By Seren Caglar [Edited by Aisha Parmenter and Sonia Hussain]
Subaltern histories of resistance refer to the post-colonial study of people who have contributed to yet been excluded from the history of anti-colonial resistance. The term “subaltern studies” was coined by Indian scholars in the 1980s, to describe a number of events in South Asia during the colonial and postcolonial era. Key contributors include: Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. These scholars explored how India’s poor and lower class possessed their very own culture that did not correspond with colonialist or nationalist narratives, so described them to be ‘subaltern.’ The Subaltern Studies Collective were interested in writing about marginalized peoples who were generally colonised and outside the socio-political hierarchy of power. They were seen as prime subaltern subjects. More specifically, this included poor, indigenous, native or tribal people. Not all colonised people held the same status. For example, Western-educated, nationalist figures, such as Jinnah and Nehru, were a part of the elite and so not considered subaltern. Therefore, Subalternists have mainly focused on how peasants, untouchables, women and enslaved people resisted both colonialism and post-colonial nationalism. This essay will focus on the hierarchy within the definition of the term ‘subaltern’ by exploring the most marginalised in histories of anti-colonial resistance. Specifically, the enslaved Black women who contributed significantly to the anti-colonial and anti-slavery effort in Cuba, the Algerian women who helped overthrow the French colonial regime in the Battle of Algiers, non-Christian colonised peoples in South East Asia, and the strong role of the peasants in the Maji Maji Rebellion of 1905 to 1907.
One must not ignore the role of women in the study of subaltern anti-colonial resistance movements. Women have often been invisible in the study of resistance movements, for example, in the historiography of Cuban anti-slavery movements between the years 1843 to 1844. Aisha Finch draws attention to the Black women who moulded the resistance movements in Cuba yet have gone unnoticed in archival records.[i] This is notably the case in the 1844 “La Escalera” movement, an alleged slave rebellion and motion to abolish slavery. Finch states that the women have gone unnoticed despite having had indispensable roles in the fight for anti-slavery in Cuba. She describes them to have been ‘central architects in their own freedom’ but argues that history has ignored their efforts.[ii] This is important as it means that the Black women in Cuba are a part of subaltern histories of resistance because they have been left without a voice to demonstrate their efforts in anti-colonial opposition. As one of the largest sugar producers of the Spanish Empire, Cuba had a high demand for enslaved Black women to ensure the longevity of both production and the empire.[iii] This suggests that enslaved Black women were at a worse social standing than enslaved men as they were used as commodities to maintain colonial power. This reveals that when historians study subaltern history of resistance, there is variation in the extent to which specific social groups can be said to have been marginalised. Enslaved Black women suffered more as they not only had to fight for their freedom as Black people, but also against the patriarchal roles implemented by the Spanish, such as reproducing to maintain the slave trade.
Finch explains that enslaved women’s motivations for resistance were different compared to their male counterparts because they had different roles in the empire but were in danger during anti-colonial campaigns, either way for being enslaved or descendants of enslaved people. A woman called Fermina was recorded as part of the anti-slavery resistance movements in the 1840s, and was reported by Filomena Gangá’s testimony to have been at the forefront of the rebels in the November Uprising. Gangá describes that she saw Fermina showing the rebels ‘the doors of where the white men slept’ to kill them.[i] In addition, there were scores of women seen attending local meetings to organise forms of resistance against slavery and colonialism in Cuba.[ii] Black women in Cuba are included in subaltern histories because the study of resistance has solely consisted of hyper-masculinised individuals, such as José Semidei Rodríguez, José Antonio Aponte or Fidel Castro, despite the fact that women played a significant role in anti-slavery and anti-colonial campaigns through both large and small or unorganised efforts, such as controlling their fertility.[iii]
