When Vinayak Chaturvedi’s Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial was first published by Verso in 2000, Stephen Slemon asked, “Why this anthology, and why now?” (Ariel, a review of International English Literature, 33.2 [2002]: 107). Revisiting these essays in 2015, in the handsome reissue from Verso (2012), I return to Slemon’s query, though perhaps from a slightly recalibrated position.

Chaturvedi’s selection of essays attempts to “ ‘map the terrain’ of the Subaltern Studies project of writings on South Asian history and society” (vii). To this end, the collection includes early essays by Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, David Arnold, and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar that articulate the concerns of writing Indian historiography “from below” and demonstrate the complex relationship (and continued dependence) of the subaltern studies collective on Gramsci’s theories of the subaltern classes and E. P. Thompson’s polemic, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Focus then shifts to explorations of subaltern subjectivity in articles by Rosalind O’Hanlon and C. A. Bayly, as well as the emergence of certain shifts and internal debates within the collective, exemplified by Tom Brass’s essay on peasant mobility in Latin America. These debates are captured in the exchange between Gyan Prakash, who argues persuasively for a post-Marxian, postmodernist shift in narrating subaltern histories, and Rosalind O’Hanlon and David Washbrook, who critique Prakash’s dependence on a Saidian frame of analysis and pithily demonstrate the pitfalls of applying deconstructionist methodologies to materialist histories. Further nuances of these larger issues are illuminated in essays by Sumit Sarkar, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gyanendra Pandey. The book concludes with Sarkar’s somewhat elegaic “The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies” (300) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s probing self-interview, “The New Subaltern: A Silent Interview” (324). Chaturvedi’s editorial selection (which only spans the period from 1982 to 1999) perfectly articulates the origins and significant debates of an intellectual tradition that has now become canonical in the field of postcolonial studies. A brief glance at syllabi in postcolonial studies or literature across North America confirms the foundational status of this book.

But it is precisely because this text bears canonical status that we should ask the question: What, or more importantly, who is served by this reprint? The answer seems simple enough: it is a text aimed at making this collection of arguments more readily accessible to current postcolonial scholarship, and it is for this reason that we should briefly address some of the more obvious gaps that appear when looking at this collection of essays as fragments of a whole.

The aim to map “subaltern studies and the postcolonial” that is set out in the title is ably met in relation to the first field, but hardly in relation to the second (unless we mean to assert that subaltern studies stands for the postcolonial). While Chaturvedi, and indeed all the intellectuals gathered in this volume, refer to subaltern studies as an effort to write revisionist “South Asian” histories, no effort is made to include any material outside Indian historiography. This significant gap—which is not so much a singular oversight on the part of this volume but a symptom of early mistranslations involved in the conceptualization of the subaltern studies collective and its rapid growth to canonical status within the Anglo-American academy (a phenomenon that roughly parallels the growth of area studies in America)—creates a slippage between Indian historiography and an idea of South Asia that still renders “other” South Asian histories silent. Most notable, however, is the absence mentioned in the conclusion of Spivak’s silent interview of an acknowledgment of “the binarity between history and fiction” (337).

While this paperback reissue of Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial will further cement the status of this text within the canon (even twelve years after its original publication), one hopes that a future edition will revise and expand the focus of this text to address some of its present gaps. To do so would be in the best practice of envisioning subaltern studies as a dialogue with pedagogy (to adapt Chakrabarty’s terms) that allows for a more resonant dialectic.