Writing Difference/Subaltern Autobiography

Subaltern writings in the autobiographical mode are denied the space of the unmarked universal – which is occupied by male, upper-class, bourgeois autobiography. Such writings are regularly consigned to the local, the particular and the marked: subjects (or shall we say, objects) that appear as something of a deviance from the ‘normal’ condition of human existence, the human self, and autobiography. They are also denied their individuality and variety, the very stuff of human life in the liberal understanding. It is the politics of this classification, and of its contestation in subaltern writing, that I investigate in this presentation, through an examination of the tradition of dalit (or ex-Untouchables’) autobiographical writings in India. I argue that the mark of subaltern life (and autobiography) is the struggle to find voice and form. What we find in subaltern autobiography – the ‘counter-selves’ narrated by women, dalits, African Americans, working class immigrants and conquered indigenous populations, among others – is the articulation of a will, and a self, that is never flamboyantly autonomous, self-generated and self-perpetuating. Rather it is a will, and a self, that is produced in constrained, often damaging conditions – something that male, upper class, bourgeois autobiography never acknowledges in full. My inquiry inevitably concerns mainstream autobiography, and claims of the autonomous modern self, although I focus here on (dalit) subaltern autobiography and memoir.