenting a retrospective situational analysis of the juncture that brought us together, and in reconsidering some of the real structural issues that caused the final demise of the group under that light.

Subaltern, Cultural, and Post-colonial Studies: Their Genealogies Subaltern Studies is in many ways for me the name of a transition. Given the available choices within the field at the time—a Marxism whose limits were already a hindrance in thinking about the social processes inflected by high modernity, and the most festive, triumphant, and market oriented current of Cultural Studies, heavily dependent on deconstruc- tion—I, together with the historical founders of the group, chose the path of Subaltern Studies.

Our recalcitrant faith in the social agency of the poor, in the belief that they were endowed with consciousness and a political will that could serve as a foundation for theory, and the affinity defined as a political sensibility between the members of the collective was our investment, a way of micro-managing the transition from an engaged past to a demobilized present and an uncertain future. This is our first legacy to the field. Guha was our mediator and compass during those disorienting days.

There was no Manichean bent implicit in this conception, no ethical distinction between good and evil, not even the idea of victims and oppressors. There was, on the contrary, the necessity of revising, or rather, constructing, a theory of resistance grounded on the practices, conscious- ness, and will of the poor.

Where had we gone wrong in our understanding of the agent of change? We were Marxist, we had read our Marxism, we were aware of the polemics within Marxism. This knowledge notwithstanding, we could not let go of the desire to construct a critical approach to culture from the viewpoint of the subaltern and in solidarity with them. And agency was the magic word or formula we seemed to encounter in the South Asian collective use of the term subaltern. Agency plus the term subaltern itself seemed to give meaning to cultural criticism and value to a field left empty by the evacuation of Marxist cate- gories.

In the work of the South Asian collective we found the vehicle to perpetuate what could be rescued of a depleted epistemology, and we used Subaltern Studies to make a statement: We were conver- sant with this type of work. The fact that we are always called to make the distinction between Subaltern and Cultural Studies, more than between Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies is proof that the difference between us could not be so easily discerned. This was a sign not only of the contem- poraneity of our scholarship but also of the sharing of some presuppositions and concerns.

After all, we are in the same field, we belong to the same pro- fessional group, and yes, we share our genealogies. All of us, fin de siglo cultural workers in the field of Latin American studies, were of one and the same generation—ten years of difference between us, give or take. As stu- dents, most of us were brought up under the aegis of Marxism, whether of the orthodox or revisionist kind, which was the dominant paradigm during our formative years.

Most of us, at least in our early youth, were politically engaged, some militants in social movements, most of us became public intellectuals who participated in public debates in our respective societies, marched against the war in Vietnam in the U. We were engaged intellectuals, people who took a stand, wrote for the newspapers, and read the same books. Also, we were influenced by the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools that gained so much notoriety in the works of Cultural Studies—for all of us, ex- or post- Marxists, cultural analysts had been the seedbeds of large polemics on the constitution and role of culture with regards to society, class, and party construction, and yes, important elements in the discussion of ideology and class struggle.

Who is not going to remember the polemic between party intellectuals like George Lukacs and Bertolt Brecht? Who was not learned in the Benjaminian warnings of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and the art of story telling? Who did not know the polemic on class undertaken by Eric Hobsbawm, E. Thompson, and Raymond Williams? In fact, Guha belongs to that generation of historians who, so the oral history goes, did not give a damn about his or her work. All those bibliographies were recognized by all of us, those bibliographies were our common ground, our true home base. The difference between us at that moment, the difference that was being emphasized and paraded, was our place of enunciation.

Where we lived became a determining factor at the juncture of globalization. This was nothing new because this was also true at the time of the revolution. However, in my view, our posture before the transition, what each of us chose to emphasize, distinguished the two approaches to the field. The transition from liberalism to neo-liberalism was the real part- ing of the waters.

In those three years we are referring to [], the struggle of the leftists against the military dictatorship ceases to be the hegemonic question in the cultural and artistic Brazilian scene, opening up space to new problems and reflections inspired by the democratization in the country I insist: To the sorrow of those who leave is opposed the emptiness to be inhabited by the acts and words of those who come in my translation. Some of these scholars repre- sented the cutting edge of the field, and if they were not the vanguard they were the postmodern avant-garde.

