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Subaltern

 In political science, the concept of "subaltern" originates from the work of Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci used the term to refer to groups of people who are socially, politically, and economically marginalized or oppressed within a given society. The subaltern as a concept within political theory gained momentum through the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. His conception of the subaltern has been reworked by Indian scholars such as Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak and is now a fundamental concept in postcolonial studies. Subaltern groups often include minorities, lower socioeconomic classes, indigenous populations, women, and other marginalized communities who lack access to political power and are often excluded from mainstream discourse and decision-making processes. Gramsci's concept of the subaltern has been influential in postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and other fields that examine power dynamics and social hierarchies. It highlights the importance of understanding the perspectives and experiences of marginalized groups in order to fully grasp the complexities of power relations within society.

Subalternity refers to diminished political voice, organization, and representation on the part of nonelite social groups, their relative invisibility in historical documentation, and their non- or extrahegemonic subjection to the power of elites. For Gramsci, these groups include peasants, slaves, women, religious groups, different races, and the proletariat in Southern Italy; Guha includes all groups in South Asia subordinated by class, caste, age, gender, and office, or any other modality; for Spivak, a paradigmatic figure is the gendered and racialized peasant or subproletarian of the global division of labor. For all three, the subaltern is unpossessed by the state and outside the purview of state hegemony; theoretical consideration of the subaltern is based on a political concern with radical social transformation at multiple levels.  Conceptually, subalternity has been significant to the field of political theory in its challenge to the prevalent categories of (sovereign) subjec- tivity, agency, political representation, and (rigid definitions of) class.

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