Can There Be a Subaltern Middle Class? Notes on African American
and Dalit History The history of the middle-class idea has been
elaborated for the most part in the light of the western
European and North American experience — the “classical” cases,
as they say.1 This essay asks whether the burdens and
expectations of the middle classes have been qualitatively
different in the Asian and African colonies of Europe, and in
postcolonial societies generally, once middling strata in these
societies come to be recognized as a distinct entity, with the
historically assigned task of carrying their people into
modernity and a regime of human rights and equal opportunity. It
then analyzes the particular political and psychological
challenges that come with the emergence of an ex-slave or
exuntouchable middle class, such as the “black bourgeoisie” in
the United States or the dalit (ex-untouchable) elite in India.2
In the following pages I trace the idea of the middle class or
“middle-classness” as it travels, and mutate