The Subaltern and the State.

Resumo

Some years ago Ileana Rodríguez posed bluntly what she felt was at stake in subaltern studies as follows: “[O]ur choice as intellectuals is to make a declaration either in support of statism (the nation-state and party politics) or on behalf of the subaltern. We chose the subaltern.”3 I will argue that this way of looking at the relation between the subaltern and the state (which is broadly characteristic of postmodernist social theory generally)  is too one-sided, and that we are in need of a new paradigm. To be more concrete, what happens when, as has been the case in recent years with many of the governments of the marea rosada in Latin America, subaltern or, to use the expression more in favor today,