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Symposium ‘Subalterns and Histories in the Present’, February 5-6, 2026 [By invitation only]

Abstract:

What is the critical import of setting to work today the study of the subaltern in our vastly transformed, rapidly shifting social worlds and their varied understandings, especially within history and historiography, the critical humanities and the human sciences, and method and theory? What might it mean to meaningfully juxtapose practices and processes of indigeneity and indenture, gender and caste, slavery and apartheid, age and sexuality, settler-colonialisms and race, the Adivasi and the Dalit, nature and environment, capital and property, science and technology, media and cinema, the body and the embodied, heteronormativity and queerness, dance and state, nations and migrants, politics and justice? Can such tasks be taken up while drawing in also attributes of the far-reaching interplay between these analytical-experiential-affective arenas?


Rather than rendering subalterns and histories as already known, a priori entities, the symposium in front attempts to address such subjects as predicaments and provocations in the present. It does so by registering especially the formidable reworking of our worlds, the exponential remaking of the planet by authoritarian populisms, intolerant nationalisms, and predatory capitalisms,  themselves founded on afterlives of slavery and apartheid, settler-colonialisms and state-settlements and bringing into play aggrandizing extraction and climate-change, pervasive precarities and pandemics. We keep in view, too, living-specters of migrants and minorities, indigenous identities and sexual alterities – all entwined with common injuries of gender-race-caste-class. In such scenarios, might the task of approaching histories and subalterns as predicaments and provocations that abound suggest in turn critical perspectives and cautious possibilities in the present?


Taken together, the symposium ahead imaginatively intersects with the recently published Routledge Handbook of Subalterns across History, yet only in order to engage and extend pressing questions of subalterns and histories – intimating subjects and lives that ever abide.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
mwfdelhi (January 27, 2026). Symposium ‘Subalterns and Histories in the Present’, February 5-6, 2026 [By invitation only]. Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies (MWF Delhi). Retrieved March 5, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15kmm


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