(Re)imag(in)ing Other²ness: A Postmortem for the Postmodern in India

The Subaltern Studies project, which originated in India in the early 1980s, has profoundly influenced attempts to theorize the history of the non-Western world, and is therefore of utmost relevance to world historians. This essay traces the rise of this project and the transformations it experienced as it encountered literary theory, postmodernism, and cultural studies in the late 1980s and 1990s. By questioning the utility of a rigid binary opposition between India and Europe, and the utility of placing the British Raj at the center of Indian time, the essay seeks ways of recovering not only non-Western but precolonial history.