Hilary Beckles has described women in anti-colonialist resistance movements as ‘natural rebels.’[i] Algerian women fit this description as they had a strong position in the fight against French colonial power in Algeria. The resistance movement gave birth to many female heroes such as Zohra Drif, Lakhdari and Djamila Bouhired. These three women carried bombs to French quarters to disrupt the dividing French rule of Algeria which was shown vividly in the film ‘The Battle of Algiers’ in 1966. The film by Gillo Pontecorvo is an important source for shining light upon the anti-colonial efforts which women like Drif were a part of both in real life and in the film as “actors”. This is significant for subaltern historians as it is very rare that colonised women have been given a voice to demonstrate the ways in which they were active agents during the revolution. For example, they used their femininity to lure the French into getting into their quarters and acted as liaisons between the male heroes.[ii] In addition, it has been recorded that the male heroes were veiling like Algerian women to hide weapons from the French.[iii]
Despite the recognition given to female rebels in the film ‘The Battle of Algiers’, it has also been accused of ignoring the distinctly female struggle that came alongside living under a patriarchal system during the national fight for independence.[i] Therefore, Algerian women are also included in the study of subaltern histories of resistance. This is a different type of subaltern history to the Black women in Cuba, however, both groups of women have not been given a voice to project their struggles throughout the history of anti-colonialism.[ii] Adrienne Leonhardt highlights how the National Liberation Front (NLF) saw the advancement of women’s rights as very western and therefore wanted to maintain the traditional conservative culture of Algerian women as part of anti-colonial resistance.[iii] Algerian women put nearly, if not entirely, the same effort into anti-colonial resistance as the men, yet they have remained marginalised both through history and in today’s society despite decolonisation. Furthermore, Zohra Drif is part of subaltern history because her memoirs and experiences were only published for the first time in French in 2013 and later in English in 2017, despite her living with a sisterhood of fighters as a member of the National Liberation Army (NLA) and NLF during the Algerian independence movement.[iv] Although she worked with other revolutionary figures such as Ali La Pointe, Yacef Saadi and Larbi Ben M’hidi, to this day she does not gain as much recognition as her male counterparts.[v] Furthermore, despite the fact that Drif was a part of the NLF, they were forced to oppose more social rights for Algerian women as it seemed to align too much with French policy, whilst this fed into the French colonial narrative that Algerian women were oppressed and backwards.[vi] It is clear today that Algerian women were at a disadvantage during the anti-colonial resistance period, both because French colonial rule depicted the Algerian Islamic culture that women identified with and embraced as oppressive, and the NLF opposed the advancement of women’s rights as a rejection of the ideas of the coloniser. This further supports the argument that the significant role that Algerian women played in anti-colonial resistance did not improve their social standing in everyday life in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, because of how little their efforts are recognised but also because they were constantly forced to choose between preserving their identities and being “liberated” by the French. Like the Black women of Cuba, Algerian women were used during both colonisation and anti-colonial resistance for the advantage of both anti-colonial resistors and the coloniser. They have been used as weapons for showing power, through the high demand for female slaves to reproduce or the westernisation of Algerian women to maintain colonial power. Therefore, women are included when studying subaltern histories of resistance as their distinct voices in the struggle for liberation have been absent in the study of anti-colonialism.
The study of subaltern histories of resistance also includes peasant communities as they have been significantly marginalised in colonial societies, despite arguably playing a crucial role in the start of many anti-colonial resistance campaigns, such as the Maji Maji Rebellion (1905-1907). Although this rebellion has limited documentation relating to its organisation, famine and poverty can be considered its main cause as 75,000 East Africans died as a result of German economic pressure.[i] This claim is supported by the fact that most rebels had poor, peasant backgrounds, which gave the people of German East Africa a common grievance, uniting them against colonial rule. The imposition of taxation and increased forced labour in European construction sites and plantations is said to be a reason for the organisation of the Maji Maji Rebellion, as it took place after the governor imposed large-scale cotton production in each neighbourhood.[ii] The policies implemented had a serious impact on the people as by the third year of cotton growth, it was the only crop grown in the neighbourhoods and required fifty to one-hundred per cent more labour as it was difficult to grow.[iii] Male labourers refused to work on the scheme leaving women and children as the main labourers, which disrupted the family economy. Like the women who resisted against the colonial slave trade in Cuba, the female peasants suffered at the hands of both patriarchy and colonial rule. The experience of women in the lead up to the Maji Maji Rebellion adds further support to the argument that poor, Black women were the most marginalised in subaltern histories of resistance. The Rebellion is therefore said to have been started by peasants, as they had suffered most from economic pressures, and the leaders of the rebellion, Selemani Mamba, Chekenje and Digalu Kibasila had previously been in prison for failing to encourage their people to grow cotton.[iv] These leaders had also seen to burn the crops which was a common form of anti-colonial resistance by subaltern peoples in other places such as colonial South-Asia.[v]
