austraLasia 1037
Is it a Salesian word? If not then it ought to
be!
TURIN/DELHI: 11th February 2005 -- When you
first see it you might, if that was your upbringing, think of Rudyard Kipling's
short story Only a Subaltern. This will at least place you in
India. We will return there, but only after a detour to Turin, where you
just cannot wander around the city without coming across, in almost equal
measure, a Via(le) Gramsci and a Via(le) Don Bosco, a primary or middle school
Gramsci and a primary or middle school Don Bosco, a Gramsci Library, a Don Bosco
Library....
But is it a Salesian word, I ask?
What word? Subaltern!
In terms of its frequency of use in
Salesian discourse, possibly not. Several recorded hits, all from the same
tome, a compilation by BOSCOM-India (there, I've brought you back to India)
titled 'Shepherds' for an Information Age, an excellent manual on Media
and Social Communications edited by Fr Peter Gonsalves, currently Web
Coordinator of www.sdb.org in
Rome.
Time, then, to tie together the weird
linkages between Turin, a certain Gramsci, Don Bosco and India and hoist
subaltern a little higher in the Salesian lexical can(n)on - there's a pun
in there if you check out the meaning of petard, which hoist normally
calls for!
At the beginnings of the 20th Century,
Antonio Gramsci, a Sardinian, won a scholarship to the University of
Turin. Leaving everything else aside, he was a rabid left-leaning
socialist who bent many of the dispossessed FIAT workers in the direction of
Moscow rather than Rome, where more right-wing moves were afoot. But
his international claim to fame centres on the Italian word
subalterno which he re-appropriated from military use (a rank below
that of Captain) to apply to workers - he had FIAT workers in mind originally -
who belonged, he said, to the subaltern classes, those who could
not speak, could not organise themselves, who were economically
dispossessed and just plainly marginalised. Since many would have been
ex-Oratorians, the Salesian connection is not as tenuous as it
seems.
It was not until the 1980's that this
re-appropriated meaning really took off in English, and the University of Delhi
was where it happened. It came along at just the right time to express
Indian post-colonial social historiography and was made famous (again) by an
outsider, a third world woman, in her own understanding, but with academic
privilege - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who wrote Can the Subaltern
Speak?
It is from that point that Subaltern
Studies spread, and spread wide and fast and respectably, to Ireland, to Latin
America, further North still to Canada, and throughout South Asia.
Communications theory took it up, so did linguistics and subaltern
communication (subaltern discourse contrasting with dominant discourse) is
on any decent linguistics and/or communications programme at tertiary
level these days.
Somehow, I think that the appropriation of
subaltern into Salesian discourse is excellent, and a possible way of
re-reading Don Bosco's conversation with the dispossessed young lower classes of
Turin, and subsequent Salesian communication with subaltern groups anywhere;
maybe subaltern is as good as you'll get for a 21st century gloss
of poor and abandoned.
You will find this, and much more, in a
revised second update of Salesian Thesaurus and Translator's Glossary on the
homepage of www.bosconet.aust.com ,
just under Don Bosco himself! Download it now in zip form.
________________________
AustraLasia is an email service for the Salesian
Family of Asia Pacific. It also functions as an agency for ANS based
in Rome. Try also www.bosconet.aust.com and Lexisdb