The greatest rubric of these works was the analysis of mass, elec- tronic, and industrial pop cultures, but looking at these texts with the wis- dom of hindsight, they represent the scholarship of the transition from a world with telos to one without it: All these works responded to the needs of peripheral societies as they adjusted them- selves to the new logic of high modernity or postmodernity. Looking at the body of work from this perspective, I can understand the reluctance on the part of Latin American scholars to be grouped under the festive rubric of Cultural Studies—a current of thought they associated with the North American academy.

These Latin American scholars based in Latin America were serious analysts of the transition to the neo- and the post-. They proposed new and alternative paths for the field of Latin American Studies, reflected on the disciplines that had formed the identities of the former nation-states, iden- tified the new profiles of fragmented, shattered, and dispersed social sub- jects and social movements locally, and discussed the inadequacies of the liberal paradigms circulating in mimicry of civil society. In this respect our interests converged.

They spoke about modernity, modernizing, and mod- ernization: And in their cultural analysis they, like us, made a move to include all forms of culture—not only high but also pop, mass, industrial, and electronic cultures. These themes were also present in the discussion forums established by the national and international commissions on truth and reconciliation.

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These forums fostered the production of testimonials and changed the notion of historiography, bringing the disciplines of his- tory, anthropology, and sociology closer to the spirit of Subaltern Studies. In these efforts, their work and ours dovetailed.

In those days, LASS scholars were more invested in revising and insisting on the left than in debating the aporias of liberalism. We were more interested in finding out what had gone wrong—the future possibili- ties for the left, and the nature of radicalism—than in civil society, the new social movements, or the debates on pluralism and democracy. The bottom line was that, at that moment, we saw ourselves as radical scholars and thought Cultural Studies scholars were liberal social democrats. Yet, back then, all of us were looking for new vocabularies for a sit- uational analysis of culture, an analysis that described a saturated public sphere in which the new forms of opposition had to be re-imagined.

It was clear that the opposition had taken new, unedited forms, some of which were going to derive from the performative, the queer, and beyond. If I am going to pinpoint our intervention in the field, it is its insistence upon the power of negative dialectics and radicalism—not so much governability as ungovernability. In the notion of subalternity, I believe we come closer to the gatherers of testimonials. I am thinking in particular of the works under- taken in Colombia, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Guatemala by historians, journalists, and all kinds of social agencies.

Their voices consti- tute what Nancy Fraser calls the subaltern counterpublics. Living in the hegemonic nation, fully inserted within high modernity, we took electronic and mass culture for granted and insisted upon dwelling in the residual memory of the left. This was one of our major concerns and part of our legacy. Living in the metropolis, is it really that hard to under- stand that gesture? The remnants, the leftovers and shreds of the big defeat were more attractive to us.

I personally was much less interested in the cultures of con- sumption than in the great duelo. We were aferrados, we clung to the mem- ories of the past, hopes and memories that were also part of the transition, and if being obstinate is just another name for the virtue of persistence and resiliency then our legacy to the field is precisely that: For that reason alone South Asian Subalternism was a proper vehicle for us. I am sure they went through the same circle of hope and defeat, of uncritical allegiance and critical distance, of the direct experience of the ris- ing hopes for a better future for the poor and the betrayal of corrupt leaders, hardened dogmas, and local cultural determinations.

They had a wealth of knowledge concerning their own local experience that they wanted to revise, unhinge, and untangle. They too were discontented with the liberal national leadership, the ideas of modernization and the development— western style—that the comprador bourgeoisie had displayed for purchase. We reached the same point in several different parts of the world at differ- ent historical junctures and, to our credit, we recognized our affinities. The difference between localities—who was where when—was also a factor in the constitution of that South Asian Subaltern Studies collective.

