Can there be a subaltern middle class? Notes on african american and dalit history

Public Culture

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 321-342

  Pandey, Gyanendra ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 68549112755     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: 15278018     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2008-031     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. See, e.g., Peter Stearns, "Middle Class: Toward a Precise Definition," Comparative Studies in Society and History 21 (1979): 377 - 96
2. Stuart M. Blumin, "The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Some Proposals," American Historical Review 90 (1985): 299 - 338
3. Jürgen Kocka, "The Middle Classes in Europe," Journal of Modern History 67 (1995): 783 - 806
4. Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790 - 1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
5. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780 - 1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
6. and Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, 1780 - 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
7. I need hardly say that I use the term ex-slave here in a figurative rather than a literal sense. Obviously, not all members of the African American middle classes come from a slave background
8. many are descended from families of free and even middle-class black immigrants. Equally, the dalit groups whose middle-class elements I write about were rarely slaves in a technical sense. For my purposes, it is important to note, however, that an increasingly popular account of the foundation of the United States is built around an acknowledgment of the "original sin" of slavery, the recognitionand overcoming of which underscore the story of American democracy and liberty. There is a parallel story regarding untouchability in the received narrative of Indian democracy. For important general statements on the African American and dalit middle classes, see E. Franklin Frazier, The Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957)
9. Bart Landry, The New Black Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)
10. Harold Isaacs, India's Ex-Untouchables (New York: Harper, 1964)
11. Sacchidanand, The Harijan Elite: A Study of the Status, Networks, Mobility, and Role in Social Transformation (Delhi: Thomson, 1976)
12. Nandu Ram, The Mobile Scheduled Castes: Rise of a New Middle Class (Delhi: Hindustan, 1988)
13. It is necessary to stress that the "educated, professional middle class" position was in the twentieth century the major aspiration and avenue of advancement for the widest sections of the lower classes, American blacks and Indian dalits included. As E. Franklin Frazier put it, "Educa tion is the chief means by which the Negro escapes from the masses into the middle class" (The Negro Family in the United States, rev. ed. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966], 331).
14. Amy Schrager Lang, The Syntax of Class: Writing Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 10, quoting Blumin, "Hypothesis of Middle- Class Formation," 305, 309.
15. "In democracies," as the sociologist Akos Rona-Tas puts it, "the middle class is the nation proper. The typical member of a national community is a member of the middle class" ("Post Communist Transition and the Absent Middle Class in Central East Europe," quoted in Sam Vaknin, "Russia's Middle Class," December 18, 2002, samvak.tripod.com/brief-middleclass01.html).
16. See Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 22
17. and J. V. Pickstone, "Establishment and Dissent in Nineteenth-Century Medicine: An Exploration of Some Correspondence and Connections between Religious and Medical Belief Systems in Early Industrial England," in The Church and Healing, ed. W. J. Sheils (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 169 - 70.
18. See Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865 - 1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994)
19. and Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 433 - 34
20. It is ironic, then, that in some countries today, like the United States, and more generally among groups I call the subaltern middle classes, anyone, working-class or professional, who holds a steady job and even temporarily occupies a position of intellectual, civic, or political leadership, can be thought of as middle-class
21. For a few important commentaries, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Colonialism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, n.d.)
22. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1982)
23. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963)
24. Jean Suret-Canale, French Colonialism in Tropical Africa, 1900 - 1945, trans. Till Gottheiner (New York: Pica, 1971)
25. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)
26. Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990)
27. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class
28. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966).
29. For a few relevant studies, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983)
30. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed, 1986)
31. Hamza Alavi, "Pakistan and Islam: Ethnicity and Ideology," in State and Ideology in the Middle East and Pakistan, ed. Fred Halliday and Hamza Alavi (London: Macmillan, 1988), 64-111
32. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798 - 1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
33. William R. Roff, The Origins of Malay Nationalism, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995)
34. James S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971)
35. Brian Willan, Sol Plaatje: South African Nationalist (London: Heinemann, 1984)
36. Michael Oliver West, The Rise of an African Middle Class: Colonial Zimbabwe, 1898 - 1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002)
37. The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1957)
