Subaltern storytelling
Decolonising communications, the hope-based way
Too often, the stories we tell speak about the people we want to help, instead of with them. Subaltern Studies, a field of post-colonial theory that looks at how the most marginalized people are silenced even in liberation movements, can help us avoid that trap.
Anyone who cares about truly decolonising should learn about Subaltern Studies.
This is a conversation starter. Let me know what you think! Next week, I will write a follow-up piece explaining how the Andor - the best Star Wars story ever - succeeds by embracing these principles subaltern storytelling!
What is the opposite of colonialism?
If we want to truly decolonise our societies, we must articulate some sense how we will all live in the future we want to see happen.
The lesson I most remember from university is our professor of post-colonial theory asking us: “If you are anti-colonial, are you in fact reinforcing colonialism by defining yourself by it?”
Little did I know that 20 years later my entire career would be built around the idea that - in the words of Anat Shenker-Osorio - ‘what you fight, you feed’.
So in hope-based workshops, we ask people: “what we are for, when we against colonialism?” As in, how do we describe what it means to be anti-colonial, to decolonise, or to live in a post-colonial state?
As with capitalism, racism and authoritarianism, if we want to replace colonialism, we have to be able to name what we want instead, and then cultivate it.
"What do you do with your revolution once you've got it?"
Postcolonial theory explains how societies liberated from colonial domination often formed new forms of oppression that mirrored or reproduced the same institutions or forms of power. This was very much the experience of independent Ireland: one of the first countries colonised, and the first to experience post-colonialism, where everyday Irish people went from being oppressed by the British to being oppressed by the church.
The lesson: to actually get past colonialism, you need to come up with a whole new way of operating. If you do, you can already start to “feed it” in times of oppression, as a form of resistance.
How do we do that? By hearing new visions from new voices.
What you need to know about Subaltern Studies
Subaltern Studies is a field of postcolonial scholarship that highlights how the voices of the oppressed people - especially rural, colonized communities - are often silenced by those trying to help them.
The subaltern is the person whose story is told for them, not only by the coloniser but also by anti-colonial liberation movements.
Both speak on behalf of the subaltern, rather than truly empowering them. The key is that neither side believes the subaltern has agency to free themselves, so someone has to do it for them.
Speaking over the subaltern is bad for social change, not only because reproduces the oppression, but also because it leads us to miss potential pathways for liberation. Because the crucial lesson of subaltern studies is that the oppressed have more agency than dominant narratives would have us believe.
Are we truly listening? Why subaltern studies matters for activism
Subaltern Studies warns us to avoid reproducing hegemony by the way we document it, and makes us aware of the limits of our perspectives. It shows the limits of power, highlighting how the least powerful in society actually resisted colonialism, which “never achieved hegemony over the mind”.
The most recent Subaltern Studies warn academics to not to “descriptively reproduce” the status quo, but rather find pathways away from it. I would extend this advice to activists.
Instead of “describing rather than transforming the world” and “thinking in terms of lament” it calls on us to “enunciate to the world the potential it already has”.
We in social change also tend to speak for the subaltern: the “suffering subject” of our stories, victim of injustice but lacking agency to confront it without our intervention.
How post-colonial states reproduce colonialism
In post-colonialism, the coloniser is replaced, but colonial forms of power remain: they are nationalised, not replaced. Colonial power is about how we think, and delegitimising forms of knowledge that don’t fit the coloniser’s narrative.
One form of repression is replaced by another. We see this in many forms, from Victorian-era, anti-LGBT laws to criminalising the LGBTQ+ community to communities moved off their land in the name of economic development, as well conflict based on racial lines drawn by the coloniser (recommend the novel House of Stone by Novuyo Tshuma for an illustration of this phenomenon).
Signs of colonial thinking
How do you avoid reproducing or reinforcing the power you are trying to dismantle?
To truly decolonise, we have to be ever conscious of the colonial mindset and train ourselves to replace it with something else.
Using knowledge as power → Colonial powers transformed disciplines like geography, anthropology, and linguistics into tools of domination: turning people into objects of study rather than subjects of their own story. This framed the colonised as less human, less rational, and less capable, justifying control in the name of “progress.”
Thinking in categories → Colonial thinking sorts people into racial and other categories. This mindset persists anytime we label people as cases, identities, or issues instead of seeing them as multi-faceted human beings.
Operating with certainty → Colonialism was built on the assumption of superiority and correctness. A decolonised mindset requires letting go of the need to be right and entering into dialogue with the willingness to be changed.
