Discursive Subalternity

The subaltern, in the postcolonial tradition from which Arturo Escobar draws, is not simply the person who is economically disadvantaged. The subaltern is the person whose exclusion from the discourse of power is organized by the discourse itself. Discursive subalternity is not imposed through censorship or prohibition; it is the structural effect of conventions so deeply internalized that they constitute the conditions of possibility for the institution's work. The development planner who writes a report about rural poverty does not intend to silence the farmers whose lives the report describes. The planner writes within a genre that does not include the farmers' voice because the genre was designed to convey expert knowledge to institutional decision-makers, and within the genre's conventions the farmer is an object of study rather than a subject of analysis. The conventions are invisible because they are the water in which the planner swims. The most consequential application of this concept in the AI