{"id":528,"date":"2012-04-14T14:32:29","date_gmt":"2012-04-14T21:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=528"},"modified":"2012-04-14T14:32:29","modified_gmt":"2012-04-14T21:32:29","slug":"podthoughts-the-subaltern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=528","title":{"rendered":"Podthoughts: The Subaltern"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/assets.podomatic.net\/mymedia\/thumb\/1688322\/460%3E_5696673.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" \/><\/center><br \/>\n<strong>Vital stats:<\/strong><br \/>\nFormat: one young writer interviewing others<br \/>\nEpisode duration: 30-50m<br \/>\nFrequency: weekly, in series of ten episodes<\/p>\n<p>If you\u2019ve passed through an institution of higher learning in the last twenty years, you twitch, almost imperceptibly, when you hear a word like \u201csubaltern.\u201d You do the same when upon hearing the terms \u201chegemony,\u201d \u201crearticulation,\u201d or \u201c(dis)loc[a\/u]tion.\u201d You twitch because you remember feeling plunged into insoluble confusion, right where you sat in the lecture hall: you didn\u2019t know whether to believe your professor was feeding you these whole verbal grapefruits in the good-faith service of important points, or whether they were just screwing with you. Maybe, as certain high-profile academics argue, their complicated arguments could only find honest expression in a vocabulary whose very comprehension demanded a mental struggle. But maybe, having themselves started out as wide-eyed undergraduates with an unquenchable love for novels or a pang in their hearts over the world\u2019s injustices, these professors ultimately found themselves marooned in an academic hellscape of fear, insecurity, and obfuscatory self-justification. Maybe they knew only one way to rattle the bars of their cage: to make you share their painful bewilderment.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine my relief, then, to find that <a href=\"http:\/\/thesubaltern.podomatic.com\"><em>The Subaltern Podcast<\/em><\/a> [<a href=\"http:\/\/thesubaltern.podomatic.com\/rss2.xml\">RSS<\/a>] [<a href=\"http:\/\/assets.podomatic.com\/images\/subscribe_with_itunes.gif\">iTunes<\/a>] comes not from a haunted-eyed lecturer but from a <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/#!\/nikeshshukla\">hard-tweeting<\/a> novelist. This novelist, a certain Nikesh Shukla, seems to have written a book called Coconut Unlimited, about some young British Indians who form a collectively inept hip-hop trio. I would like to read this book, just as I would like to read the many hundreds of other books that new writers all over the Anglosphere (and, in translation, beyond) are putting out as we speak. But how to choose where to begin? Even the most dedicated readers suffer under the burden of many, many thousands of exciting novels they could never hope to live long enough to crack, and that doesn\u2019t even include the countless undoubtedly brilliant ones to be published over the rest of their lifetimes. This problem surely weighs even heavier on Shukla and his <em>Subaltern<\/em> interviewees, all reasonably young writers who must compete against every novel ever written for vanishingly scarce readerly attention.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the whole thing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.maximumfun.org\/2012\/04\/14\/podthoughts-colin-marshall-subaltern-podcast\">at maximumfun.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Vital stats: Format: one young writer interviewing others Episode duration: 30-50m Frequency: weekly, in series of ten episodes If you\u2019ve passed through an institution of higher learning in the last twenty years, you twitch, almost imperceptibly, when you hear a word like \u201csubaltern.\u201d You do the same when upon hearing the terms \u201chegemony,\u201d \u201crearticulation,\u201d or [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-podthoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=528"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":530,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528\/revisions\/530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}