Without History ─ Subaltern Studies, the Zapatista Insurgency, and the Specter of History

"Truly outstanding and original. Rabasa provides a solid genealogy of indigenous thinking in dialogue with Western epistemes. He opens a universe of meaning for scholars interested in the ideological richness of the first confrontations between Europeans and Amerindians and explains the possibilities for the production of knowledge---all the way to the present, where history is still a terrain of struggle for contesting ideas and displaying the resiliency of subaltern epistemes."---Ileana Rodriguez, The Ohio State University

"This collection brings together Jose Rabasa's groundbreaking essays on the EZLN and Tepoztlan as exemplary instances of subaltern discourse and struggle. Drawing on Marx, Gramsci, and contemporary subaltern theory, Rabasa argues for a conceptualization of the indigenous as outside history, capital, and the state. This book is obligatory reading for those concerned with critical theory and Latin American cultural studies."---Cynthia Steele, University of Washington

Jose Rabasa's Without History offers new interpretations of the meaning of history from indigenous perspectives. He develops the concept of a communal temporality that exists within the individual, community, and culture as a living knowledge that links both past and present. In this vein, Rabasa recalls the works of Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and contemporary south Asian subalternists Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others. He incorporates their conceptions of communality, insurgency, resistance to hegemonic governments, and the creation of autonomous spaces as strategies employed by indigenous groups around the globe, but he goes further in defining these strategies as millennial and deeply rooted in Mesoamerican antiquity. For Rabasa, these methods and the continuum of indigenous consciousness are evidenced in presentday events such as the Zapatista insurrection in Mexico.

Jose Rabasa teaches in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He is the author of Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism and Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest.