Write an essay on ""the small voice of history""
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This essay argues that Ranajit Guha's ‘The small voice of history’ and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things are defined by, and help define, the contemporary ‘historical-political conjuncture’ that locates the motors of social, disciplinary, and epistemological transformation in the inherently or potentially resistant properties of the oppressed subaltern subject. A comparative reading of two generically different cultural artifacts – a theoretical-critical essay and a novel – that addresses both overlaps and differences between them, this essay also addresses the larger body of cultural work through which this conjuncture is also constituted, particularly work which engages with the difficulties that accrue to the task of recuperating the consciousness/voice of the oppressed and their subjugated histories.
This essay had its inception in a series of discussions with students from my course on Anglophone Literatures of the Third World. In particular, I wish to acknowledge Olivia Ambrogio, Katherine Christiani, and Juliet Gorman, whose papers I have drawn upon for some of my analysis. Funding for research assistants, Dwaipayan Sen and Menna Demessie, was provided by a MacGregor-Oresman grant, Oberlin College. This essay has benefited from the comments made by participants in the Postcolonial Seminar run by Professors Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and Robert Young at Oxford University, where I presented an earlier draft of this essay as a talk. As, too, it has benefited from comments made by and Steven Volk, Michael Fisher, and Lawrence Needham on different drafts of this essay. I also want to express my appreciation to the anonymous reader whose comments have pushed me to explicitly acknowledge some hidden and/or repressed assumptions that inform this essay.