{"id":75098,"date":"2026-07-14T01:00:34","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T05:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=75098"},"modified":"2026-07-13T09:58:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-13T13:58:12","slug":"qotd-subaltern-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/07\/14\/qotd-subaltern-studies\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Subaltern Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Thinking more about the Stupid Smart Guy, I took a quick peek at Salon.com<\/em>, because nobody is dumber than a Salon<\/em> writer … and no one thinks he’s smarter. Fully acknowledging it’s sufficient to say “Dunning-Krugerrand: The Website” and move on, nonetheless I persisted, and I came up with a theory I want to run by y’all: The Left are externalizers<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You can come at this in a few different ways. In the History biz, a big buzzword used to be “agency”. Not as in “three letter”, but as in “ability to meaningfully affect your environment”. One has “agency” insofar as one is able to get one’s way. It’s a big deal in the ivory tower, because if the grand sweep of History since the Middle Ages tells us anything, it’s that White guys tend to get their way, while brown guys do not. There are entire continents (and Subcontinents) full of millions of people, run by a handful of honkies.<\/p>\n

Obviously that’s very very bad for them … but very very good for you if you want tenure, providing you can find some way to prove that the honkies weren’t really<\/em> in charge. Subaltern Studies<\/a>, for instance, is a field where, at its worst, literally anything a brown person does, or doesn’t do, is an example of “agency”, because it’s an example of “resistance” \u2014 doing exactly what Whitey says is really sticking it to Whitey, because extremely dense polysyllabic theory-laden reasons.<\/p>\n

The stated goal of all this being, to give “agency” to the subaltern. But that’s the funny thing: While explaining at enormous length why “doing exactly what Whitey says” is somehow “resistance”, these folks were in fact acknowledging the massive agency \u2014 no quotation marks \u2014 of the British. They said “Jump, frog!” and seven hundred fifty million people asked “How high?” There’s only so much jargon can do to disguise that basic power dynamic, which is why “Subaltern Studies” isn’t the hot new thing anymore.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Externalizing”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-07-14.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thinking more about the Stupid Smart Guy, I took a quick peek at Salon.com, because nobody is dumber than a Salon writer … and no one thinks he’s smarter. Fully acknowledging it’s sufficient to say “Dunning-Krugerrand: The Website” and move on, nonetheless I persisted, and I came up with a theory I want to run […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,79,7,23,41],"tags":[1011,1065,1020,99,1462,764],"class_list":["post-75098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-education","category-history","category-india","category-quotations","tag-colonialism","tag-dunningkrugereffect","tag-progressives","tag-racism","tag-severian","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jxg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75098"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":103612,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75098\/revisions\/103612"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}