Peasants are a part of subaltern history as they have arguably been affected the most by colonialism and their memoires and experiences have mostly been inaccessible to historians as they lacked literacy due to their economic circumstances. Due to their lack of privilege, it can be argued that the history of the peasant experience in anti-colonial resistance has been silenced. They have not had the power to change historiography today, like the kings and politicians who have the literacy skills and power to do so, and exclude the voices of the marginalised.[i] Moreover, most historiographical sources of peasants have been written by these elite figures who cannot understand the struggles of peasant anti-colonial resistance despite their significant roles in starting large campaigns against colonial powers, like the Maji Maji Rebellion. This supports Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak’s statement that we cannot recover the true voices of the subaltern such as women and peasants, because the elite members of society have always spoken for them.[ii]
In conclusion, when one studies subaltern histories of resistance, this generally includes people who have been segregated from colonial society due to social hierarchies, but also the historiography of anti-colonial resistance. The case studies of Algeria, the Maji Maji Rebellion and the Cuban slave revolts explored within this essay have shown that when one studies subaltern history, there is a concentration on women and the poorer people of society, such as the peasants who had initiated the organisation of the Maji Maji Rebellion. It can also be argued that there is a hierarchy within the idea of the ‘subaltern’ because a man can be a peasant, but a Black woman who lives in a colonial society as a peasant is even more disadvantaged than her male counterparts. The men did not suffer from patriarchy like women did, shown in the Battle of Algeria. Therefore, one must conclude that the most disadvantaged in subaltern history is Black women from either background of slavery or peasantry. These women have had more to combat under colonialism, patriarchy, their social roles of being mothers and the economic demands of the coloniser.
Notes
[i] Kim Wagner, “Rebellion, Resistance, and the Subaltern”, in Peter Fibiger Bang and Walter Scheidel (eds.), The Oxford World History of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 3.
[ii] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? (Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 42-58. [i] John Iliffe, “The Organization of the Maji Maji Rebellion”, The Journal of African History, 8/3 (1967), p. 495.
[ii] Iliffe, “The Organisation of the Maji Maji Rebellion”, p. 497. [iii] Iliffe, “The Organisation of the Maji Maji Rebellion”, p. 498. [iv] Martin A. Klein and G. Wesley Johnson (eds.), Perspectives on the African past (United Kingdom: Brown, 1972), p. 532. [v] Shahid Amin, “Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in South-East Asia”, Asian Studies Review, 11/3 (1987), pp. 120-134. [i] Khannous, “The Subaltern Speaks”, p. 42. [ii] Khannous, “The Subaltern Speaks”, p. 43.
[iii] Adrienne Leonhardt, "Between Two Jailers: Women's Experience During Colonialism, War, And Independence in Algeria", Anthos, 5/1 (2013), pp. 7-8.
[iv] Zohra Drif, Inside the Battle of Algiers: Memoir of a Woman Freedom Fighter (Just World Books, 2017).
[v] Jan C. Jansen, "Creating National Heroes: Colonial Rule, Anticolonial Politics and Conflicting Memories of Emir ‘Abd al-Qadir in Algeria, 1900–1960s", History and Memory, 28/2 (2016).
[vi] Leonhardt, “Between Two Jailers”, p. 9.
[i] Beckles, Natural Rebels, p. 35.
[ii] Touria Khannous, "The Subaltern Speaks: Assia Djebar's "La Nouba"”, Film Criticism, 26/2 (2001) p. 42.
[ii] Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion, pp. 115-118.
[iii] Hilary Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (Rutgers University Press, 1989), p.35; Barbara Bush and American Council of Learned Societies, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838 (Kingston; Bloomington: Heinemann Caribbean, 1990), pp.16-38. [i] Aisha K. Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844 (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), pp. 112-134.
[ii] Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion, p. 112.
[iii] Finch, Rethinking Slave Rebellion, p. 112.
Bibliography
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