It banalizes oppression.

The multifaceted field of Dalit studies is rooted in material histories, political geneoalogies, and social struggles that have become productive of particular epistemological outlooks. This stands in stark contrast to ideas of the subaltern which, according to its anticaste critics, must be understood not so much as a category of the historically downtrodden, but rather as a category for symbolic and material restitution for a privileged substratum of Indian postcolonial society and its global diaspora. Indeed, as we have seen, from its inception in Gramscian Marxism, the subaltern in postcolonial studies gained traction primarily in scholarly discourse, without any clear referent outside of academic debate. We might say that out of the three categories discussed in this article, subaltern remains the designation with the greatest potential for mystification. Indeed, unlike trans and queer which exist as material and affective designations outside critical scholarship’s theoretical extrapolations, the subaltern is in its designations a distinctly academic category of identification. Through its propensity for mystification, the subaltern as a category of critical scholarship ends up obscuring more than it reveals, producing new exclusions in its wake.

Inspired by anticaste critique but moving closer to home in disciplinary terms, we might then ask: What would the field of postcolonial IR look like without a reliance on the subaltern as a centering analytical device? Indeed, Robbie Shilliam poses this exact question in his seminal book The Black Pacific (2015). In the pursuit of epistemic and political justice, Shilliam (2015) inquires what would happen if “the democratic impulse of Subaltern Studies were to be separated from the very term ‘subaltern?’” (p. 7). In this book, as well as in more recent work, Shilliam (2018, 2021) provides us with potent answers to this question, combining a decolonial approach focused on the lifeworlds of seemingly disparate colonized populations such as the Māori, RasTafari, and Ethiopians, with an acute attention to the concrete entanglements between racialized historical imperialism and the emergence of modern capitalist social relations. In a similar register, Joanne Yao’s considerations of the histories of the Rhine, the Danube, and the Congo 20 European Journal of International Relations 00(0) River in The Ideal River (2022) provides an instructive example for the concretization and demystification of historical imperial dynamics. While relying on extensive archival research to chart the relationship between the impulse to tame the river and the emergence of the world’s first international organizations, Yao moves beyond strict empirics to allow eighteenth and nineteenth century poetries and works of fiction to complement her argument. Instructively, however, instead of understanding these merely as extensions of Western imperial imaginaries, the book demonstrates their productive aspects, linking literary work to the material machinations of imperial relations. What we call Yao’s dialectical method consists in the careful moving between an analysis of literary imaginaries and the emergence of the modern international system through the interactions of European state bureaucrats, diplomats, and politicians. In this way, her work applies the method of concretization by inquiring into the social and historical relations that were productive of, and produced by, the abstract imaginaries fetishized within poetry and fiction.

In the more specific literature on South Asia, recent scholarly interventions in postcolonial international studies have challenged the dyadic epistemological simplifications to which the subaltern as a figure of mystification have helped give rise. In the words of Martin Bayly (2022), critiques of the Eurocentrism of traditional approaches in the discipline have, in an impulse toward the recuperation of subaltern agency, ended up producing “a purely oppositional picture [which] risks obscuring those aspects of ‘non-European’ international thought that evade simple categorisation” (p. 1). Bayly’s work, as well as that of others (see Birkvad, 2020; Dilawri, in press; Thakur, 2021), has been pivotal in demonstrating the origins of power as not only emanating from the imperial center, but also from its peripheries. Further clarifying the stakes of what we call the politics of mystification, these scholars reveal how the figure of the subaltern ends up banalizing imperial relations, impairing our ability to comprehend both its origins and effects.