The relation between Subaltern and Postcolonial Studies was much more organic and fluid at the very beginning. In my view of things, these two approaches were very compatible—the South Asian Subalternists even called themselves postcolonial and as postcolonial scholars they circulated within the First World academies. In the Latin American version of Post- colonial Studies, there was an explicit validation of ancient Amerindian cultures, a desire to unearth their old epistemological ways of organizing the universe and a desire to validate them.

There was also a need to link old indigenous epistemologies to new indigenous struggles and this demanded a systemic analysis of capitalism. That con- stituted a divide among them. For those interested in ancient indigenous cultures, the epistemes provided therein constituted an alternative to Western reason and an appropriate method for thinking subaltern studies.

For given that the great genealogies and the great narratives have been written from above, thinking from below is one of the most difficult endeavors, and therefore an intellectual chal- lenge to deconstruction. The crucial question was the necessity of understanding globaliza- tion. Was globalization the name for the last readjustment of capitalism? If so, the geopolitics of geoculture brought us together because we could eas- ily plug in familiar notions that had formerly circulated under the Leninist rubric of imperialism and were given a new twist in the neo-version of Empire.

In all cases, we were talking about capitalism as a world system, a familiar frame of reference. But what were the repercussions and rearrangements that globalization brought to knowledge production? For better or for worse, some of us tied the discussion of globalization to University politics and the discussion of Area Studies. Actually, we took it upon ourselves to discern the relation- ships between the local and the global.

Here the discussion of localization and the home base of intellectuals held its sway. The question was—and still is—who knows what best? Which necessities does the new knowledge address? Who does knowledge help and whom does it wreck? Knowledge became a question of hegemony and power. Therefore it became imperative to recognize not only that there was knowledge produced in the periphery but also that this knowledge was worth studying, that it was important locally and globally, and that it ultimately crossed Area Studies.

Granted, the struggle over Area Studies was a localized struggle but it was neverthe- less a struggle to set the tendency that would later spread out throughout the world. We saw ourselves as the periphery of the center whereas our colleagues in Latin America were the center of the periphery. However, these positionalities have never been acknowl- edged.

More often than not, there is a conflation of locality and positional- ity and all of us are lumped together within dominance—cosas de gringos. Ours was a call for a dialogue among and between minority subaltern intel- lectuals that never came to fruition. This can be part of the agenda for the new project, and the idea our legacy to the field. In this new phase of geopolitics and geoculture, there is, once again, the possibility of going back to revise the common ground of Cultural, Postcolonial, and Subaltern Studies, and to understand how the work of social scientists and cultural critics converge in the use of bibliographies and approaches.

This social and cultural confluence is found in other studies that utilize the notion of sub- altern counter spheres, particularly in the new energy of NGO sponsored intellectual work that relies on the archives of the living, productive agents and brings their voices to bear on public discussion. In these studies we find the convergence of Cultural, Subaltern, and Postcolonial Studies approaches, new ways that social and cultural analysts reinsert themselves within the social fabric and feed the discussions of the public sphere.

Through these works subalterns constitute themselves as dialoguing part- ners and active agents within contemporary society. The consciousness of that break generated the new approaches to the field. We felt the need to revisit the old sites and to rework the production of knowledge, the workings of culture, and the agency of people. To paraphrase him, how must we understand the world now that we are neither apocalyptic nor integrated? It was his work that we read and discussed and it was him that we wanted to meet and invite to one of our gatherings.

Patricia Seed organized a special meeting with him at Rice for us. But in that article he also explained that the genesis of their project was grounded in the South Asian experience and that they had never entertained aspirations to univer- sality; they did not count on any readership abroad. They were local intel- lectuals dedicated to the study of their local community, their region, South Asia. Frankly speaking, we do not know much about theirs either. These three pieces remind me of our own analysis of modernism and modernization.

I heard there had been two other meetings with them, one in Chicago, organized by Chakravarty, and one in Mexico, organized by Saraub Dube, to which only a couple of us were invited. By the times these events took place, LASS was already in total disarray. Overall, in their individual relationships with us, the members of the South Asian collective were courteous and deferential but never to my knowledge intellectually engaging—the exception is Dube, who works in Mexico.

