This book explores changing modes of enfranchisement and disenfranchisement, and the historical struggles over them, in India and the United States. Initiating a conversation across very different world areas, this book stimulates new conversations about each region, and beyond both.

1. Introduction: The subaltern as subaltern citizen Gyanendra PandeyPart 1: Equal but Separate? 2. Can there be a subaltern middle class? Gyanendra Pandey 3. Race, power, and multipositionality: Examples from the lives of black schoolteachers Earl Lewis 4. Recasting the women's question: the girl-child/woman in the colonial encounter Ruby Lal 5. Casual sex: towards a "prehistory" of gay life in Bohemian America Colin R. JohnsonPart 2: Writing the Subaltern 6. The question of a pre-history Milind Wakankar 7. Writing ordinary lives M.S.S. Pandian 8. Subaltern city, subaltern citizens: New Orleans, urban identity, and people of African descent Leslie Harris 9. Culture/Politics: the double bind of the Indian adivasi Prathama BanerjeePart 3: The State and the People 10. Subordination, governance and the legislative state in early colonial India Sudipta Sen 11. Subaltern immigrants: Undocumented workers and national belonging in the United States Mary Odem 12. Could slaves enfranchise themselves? Rumours, narratives, and arenas of politics in the American South Steven Hahn 13. Democracy and subaltern citizens in India Partha Chatterjee 14. Afterword Jonathan Prude

Gyanendra Pandey is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of History, Emory University. A founding member of the Subaltern Studies collective and editor of the Intersections: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories book series at Routledge, he is one of the leading theorists and originators of the subaltern studies approach and has published widely in the field of colonial and postcolonial studies.