Theory Of Post Colonialial Theory

Post-colonialial theory as a recent field of study has lately become one of the most attractive academic disciplines - if it can be called a discipline - that incessantly triggers piles and piles of literature written by art of critics, social reformists, political scientists, literary critics and political economists. The continuous expansion of post-colonialism in its recent version made its own domains of interest and areas of functionality overlap with other fields of global academic studies such as African American literature, literary theory and criticism, anthropology and cultural studies. One of the latest subdivisions of post-colonial theory is the Subaltern Studies Group or the Subaltern Studies Collective that was launched in the
In this study, the author did not pretend perfectly master in any way the premises expressed by those scholars nor did he encompass the scopes of their inquiries, but his intention in this article is to trace the birth of the subaltern as a critical concept of extreme importance in post-colonial theory.
As such, this notion of the subaltern was traced following it through its historical developments as it was first coined before coming to its latest applications in post-modern conditions. So as not to drift into unnecessary excavations that may lead this study astray, a genealogical study of this concept (the subaltern) was chosen on three predominant thinkers with whom it is essentially associated: Antonio Gramsci, Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty
So, it became evident that the approach is a historical approach that attempts to excavate the origins of the concept of the subaltern by referring to a genealogical study of the foundational academic theoretical works which dealt with this notion of the subaltern. The material used consists mainly of major books written by Gramsci, Ranajit Guha and Spivak. The notion of the subaltern was first referred to by the Italian Marxist political activist Antonio Gramsci in his article “Notes on Italian History” which appeared later on as part of his most widely known book Prison Notebooks written between 1929 and 1935. Gramsci‟s standpoint is fundamentally instrumental to any student who reaches an understanding of the origin of the notion of the subaltern because it tends to detach itself from the mechanistic and economistic form that narrowly characterizes most of the Marxist traditional studies. The subaltern classes refer fundamentally in Gramsci‟s words to any “low rank” person or group of people in a particular society suffering under hegemonic domination of a ruling elite class that denies them the basic rights of participation in the making of local history and culture as active individuals of the same nation. Gramsci‟s intentions when