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 http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY) 4.0 license.

Karen Lauwers is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. She has a broad interest in parliamentary culture, colonial history, intersectional identities, and narratives of inclusion and exclusion. She is the author of Ordinary Citizens and the French Third Republic (2022).

Sami Suodenjoki is a senior researcher working in the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences at Tampere University. He specializes in popular politics and the interaction between citizens and the state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Marnix Beyen is a full professor and a member of Power in History – Center for Political History at the University of Antwerp. His research deals primarily with the historical, scientific, and literary representation of nations, and the history of parliamentary culture in Western Europe.