Practice question · Multiple choice
Most surviving evidence of peasant revolt is police and court records. What does that do to a history of the rebels?
Hints
- Ask who wrote the record, and what question they were asking the rebel.
- The rebel speaks in the document. In whose vocabulary?
Show the answer
B. It supplies them only as criminals under interrogation
Why
The record captures the rebel answering charges, so their programme arrives translated into the language of crime, and reading against the grain mines the document for what its author took for granted rather than what they asserted. Guha built Subaltern Studies on exactly this manoeuvre.
Practise Postcolonialism and Subaltern Studies
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. History I is free to start.
More questions on Postcolonialism and Subaltern Studies
- Said held that Orientalist scholarship was superb AND that it served empire. Why are those two claims not in…
- Why was Guha unsatisfied by nationalist history, which had already displaced the British account?
- Why does Spivak answer "can the subaltern speak?" largely in the negative?
- Sort each formulation: Eurocentric habit or Chakrabarty’s corrective?
- Said held that Orientalist scholarship could be both technically excellent and an instrument of empire.
- Chakrabarty says the "waiting room of history" still speaks someone else’s grammar. Whose, and why does that…
- Spivak argues that to be heard the subaltern must use forms belonging to the power being resisted. Why does…
- What four questions does this tradition hand a working historian, of anywhere?