At Duke they remained mostly to themselves because they were conscious that they were not part of our field discussion but, in private, I know that they thoroughly enjoyed the conference and considered it of high caliber. Thinking seriously about their indifference to our work, I can only interpret it in light of the sharp division between fields and Area Studies— South Asia, Latin America, etc. This division fosters a tradition of igno- rance amongst the regions of the world and favors the mediation of knowl- edge via Europe and Western thought.

This division is also part and parcel of the coloniality of power and part of our discussion of Area Studies. While in general the division between rigidly classified disciplines prohib- its interdisciplinary dialogue, the division between the social and human sciences is especially marked.

Historians and literary specialists hardly ever cross-reference each other. Granted, for all appearances, the South Asian collective had nothing, or very little, in the way of a dialogue with us. Hence we chose to relate to each other through the European mediation of Antonio Gramsci. Perhaps the moment was unpropitious. Perhaps when we came onto the scene, their col- lective work had lost its cohesion and political impetus and the pervading cynicism of the era had dimmed its light.

Perhaps the transition also intro- duced an element of distrust that disconcerted them as much as it did us. Perhaps all of us, the most radical flank of the international intelligentsia, were turning into social democrats. Perhaps we were losing our grip and becoming openly conservative. But in their desconocimiento or disavowal of us, I see a negation of themselves and of their own excel- lence and importance.

They turned their faces away from the image we pro- vided for them in the mirror of Latin American Subaltern Studies. Had we all recognized the productivity of a dialogue amongst our- selves, we could have moved from a national and regional form of local- ization to a continental and even global peripheral, one from below. To my knowledge, only Dabashi and Spivak recognized this angle. At Columbia University Guha said he had transcended subalternism and implied that we should do likewise. To settle his scores with Marx, Guha had turned to Hegel and high Indian culture, to the literature of the elite.

It was in response do this new turn that Dabashi ironically drew the dividing line by stating, in a paraphrase of Marx, that he was not a subalternist. This is then a good vantage point from which to consider the future agenda of subalter- nism. The Organizational Structure of the Group Considering the historical juncture of our coming together, the col- lapse of LASS and I almost dare to say of the South Asian collective as well is part of the collapse of the left and its forms of organization. During our formative years we organized study groups to instruct ourselves and read the material not included in the curricula.

Drawing on this model, we came together as a collective and ignored that collective formats were a thing of the past. The idea itself was vitiated and contaminated on all flanks due to the similitude collectivities held with models pertaining to political parties and organizations on the one hand, and the corporate world on the other. That was strike one against us. Strike two was the waning interest in the poor. Latin America is one of those areas Arrigui calls redundant or obsolete.

If that was so, who was going to be interested in the Latin American poor? We had to think hard and fast about that question. The interest in the Gulbenkian Commission Report regarding social sciences and the book on the invention of the Latin American field by Mark T. Berger is related to this awareness. We were not empresarios, entrepreneurs, or brokers. We were not bureaucrats. We did not want to invest time in organizing the group. We wanted the group to exist de facto, spontaneously. We came together at the annual conference and at the annual conference we decided who was to plan the next one.

Had we made a real and genuine effort, we could have worked out bylaws, thought about membership, orga- nized research agendas, and founded a journal. We did none of that.

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There were voices proposing a more coherent plan of action as there was sometimes assiduous communication between us via email, but nothing came of it. When subalterns are transformed into theoretical categories, they are given the status of active agents in the production of knowledge. The South Asian collective, and Guha in particular, makes them absolutely pivotal to the structure of imperial historiography and hence of politics.

When he points out the slippery character of subalternity he is referring to the anxi- eties produced in the minds of hegemonic subjects and how it affects their writing and knowledge production. The mere existence of subalterns con- stituted an interruptus that made the entire history of colonialism a failed enterprise in spite of the high rates of capital accumulation. Industrial and electronic cultures came to bear on this great leap forward of North American universities. Looking at it from this per- spective, the project is even more attractive today.