Recognizing Subaltern resistance
A history purely focused on the power of the colonizer risks missing the ways that marginalized groups wielded agency and autonomy that the colonizer could neither control nor understand. When we do this, we add to the narrative of colonial superiority.
Colonial power was built on defining modernity and progress, so that everything that didn’t fit was backward and needed to be saved or fixed.
Subaltern studies unearths the ways that colonial power, often something constructed through narratives and symbols, came up against limits in its efforts to transform the societies it controlled through military brutality and economic coercion.
The point is to recognize the agency that exists in communities, which states cannot control.
Potential principles for subaltern storytelling
Here are four questions we can ask ourselves to tell stories in a way that doesn’t reproduce colonial dynamics, but instead cultivate genuine transformation:
Q1. Are we speaking with people? (instead of for them)
"The subaltern cannot speak," Spivak reminds us—but perhaps they can be heard, if we stop speaking over them.
Colonial and even postcolonial narratives tell stories on behalf of the oppressed to advance a political project. The subaltern, by definition, is the person spoken about but rarely listened to.
To counter this, a subaltern narrative must be co-created, not narrated from above. This means creating narrative processes that prioritize listening and reciprocity, not just representation. It means seeing narrative as something we do together, not something we broadcast.
Practice → Ask yourself, whose voice shaped this message? Who’s listening, and who’s being heard? Are you ready for the conversation you have to change your own mind and being, not just persuade the other?
Q2. Are we revealing and nurturing already-existing alternatives? (instead of building over them)
“New narratives” already exist—we just haven’t been trained to see or value them.
The colonizer’s greatest trick is to claim that the dominant system is the only one that exists—or ever could. Subaltern studies teaches us that subaltern agency often exists in forms the dominant system can’t recognize: in religious rituals, everyday practices, and forms of knowledge dismissed as folklore or irrationality.
Subaltern Studies preaches “Learning to learn from below” to recover and reclaim dormant ways of thinking. Subaltern storytelling should helps us notice and nourish what’s already growing beneath or alongside dominant systems.
I love George Lakoff’s advice for this:
“Reframing is a matter of accessing what we and like-minded others already believe unconsciously, making it conscious, and repeating it till it enters normal public discourse.”
In this spirit, hope-based workshops have become deeply focused on that process of accessing our subconscious beliefs. We have found that it is something that you cannot do alone, but through a process of dialogue with others.
Practice → are we seeking to transform and replace what we have → or to engage with and grow something that is already there?
Q3. Are we ready to be changed by our own communication? (rather than just changing others)
Are we communicating solely to convey information or for social interaction? We can avoid this by ensuring we are open and curious in every encounter: that we are ready to be changed, persuaded, mobilised by the other. By seeing story not as content to extract but as a space for mutual transformation.
We should enter every conversation with the assumption that any voice has value and can change our perception of our world. In hope-based workshops we invite participants to articulate their vision and values, because we believe the narratives we need already lie inside people, and are waiting to be made conscious.
Mutual solidarity only exists were both sides gain from the encounter.
Practice → In your communications, are you open to being changed by the people you speak with? Or are you just looking to “get the message out”?
Q4. Are we communicating with our action? (not just our words?)
The essence of solidarity is not something we can “know” - it is something we have to practice.
As Krizna Gomez - a human rights lawyer turned foresight practitioner and systems change strategist - says, we cannot rely on “magic words” to change the narratives. Instead, we have to be the narrative: the things we do create narratives.
Practice → What does it look like to act on your values?
Q5. Are we cultivating multiplicity? (rather than trying to fix and cement unique perspectives)
In political debate, we often hold our opinions in a tightly gripped fist rather than an open palm. How firmly are we gripping onto our point of view, is there space for other perspectives to enrich our current thinking?
Colonialism thrives on fixed categories and identities. If we want something different, we have to train our own ability to think more fluidly, especially by embracing multi-group identities.
Instead of capturing a narrative through a process and freezing it in a pdf, we find the narrative in interconnection and encounter.
In this approach, narrative is not something we fixed that emerges from one round of research, but a fluid mosaic of conversations and stories that is constantly evolving.
Practice → Does your process align with your (deep) values? → does the way you are carrying out your work reflect the way of being you hope to see in the world.
Can the subaltern tweet? Collective storytelling
Subaltern storytelling is not just a necessary way to decolonise our communication, it is simply good communication strategy in today’s media eco-system. Why?
First, because communication that simply raises awareness through mainstream media gets drowned out, or undermined by confirmation bias and what-aboutery.
Second, we are all influencers. For social change this means we have more communication tools than ever to elevate and amplify voices that were not heard before.
