Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the use of Indian subaltern studies by African historiography furthers a de-essentialization of its representations. It focuses both on the issues raised by the engagement with subaltern studies and on how south-south exchanges confirm the role of Western academic centers.

Paper long abstract:

At the end of the 1990s the Senegalese historian Mamadou Diouf edited a seminal collection of texts written by prominent representatives of Indian subaltern studies. In the introduction Diouf discusses the ways how subaltern studies and their Gramscian theoretical framework can provide a constructive contribution to revisiting the terms of national histories in Africa. This leads him to address the underlying problem of coming to terms with grasping otherness within knowledge configurations that remain under the influence of a colonial scientific heritage. In this paper I seek to examine the value of Diouf's arguments both as such and by connecting them to the discussion they have raised in and outside of Africa. Considering this case as the expression of a geopolitics of knowledge, I stress how this example of theoretical exchanges within the global south has had little influence on the Indian academic world, while reenforcing the mediating role of North-American and European academic sites.