I think that had we worked out a solid organizational structure, and had we had a clear research agenda, that our project could have survived. In retrospect, there were several ways of constructing affinities in our group. There were the young and the old; those established and those beginning; the European, the Africans, and the Latin Americans, men and women, blacks and non-blacks, gay, straight, and bisexual, but all those signs and discourses were conveniently disregarded. Differences were in fact never discussed.

We ignored the fact that rank and hierarchy of all kinds are part of social relations and that the distinction between elite and subaltern is duplicated in all social structures. Ours was no exception. The effect of all this unfinished business was a climate of distrust and this distrust translated into a form of disrespect amongst the members. This is, I dare say, a very masculine way of approaching group dynamics but what else is new? Mas- culine protocols were coming back into fashion. Our differences, our het- erogeneity, could have been a source of wealth, instead they became a hindrance.

Difference was the big and unresolved question raised at our meeting in Puerto Rico. Rather than confronting difference head on, we spoke about it procedurally, in terms of membership and group structure, mechanically, harried, and pressed. But, one thing is certain, and that was that no one wanted to organize the group on the basis of exclusions because exclusions reeked of party politics and all of us were sick of that. If I am going to sum up our problems, I would say that our academic discussion was harassed by historical, political and academic distrust. I am sure each one of us felt at a certain moment unwanted.

Was distrust a symp- tom of the perception of incompatible research agendas? Did we transfer our political discrepancies to our organizational discrepancies? Nothing was ever spelled out. We tried doing it at our last meeting at Duke. My fondest memories are of that meeting, one of the best I have ever attended, because I could see all our potential displayed. To this day I lament our demise because, together, we were, simply, a formidable group.

For the young we were providing models of academic intervention—not only the- oretical models that too but also energy, ways of organizing, ways of hav- ing an impact. That is another of our legacies to the field. Policy Statements and Forecast for the field: We all abide by it. So, if the purpose is to do Subaltern Studies por la libre, then there is no purpose in questioning that decision. But if what was attractive was the collective nature of the endeavor and some of the questions we raised, then what is needed is to rethink the project, its purposes, and its structure.

First of all, there is a need for a coupure, a clean break. Any attempt to duplicate the past will duplicate the vices of the past. If there is going to be a new collective endeavor—be it a group or a move- ment—writing a new statement of purpose, manifesto, or foundational position statement is a must.

Whoever is interested in being part of this new project must contribute to this new dialogue but there must also be leader- ship and initiative. One of the structures that I saw we could have adopted was a mixture of a movement and a group. That is, to have a core group of people inter- ested in carrying out on a rotating basis the bureaucratic functions of the group and in identifying the issues around which research was necessary, and then inviting people to participate in it.

This makes the situation very clear to the profession and gives the collective the structure of a think-tank. The easiest way would be for each scholar to continue his or her own work while engaging with and organizing panels with other scholars working on compatible approaches. To do collective work requires funds, time, energy, and a debate on the institutional character of the project.

Without structure there is no project. To pre-empt internal strife, the new stage must rely on trust, the kind of trust that is reflected not only in the open nature of the structure but in the open discussion of difference. If there is a new collective, the members must know on what basis they are con- structing their affinities; they must define their research issues and approaches, and know well who they can and want to work with. I welcome this project and wish whoever wants to undertake the effort to organize it, good luck.

Subaltern Studies in the Americas.

:: RAPIDO bus & coach- ::

Duke UP, ; Convergencia de Tiempos: The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America. A special issue of boundary 2. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Univer- sity of Illinois Press, Ao luto dos que saem opo-se o vazio a ser povoado pelos atos e palavras dos que estao entrando Raul Antelo et al ed. Cuarto Propio, 11 I am thinking in works like Alfredo Molano.

Vivencias de guerrilleras y colaboradoras del FMLN. Grafistaff, ; Laurie Gunst. A Journey through the Jamaican Posse Underworld. The Massacre at El Mozote. Vintage, ; Luz Arce. Planeta, ; Maria Alejandra Merino. Santiago de Chile, AGT, Habermas and the Public Sphere. Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Duke UP, l Beatriz Sarlo. Escenas de la vida postmoderna. Intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina. New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture. De los medios a las mediaciones.

