Jaishree Odin is a literary scholar who is the director and a professor of the Program of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawaii. The thrust of her research work involves cultural studies of science and technology, literary and political ecology, ecology and ethics, system's ecology, and eco-literacy. Her work ranges from German philosophy and the feminist angle to mysticism. She has also considered the current relevance of Shaivite theories of higher consciousness.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic. She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Dipesh Chakrabarty is a Indian historian, who has also made contributions to postcolonial theory and subaltern studies. He is the Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in history at the University of Chicago, and is the recipient of the 2014 Toynbee Prize, named for Professor Arnold J. Toynbee, that recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity.
Ranajit Guha is a historian of the Indian Subcontinent who has been vastly influential in the Subaltern Studies group, and was the editor of several of the group's early anthologies. He migrated from India to the UK in 1959, and was a reader in history at the University of Sussex. He currently lives in Purkersdorf, Austria on the edge of the Vienna Woods, with his German-born wife Mechthild Guha, née Jungwirth, herself a leading scholar of subaltern studies, who he met at the University of Sussex in the early 1960s, where Guha rose to prominence, and then moved to the Australian National University where both continued their work.
Robert J. C. Young FBA is a British postcolonial theorist, cultural critic, and historian.
In post-colonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically outside the hierarchy of power of a colony, and of the empire's metropolitan homeland. In describing cultural hegemony as popular history, Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the social groups excluded and displaced from the socio-economic institutions of society in order to deny their political voices. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonialism through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the men and women who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.
Partha Chatterjee is an Indian political scientist and anthropologist. He was the director of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta from 1997 to 2007 and continues as an honorary professor of political science. He is also a professor of anthropology and South Asian studies at Columbia University and a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.
Navayana means "new vehicle" and refers to the re-interpretation of Buddhism by B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar was born in a Dalit (untouchable) family during the colonial era of India, studied abroad, became a Dalit leader, and announced in 1935 his intent to convert from Hinduism to Buddhism. Thereafter Ambedkar studied texts of Buddhism, found several of its core beliefs and doctrines such as Four Noble Truths and "non-self" as flawed and pessimistic, re-interpreted these into what he called "new vehicle" of Buddhism. This is known as Navayana, also known as Bhimayāna after Ambedkar's first name Bhimrao. Ambedkar held a press conference on October 13, 1956, announcing his rejection of Theravada and Mahayana vehicles, as well as of Hinduism. Thereafter, he left Hinduism and adopted Navayana, about six weeks before his death.
Gyan Prakash is a historian of modern India and the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. Prakash is a member of the Subaltern Studies collective. Prakash received his Bachelor of Arts degree in history from the University of Delhi in 1973, his Master's degree in history from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1975, and his doctorate in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. His field of research concerns urban modernity, genealogies of modernity, and problems of postcolonial thought and politics. He writes about modern South Asian history, comparative colonialism and postcolonial theory, urban history, global history, and the history of science.
Latin American subaltern studies was a group founded in 1992 by John Beverley and Ileana Rodríguez. Inspired by the South Asian Subaltern Studies group, its aim was to apply a similar perspective to Latin American studies. It was one of the more important recent developments within Latin American cultural studies, though in the end the group folded owing to internal differences that were both scholarly and political.
Postcolonialism or postcolonial studies is the academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. Post colonialism is a critical theory analysis of the history, culture, literature, and discourse of European imperial power. The name postcolonialism is modeled on postmodernism, with which it shares certain concepts and methods, and may be thought of as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same way postmodernism is a reaction to modernism. The ambiguous term colonialism may refer either to a system of government or to an ideology or world view underlying that system—in general postcolonialism represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a system that comes after colonialism. The term postcolonial studies may be preferred for this reason. Postcolonialism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, and theoreticians may not always agree on a common set of definitions. On a simple level, it may seek through anthropological study to build a better understanding of colonial life from the point of view of the colonized people, based on the assumption that the colonial rulers are unreliable narrators.
Sudipta Kaviraj is a scholar of South Asian Politics and Intellectual History, often associated with Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies. He is currently teaching at Columbia University in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies.
Saurabh Dube is an Indian scholar whose work combines history and anthropology, archival and field research, and subaltern studies and postcolonial perspectives. After teaching at the University of Delhi, since 1995 he is Professor of History at the Center of Asian and African Studies at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. Dube has been described as having "...long been one of the most interesting and perceptive scholars addressing the dilemmas of modernity in South Asia." His work has been appreciated for setting up conversations between scholarship on South Asia and Latin America, combining "...sociology, history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies to present a nuanced analysis of the challenges confronting our contemporary understandings of empire and modernity, power and difference, and nation and history." Dube's work has been read for "...its lyrical tenor, conversational approach and inspired indecision between the archive and the field. ... an irresistible feast for the historical imagination... that is visibly kind to theoretical abstractions", while it closely addresses details, especially of the Chhattisgargh region. His last authored book, Subjects of Modernity has been heralded as “ranging widely and globally - from histories of empires and genealogies of disciplines to recent Dalit artwork from India - to explore and carefully delineate a tension he regards as fundamental to the formation of the modern: the modern subject's inevitable entanglement with those subject to modernity. A tour de force, this book offers a critical, timely and powerful sequel to postcolonial and subaltern studies”. The work has also been appreciated as modelling “a form of critical scholarship that is generous in its engagement with the work of its interlocutors even as it pushes against the latest clichés to chart new directions”. Others, however, have found Dube's writing to be far too theoretical and vastly broad in scope.
Akhil Gupta is an Indian-American anthropologist whose research has focused on the anthropology of the state and of development, as well as on postcolonialism. He is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Jenny Sharpe is a professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA. Her research focuses on issues of postcolonial studies, Caribbean literatures, theories of allegory, the novel, rethinking models of memory and the archive, and the affect of the Middle Passage. In 2020, she began serving as the Chair of Graduate Studies in UCLA's English Department.
David Hardiman is a historian of modern India and a founding member of the subaltern studies group. Born in Rawalpindi in Pakistan, Hardiman was brought up in England where he graduated from the London School of Economics in 1970 and received his D.Phil. in South Asian History from the University of Sussex in 1975. He is presently a professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick.
Vivek Chibber is an American academic, social theorist, editor, and professor of sociology at New York University, who has published widely on development, social theory, and politics. Chibber is the author of two books, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital and Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India.
Postcolonial theology is the application of postcolonial criticism to Christian theology. As is in postcolonial discourse, the term postcolonial is used without a hyphen, denoting an intellectual reaction against the colonial, instead of being merely sequential to it.
The historiography of India refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of India.
