Like journalists, academics are used to working with hard evidence, things that can be shown and proven. The concern is that we may be wrong in imagining the lives of others very different from us, that we may impose our own biases and positionalities onto what we imagine as their interior lives.
For the past few years, the CGSC have been especially concerned with the adequacy of inherited categories to grasp the contemporary situation. We were thus quite interested in Chatterjee’s reflections on the contingent conditions through which the Subaltern Studies collective and conversation developed, the scholarly and worldly situation into which they were intervening, and the subsequent shifts that may [read more»]
