Founding Statement

The Founding Statement talks about the danger of filtering cultural hegemonies all the way across the political spectrum, from the elites themselves to the epistemologies and discourses of revolutionary movements looking to subvert their power in the name of the "people".
Even in the case of the Cuban Revolution, it was the "working masses" that was written about by the elite intellectuals who insisted on a unitary, class-based subject veiling "the disparity of blacks, Indians, Chicanos and women; alternative models of sexuality and of the body; alternative epistemologies and ontologies; the existence of who had not entered into the social pact with the (revolutionary) state". This basically sums up all those groups, and their perspectives, about whom we have studied in the course so far. Using the same lens for the Latin American case places a particular detactment with the subaltern that was not the case with the "Indian" subaltern.
The emergence of students in the political arena changes the dynamics in Latin America where the subaltern subject representated in the testimonial text becomes a part of the construction of the text itself. It seems as if the degree of marginalisation or subalternity within Latin American society in the second and third phase was less than South Asia. This comparison would be useful in gauging the state of scholarship on Subaltern studies in the two regions.