The Modern Language Associa- tion of America: Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America. The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Projects for our times and their con- vergence. Open the Social Sciences: Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales. If there is no one universal standard for truth, then claims about truth are contextual: In this transaction, the Latin American intellectual is relegated to the status of an object of the- ory as subaltern, postcolonial, calibanesque, etc.

But Arturo Arias points out that there are Guatemalan intellectuals of the right who have attacked Stoll precisely as a North American denigrating a Guatemalan national figure. This seems to be the appropriate moment to recall the famous pas- sage in The Philosophy of History where Hegel envisions the future of the United States. North America will be comparable with Europe only after the immeasurable space which that country presents to its inhabitants shall have been occupied, and its civil society will be pressed back on itself America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the times that lie before us, a world historical significance will reveal itself—perhaps in a conflict between North and South America.

What is more interest- ing for our purposes here, however, is the notion that a conflict between North and South America will be necessary for the United States to attain world historical significance. Today perhaps the opposite could be said: The nature of these questions provides the occasion for me to intro- duce my national allegory. It is Richard Harding Davis's novel Soldiers of Fortune, which at the time of its publication in became something of a best seller and fed public enthusiasm for American intervention in Cuba.

Because of its coincidence with the centennial of the war, it has attracted quite a lot of attention in American studies in the recent past. Sol- diers of Fortune which bears an obvious, albeit unacknowledged, debt to Conrad's Nostromo , is set in the fictional Latin American republic of Olan- cho, recognizably Venezuela where, as it happens, I was born.

The nationalist opposition to Alvarez in the Olanchan senate, led by General Mendoza, objects to the concession, and introduces legislation to obtain a larger share of the mine's production. The Bible Can these bones live? Loesje Does living take a lot of your time? Anonymous Act as if you'll live forever. Plan as if you would die tomorrow. Anonymous Aquella que nunca ha amado, nunca ha vivido.

John Gay She who has never loved, has never lived. Alfred Edward Housman Here dead lie we because we did not choose To live and shame the land from which we sprung.

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Life to be sure, is nothing much to lose; But young men think it is, and we were young. Ed Howe By the time a man is ready to die, he is fit to live. Anonymous Giving makes living more loving. Anonymous Dum vivimus vivamus. Orton Dum vivimus vivamus. Orton El hombre inmaduro quiere morir noblemente para una causa, mientras el hombre maduro quiere vivir humildemente en primer lugar. Wilhelm Stekel The immature man wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mature man wants to live humbly for one. Thomas Ken Teach me to live, that I may dread The grave as little as my bed.

Thomas Ken Es mejor haber vivido y amado que nunca haber vivido del todo. Es mejor morir de pie que vivir de rodillas. Dolores Ibarruri Better to die on one's feet than to live1 on one's knees. Oscar Wilde There are few things easier than to live badly and die well. Anonymous Do more than exist: Do more than touch: Do more than hear: Do more than listen: Do more than look: Do more than love: Do more than think: Do more than Talk: Josh Billings I have lived long enough to look carefully the second time into things I am most certain of the first time.

One half the world doesn't know how the other half lives, and neither does the other half. Willa Cather I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. Half the world knows how the other half ought to live. Mejor morir de una vez por todas que vivir en terror continuo.

Aesop Better to die once and for all, than live in continual terror. David Herbert Lawrence But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions. Lucius Annaeus Seneca As long as you live, keep learning how to live. John Lothrop Motley As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.

John Lothrop Motley Morir es muy poca cosa. Jean Anouilh Dying is nothing. So start by living. Samuel Johnson Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eat and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him. The Bible No puedo vivir sin libros. Thomas Jefferson I cannot live without books. Maxwell Don't fear, just live right. Maxwell Nunca vivimos, siempre vamos a vivir. Voltaire We never live, we are always going to live. Voltaire Para mi el vivir es Cristo y el morir ganancia. The Bible For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

The Bible Para nosotros que vivimos para agradar debemos agradar para vivir. Samuel Johnson For we that live to please must please to live. Samuel Johnson Pon en orden tu casa: The Bible Set thine house in order: