Subalternity in the age of the planetary

Keywords: Gramsci, subalternity, planetarity, political ecology
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

The publication of a critical edition of Gramsci's Notebook on "The History of Subaltern Social Groups" prompts further reflection on how Gramsci's distinctive conception of subalternity functions in relation to other geographical processes. In this paper, I will develop such a reflection through a critical engagement with the so-called planetary turn. There is something of an irony in the enthusiastic adoption of a planetary perspective by several thinkers formerly associated with the subaltern studies collective. Nevertheless, in the view of one, Dipesh Chakrabarty, the challenges of climate change and the lessons to be gained from Earth System Sciences demand a planetary approach. I reject such a position and, instead, seek to frame a response to our environmental predicament through a "subaltern political ecology". While drawing from Gramsci's eight carefully crafted notes around the methodological criteria for researching the subaltern, I will also bring these notes into conversation with a range of perspectives and approaches that, as Chari (2019: 96) writes "stretch Marxist analysis by reading in dialectical relation to the praxis of the oppressed".