Approaching subalternity from a broad Gramscian angle, this edited collection contributes to the understanding of popular politics in parliamentary, autocratic, and colonial contexts.

Karen Lauwers is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. She has a broad interest in parliamentary culture, colonial history, intersectional identities, and narratives of inclusion and exclusion. She is the author of Ordinary Citizens and the French Third Republic (2022).

Sami Suodenjoki is a senior researcher working in the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences at Tampere University. He specializes in popular politics and the interaction between citizens and the state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Marnix Beyen is a full professor and a member of Power in History - Center for Political History at the University of Antwerp. His research deals primarily with the historical, scientific, and literary representation of nations, and the history of parliamentary culture in Western Europe.

Introduction: Subaltern Political Subjectivities Part 1: Subaltern Political Participation in an Autocratic Context 1. Voice of the People: The Politics of Petitioning in Modern Latin American History 2. Letters to the Caudillo: Petitions in Miserable Times, 1936-1945 3. Finding Subjectivities in Fascist Italy: "Mothers of the Fallen" between Symbolic and Experienced Political Participation Part 2: Subaltern Political Communication in the Context of (proto-)Democratic Representation 4. The Municipal Assembly as a Scene of Local Democracy and Subaltern Political Experiences in Finland, 1865-1917 5. At the Crossroads of Local and National Representation: Peasant Petitions to the Diet of Finland in the 1860s and 1870s 6. Outsiders? "Democratic Patronage" and the Subalterns in France, c.1875-c.1935 7. "Reading the newspaper made me believe that...": Sources and Uses of Political Knowledge in the Liminal Space between Subaltern and Elite Politics. Paris, 1894-1920 8. How to Bridge the Gap? The Issue of Popular Political Engagement in the Netherlands, c.1945-1965 Part 3: Spiritualization of Politics in Embodied Subaltern Narratives 9. From Subaltern Experience to Political Tradition: Telling and Knowing Revolutionary Martyrs in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, 1848-1860 10. Nonsense and the Senses: French Sources of Knowledge in Colonial Algeria, 1846-1871 11. Subaltern Caste Concepts of the "Political": Bengal, 1900-1930