Preamble: This course attempts to acquaint students with questions of marginality and dispossession and how these are related to discourses of knowledge and power. In the Indian context marginality stems from modes of stratification such as practices of caste, class and gender hierarchies. The course will throw open these issues through the reading of literary texts that seek to represent the voices of those marginalized.
Course Contents: Subaltern history and literature; culture: identity and tradition; social stratification: caste, class and gender; knowledge: discourse, power and representation; reform and intervention: Phule, Gandhi and Ambedkar; social change and conflict: empowerment and political representation; Dalit and gender movements: affirmative action and social transformation; subaltern voices: speech, agency and representation; subaltern literature: issues of language and performance, aesthetics and rhetoric of protest; selected readings in English and in English translation.
Texts:
1. D.R.Nagaraj, The Flaming Feet: A Study of the Dalit Movement, South Forum Press, Bangalore, 1993.
2. M. Bhagavan and A. Feldhaus (Eds.) Speaking Truth to Power : Religion, Caste and the Subaltern Question in India, OUP, New Delhi, 2008.
References:
1. R. Guha (Ed.), Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, OUP, New Delhi, 1982.
2. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, University of Illionois Press, 1987.
3. V. Chaturvedi (Ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, Verso, London, 2000
