Subaltern Political Subjectivities and Practices in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Approaching subalternity from a broad Gramscian angle this edited collection contributes to the understanding of popular politics in parliamentary autocratic and colonial contexts.The book explores individual stories and micro-histories of complaints requests rumors and other mediated and unmediated interactions between political institutions and the subjects they claimed to govern or represent. It challenges the approaches of institutionally oriented political historiography and its attention to the top-down construction of political representation citizenship and power and powerlessness. The book discusses more subtle forms of agency and the spaces these pertained to which could indicate contestation or resistance taking place within a framework of loyalty towards the existing political institutions. This research does not only bridge the divide between political and apolitical frames of reference but it also provides a new perspective on the dichotomy between loyalty and resistance by acknowledging the nuances of these seemingly opposing stances. With case studies from Europe North Africa South America and India the chapters cover political communication in proto-democratic democratic imperial and authoritarian contexts.This volume is crucial reading for undergraduates postgraduates and scholars in history and social sciences who are interested in political culture and the mechanisms of negotiating local national or imperial identities. Chapter 4 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at taylorfrancis under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY) 4.0 license.