Subaltern Studies - which was so central to the intellectual life of Romance Studies at Duke in the late 1990s (The Latin American Subaltern Studies reader was published in 2001) -  gave me a language to think about difference and the neo-colonial worlds I'd grown up in. The unapologetic articulation of deconstruction and Marxism - riding two horses at once - has stayed with me.

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My entry into the UC system was accompanied by five years of generative, generous and formative discussions of The Subaltern-Popular Workshop, a Multi-Campus Research Group spearheaded by Swati Chattopadhyay and Bhaskar Sarkar (2005-2009), an experience that planted the seeds for what came next.

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 Sentencing Canudos (2010) asks about the ways the people of Belo Monte/Canudos have been sentenced to history -  made intelligible in history but also condemned - by Euclides da Cunha's Os Sertões, a text that is generally read as giving "voice to the voiceless" in its denundication of their destruction. I read a series of alternative accounts (newspaper articles, oral histories, literary renderings) to probe how Canudos has been constructed as making sense to us, and all that has been discarded as non-sense. 

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 "Subalternity and Everydayness" comes from a chapter in my book on Canduos and focuses on the non-relationship between what has been theorized as everydayness and subalternity . “Subalternizing Canudos.” Modern Language Notes (2005) also comes from the book.

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 A recent piece on Kleber Mendonça Filho's "Recife Frio", “Off Screen, Unsighted, Unthought” Forma (2023), works on the continuities and discontinuities between the limits of intelligilibity such as it was theorized in several of the Subaltern Studies writers and similar figurations when confronting climate change. Dipesh Chakrabarty's work serves as a subterranean through-line.

 

Recently, I participated in a roundtable discussion on Subaltern Studies 2.0 UCI which will be coming out in Postmodern Culture.