Artwork: Mark Wang for OBI x Fine Acts Third, this can only happen if we do it strategically. Stories do not go viral by accident: it takes concerted effort. We need to engage in collective storytelling that allows the subaltern to assert their identity and agency, to share their vision and values with us, so that maybe we integrate it into our own.
Fourth, and crucially, we learn attitudes and behaviour from the stories we see. This means that we can build an alternative to colonialism, but only if we can see other ways of thinking, speaking and being. This is the key lesson of subaltern studies - that the rest of us actually need the subaltern to free us from our colonial mindset!
Nobody can make narrative alone, it’s about putting all our stories together.
What you can do: Fix your prefix!
Try to track your own use of prefixes. When you find yourself using words with prepositions like “anti-” or “post-”, ask yourself what new vocabulary you might use to define your message by the new thing you want, rather than the old thing. Can we describe what we want without using words that are only a negation?
If someone is anti-capitalist, what are they pro-?
What does it mean to be de-colonial or post-colonial? Once we are decolonised, what are we? What words describe what it is like to live in decoloniality?
If society became more anti-racist, what would it be like?
If we want people to move beyond the dichotomy between global north and south, what new identities would need to be activated?
It is precisely because these causes are so important that we need a better vocabulary to describe what life would be like if they succeeded.
It is precisely because this is hard work that fields like Subaltern Studies end up using such difficult language! But once we arrive at an understanding of what we want, good communication can take new concepts and make them feel familiar and understandable.
Read more about subaltern studies
A few starting points for anyone who wants to dive deeper into subaltern studies:
Subaltern Studies 2.0 - calls for “multi-being communities”
Ranajit Guha - documenting subaltern resistance showing how the British Empire and local elites never achieved hegemony over the mind.
Gayatri Spivak - shows how academic fields can become instruments of power and shows how to “learn to listen from below”. See esp her Amnesty International lecture Righting Wrongs.
Partha Chatterjee - who shows how community is the site of struggle, solidarity and empowerment; and how aspirations for a better life can be expressed through religious life and practice, in a way that we in secular social change movements might miss.
Mahmood Mamdani - who talks about postcolonial states that reversed colonialism, but did not supersede it, leaving the underlying power dynamics in place, or expressing them in new forms.
Bernard S. Cohn - showed how the colonial project functioned through "investigative modalities", which today are known as fact-finding: such as historiography; observation/travel; surveys; statistics; museology; surveillance. These 'forms of knowledge' produced usable knowledge for the implementation of colonial projects, and for its justification as a rational project.
3 novels to read to experience subalternity
The postcolonial condition has been best expressed through literature. Here are three novels I would recommend:
Earl Lovelace - Is Just a Movie
Kiran Desai - The Inheritance of Loss
Amitav Ghosh - The Hungry Tide
Rosario Castellanos - The Book of Lamentations
Abu Bakr Khaal - African Titanics
Ousmane Sembene - Les Bouts de bois de Dieu
What novels would you consider examples of "listening from below”?
What’s making us hopeful
Listen to the Land Speak by Manchán Magan - in which an Irish writer explores traces of pre-colonial Irish culture by trying to understand what land and nature are communicating to us still.
The best “opposite” of colonialism I have heard is “indigeneity”, suggested by Marquez Rhyne from Reframe. This book offers a glimpse of what indigeneity in a European country might look like.
Quote of the week
“The individual shall flourish through community—in relation with others…As feminists once called for wages for housework, we shall first demand wages for animals and plants who labor and create value for us. And then we shall replace the wage form altogether by an abundance where our communities will freely give what we require for being. Political education will replace advertising…
Humans will seek to understand animal polities with increased sensitivity and attune their decision making to the desires and welfare of animals. Scientific research will be directed toward establishing better communication between human and animal democracies. Humans will co-create vegetal polities with plants, with plant well-being codetermining public policy.
Each being shall find their roots in another; each community shall work in solidarity with others.
Each shall become a world for another.”
A manifesto I can get behind. From Subaltern Studies 2.0 - Milinda Banerjee & Jelle J. P. Wouters
We see glimpses of subaltern storytelling even in pop culture: next week I will do a follow-up post on the Star Wars series Andor as an example of Subaltern Storytelling. Andor gives narrative space to the ordinary people and collective power that make resistance possible (instead of heroes on their own journey).
Great piece - think of the potential that could be unlocked if much of the energy used in top-down narratives and storytelling shifted to subaltern storytelling. Thanks for sharing.
This is fascinating!! Thanks so much for sharing Thomas :)