Subaltern space is not covered by the colonization-decolonization reversal.

Evidence

Especially in cultural critique, the event of political independence can be automatically assumed to stand in between colony and decolonization as an unexamined good that operates a reversal. As I am insisting, the new nation is run by a regulative logic derived from a reversal of the old colony from within the cited episteme of the postcolonial subject: secularism, democracy, socialism, national identity, capitalist development. There is however a space that did not share in the energy of this reversal, a space that had no firmly established agency of traffic with the culture of imperialism. Paradoxically, this space is also outside of organized labor, below the attempted reversals of capital logic. Conventionally, this space is described as the habitat of the swbproletariat or the subaltern. Mahasweta’s fiction suggests that this is the space of the displacement of the colonization-decolonization reversal. This is the space that can become, for her, a dystopic representation of decolonization as such. In this context, “decolonization” becomes only a convenient and misleading word, used because no other can be found. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1294

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the subaltern as that space which did not share in the reversal energy of postcolonialism — the limit case where strategic claims find their outside.
• XREF: Connects to Spivak’s famous earlier position that the subaltern cannot speak — here refined as the subaltern space where decolonization itself becomes a misleading word.