38. and Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
39. For more on the Indian example, see Sudhir Chandra, The Oppressive Present: Literature and Social Consciousness in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994)
40. Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism (London: Hurst, 2001)
41. Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001)
42. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1982), 45.
43. As Paul Gilroy notes, this is a situation in which the lines between public and private violence have often been very hard to draw (Black Atlantic, 175)
44. For two important recent studies, see Mary Patillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
45. Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005).
46. See Darryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880 - 1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)
47. I am grateful to the columnist for his kindness in letting me read, copy, and use all the letters he received. The translations from the Hindi in the quotations that follow are mine. After prolonged consideration, and consultation with the columnist, I have withheld his name and other particulars to prevent the personalization of the larger issues at stake here.
48. Carol Batker, " 'Love Me like I like to Be': The Sexual Politics of Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, the Classic Blues, and the Black Women's Club Movement," African American Review 32 (1998): 199
49. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: Harper and Row, 1990)
50. Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis, Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992), 7. See also Leslie B. Inniss and Joe R. Feagin, "The Cosby Show: The View from the Black Middle Class," Journal of Black Studies 25 (1995): 692 - 711.
51. Stephanie J. Shaw, What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers during the Jim Crow Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 119.
52. The census commissioner of Bihar noted in 1911 that the flood of petitions asking for a change of names and a higher place in the caste order was such that the weight of the paper alone amounted to 1.5 maunds. Both Hindu and Muslim castes were involved, claiming "higher" caste names, such as Singh, Sharma, Khan, and Ansari (Bengal, Bihar and Orissa, and Sikkim, Part 1, vol. 5 of Census of India, 1911 [Calcutta: Government Press, 1913], 440, 446). On dalit attempts at redesignation, see, e.g., Owen Lynch, The Politics of Untouchability: Social Mobility and Social Change in a City in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969)
53. Andre Beteille, "Caste and Political Group Formation in Tamilnad," in Caste in Indian Politics, ed. Rajni Kothari (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970), 245 - 82
54. Mark Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement against Untouchability in Twentieth-Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)
55. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, Caste, Protest, and Identity in Colonial India: The Namasudras of Bengal, 1872 - 1947 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1997)
56. Saurabh Dube, Untouchable Pasts: Religion, Identity, and Power among a Central Indian Community, 1780 - 1950 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998)
57. Vijay Prashad, Untouchable Freedom: The Social History of a Dalit Community (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999)
58. Chinnaiah Jangam, "Contesting Hinduism: Emergence of Dalit Paradigms in Telugu Country, 1900 - 1950" (PhD diss., University of London, 2005).
59. Balwant Singh, interview by the author, Saharanpur, January 11, 2007. Such recasting of history was very much part of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century struggles for dignity and selfrespect.
60. See James C. Scott, John Tehranian, and Jeremy Mathias, "The Production of Legal Identities Proper to States: The Case of the Permanent Family Surname," Comparative Studies in Society and History 44 (2002): 4 - 44.
61. Among certain groups, especially in southern India, the first name of the father came to be used as an individual's second name
62. For the purposes of this exploration, I have constructed more than a hundred family trees or, more accurately (given the nature of the evidence), partial family trees of dalits in northern and western India. My information comes from interviews, supplemented by autobiographical writings and "fictional" accounts. I have kept footnotes to a minimum in the following pages to protect the identities and confidentiality of my informants.
63. As the life story of an educated, rural dalit youth in a major Gujarati novel pronounces, "Yesterday's [rough sounding] Somnaa, today's [far more respectable] Somanlal, will be [the highly respected!] Solomon tomorrow" (quoted by Joseph Macwan at the conference "Dalit Subaltern Sahitya," Delhi, December 12, 2003)
64. For one example, see Bauddha stri-purush namavali (no publication details, 1991)
65. There, his fellow villagers would still have treated him as "untouchable," but given his wealth, they could not, at least not openly
66. Interview by the author, Milton Keynes, United Kingdom, July 16, 2006. The names have been changed to protect the interviewees' privacy.
67. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 147, also 238
68. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896 - 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 18
69. This account is based on the chapter on Broyard in Henry Louis Gates Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (New York: Random House, 1997), 180 - 214. The quotation is from 180.
70. Gates, Thirteen Ways, 127. (However, the category of "our people," and that of "our innermost identity," is hardly so self-evident. In the African American and dalit cases, as among other colonized populations, not to say everywhere in the modern world, these categories continue to be politically produced.)