The Dictionary of Human Geography

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gender,caste, untouchability, charges of bias

towards the Bengali intelligentsia,law,vio-

lence, literary and oral traditions,diaspora

and South India. The collective is now more

intellectually eclectic than ever: it continues to

be read and responded to from across the

world, with a breadth of readership rare for a

school of thought emerging from thesouth.

To be sure, this is partly a consequence of the

visibility of key diasporic Indian intellectuals.

Subaltern studies has breathed new life into

debates over colonialgovernmentality, post-

colonial nationalism, representation and

popular histories of the present (seecoloni-

alism;post-colonialism). As one instance of

reception, Frederick Cooper (1994) argues

against the idea of an abstract, generalized,

binarist colonial rationality and for a dynamic

conception of subalternity that ‘put[s] the pro-

cess of making history into the picture’

(p. 1516). The persisting question is whether

the collective remains engaged with subalterns

in the noun form used by Gramsci, while also

developing more sophisticated tools for

engaging subaltern as an adjective, as in ‘sub-

altern power/knowledge’. The interaction

between the first two phases of the collective

remains a useful and potentially radical device

in understanding spatially layered politics

today in the shadows of twentieth-century

empiresand nationalisms, and their twenty-

first-century successors. sc

subject/subjectivity This grounds our

understanding of who we are, as well as our

knowledge claims. Allgeographypresumes

some notion of subjectivity: even ‘objective’

spatial sciencerests on a theory of subjectiv-

ity as a foundation for ‘objective’ knowledge.

But different theories of the subject provoke

different geographical narratives (and vice

versa).marxismassumptions about the cen-

trality ofclassto subjectivity have prompted

studies of geographies of labour organization,

as well as homeownership, residentialsegre-

gationand suburbanization, many of the lat-

ter aimed at understanding the dissolution of

class consciousness in Anglo-American coun-

tries in the twentieth century. humanistic

geography, with its emphasis on the ethical

responsibility for human agency and the full-

ness of human experience beyond economic

calculation, invites studies of the social con-

struction of meanings in differentlandscapes,

and the inauthenticity/authenticity of particu-

lar landscapes. Until recently, much ofsocial

geographyinvolved locating stable, coher-

ently formed identities (such asethnicityor

race) in particularplaces. This was the expli-

cit objective of social area analysis. The

influences of identity politics and post-

structuralismfrom the mid-1980s led geog-

raphers to be attentive to a wider range of

identifications (e.g.disability;gender;sexu-

ality) and problems of overgeneralization.

Withinfeminist geographies, for example,

there is now more sensitivity to how the

experiences of different groups of women vary,

within and across space. From the perspective

of post-structural theories of the subject, this

focus on multiplicity is not enough; identity

politics (which receives credit – or takes the

blame – for the proliferation of politicized

identifications through the 1980s and 1990s)

has been criticized for taking the fact and sta-

bility of identities for granted, and for failing to

problematize the processes through which

identities are created and differentiated (see

recognition). The subject is even more fully

de-centred inactor-network theory, with

the emphasis on the agency of non-human

actants and ‘a distributed and always provi-

sional personhood’ (Thrift, 2000a, p. 214).

Criticizing actor-network theory for an

account of subjectivity that flattens human

powers of imagination and processes that

are not readily reducible to an object

world, Thrift (2000a) has articulated anon-

representational style of thinking that

focuses not on individual agents, but on ‘a

poetic of commonpractices and skills’ (p. 216,

original emphasis) in which ‘persons become,

in effect, rather ill-defined constellations rat-

tling around in the world’ (p. 220). A very

different rendering of the subject throughpsy-

choanaltic theoryhas also received more

attention since the mid-1990s, in what some

have labelled the ‘psychoanalytical turn’ in

geography (Philo and Parr, 2003). Callard

(2003) has argued, however, that geographers

have tended to assimilate psychoanalysis as yet

another version ofsocial constructionto a

disciplinary culture that values agency,resist-

anceand liberatory cultural politics, and have

missed what is most valuable and distinctive

about psychoanalytic theory; namely, a theory

ofthe ‘intractabilityof the unconscious and its

imperviousness to political goadings, and the

anarchic and implacable movement of the

drives’ (p. 300).

Debates about the human subject are vast;

they lie at the heart of twentieth-century

Westernphilosophy. They are, then, difficult

to summarize (for one attempt, see Pile and

Thrift, 1995). One organizational device is

to distinguish between humanist and

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SUBJECT/SUBJECTIVITY