SPIVAK

SPIVAK

"Can the Subaltern Speak?

• Introduced a feminist agenda to postcolonial theory
• Key concept: ‘Subaltern’-> ‘men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat’
• Criticises double exploitation of women in postcolonial contexts
• Criticism of continuity of West as Subject

Epistemic violence: harm through discourse (colonial subject as Other)

• Through law among others, e.g., Macaulay’s ‘Minute on Indian education (1835):

‘We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.’

• In 1st world, oppressed may be able to speak, not usually the case for the subaltern

Contradictions among (and about) the subaltern:

• “The same class […] which was dominant in one area […] could be among the dominated in another” (79)
• “If in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.” (83)
• “[…] the subject of exploitation cannot know and speak the text of female exploitation even if the absurdity of the nonrepresenting intellectual making space for her to speak is achieved. The woman is doubly in shadow.” (84)

When we analyse a postcolonial text, we should bear in mind:

• History as narrative of truth (78)
• Woman as subaltern: manipulation of female agency (78) (e.g. sati)
• What is not said/cannot be said is important (81-82)
• The Third World is presented by the ethnocentric Subject through assimilation (87-88)

Spivak’s aim: “In seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman, the postcolonial intellectual systematically ‘unlearns’ female privilege. This systematic unlearning involves learning to critique postcolonial discourse with the best tools it can provide and not simply substituting the lost figure of the colonized. [In other words,] to question the unquestioned muting of the subaltern woman.” (91)

• Role of the postcolonial teacher:

“[…] the postcolonial teacher can help to develop this vigilance rather than continue pathetically to dramatize victimage or assert a spurious identity. She says ‘no’ to the ‘moral luck’ of the culture of imperialism while recognizing that she must inhabit it, indeed invest it, to criticize it.” (206)

• Neo-colonialism:

“Arguments from multiculturalism […] can work to obscure such separations [ethnic, gender and class prejudice] in the interests of the production of a neo-colonial discourse” (201)

Other important ideas in Spivak

QUOTATIONS

“Some of the most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject.” (66)

“The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.” (76)

“[In colonial times] an explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one.” (76)

“…the Indian case [for example] cannot be taken as representative of all countries, nations, cultures and the like that may be invoked as the Other of Europe as Self.” (76)

“The legitimation of the polymorphous structure of legal performance, ‘internally’ noncoherent and open at both ends, through a binary vision, is the narrative of codification I offer as an example of epistemic violence.The narrative of the stabilization and codification of Hindu law is less well known than the story of Indian education, so it might be well to start here. Consider the often-quoted programmatic lines from Macaulay’s infamous ‘Minute on Indian education’ (1835): 'We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.' The education of colonial subjects complements their production in law. One effect of establishing a version of the British system was the development of an uneasy separation between disciplinary formation and Sanskrit studies and the native, now alternative, tradition of Sanskrit ‘high culture’. Within the former, the cultural explanations generated by authoritative scholars matched the epistemic violence of the legal project.” (76)

“Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat. According to Foucault and Deleuze (in the First World, under the standardization and regimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem to recognize this) the oppressed, if given the chance ... can speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the following question: on the other side of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak?” (78)

“Antonio Gramsci’s work on the ‘subaltern classes’ extends the class-position/class-consciousness argument… This movement must be made to determine the production of history as narrative (of truth). … When I move, at the end of this essay, to the question of woman as subaltern, I will suggest that the possibility of collectivity itself is persistently foreclosed through the manipulation of female agency.” (78)

“The same class … which was dominant in one area… could be among the dominated in another. This could and did create many ambiguities and contradictions in attitudes and alliances, especially among the lowest strata of the rural gentry, impoverished landlords, rich peasants and upper-middle peasants all of whom belonged, ideally speaking, to the category of ‘people’ or ‘subaltern classes.’” (79-80)

“With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak? … Foucault is correct in suggesting that ‘to make visible the unseen can also mean a change of level, addressing oneself to a layer of material which had hitherto had no pertinence for history and which had not been recognized as having any moral, aesthetic or historical value.’ It is the slippage from rendering visible the mechanism to rendering vocal the individual, both avoiding ‘any kind of analysis of [the subject] whether psychological, psychoanalytical or linguistic’, that is consistently troublesome” (80-81)

“Pierre Macherey provides the following formula for the interpretation of ideology: ‘What is important in a work is what it does not say. … When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern, the notion of what the work cannot say becomes important.” (81-82)

“…both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. If in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.” (82-83)

“With so-called decolonization, the growth of multinational capital, and the relief of the administrative charge, ‘development’ does not now involve wholesale legislation and establishing educational systems in a comparable way. This impedes the growth of consumerism in the comprador countries. With modern telecommunications and the emergence of advanced capitalist economies at the two edges of Asia, maintaining the international division of labor serves to keep the supply of cheap labor in the comprador countries… While global recession has markedly slowed trade and investment worldwide since 1979, international subcontracting has boomed… In these cases, multinationals are freer to resist militant workers, revolutionary upheavals, and even economic downturns.” (83)

“On the other side of the international division of labor, the subject of exploitation cannot know and speak the text of female exploitation even if the absurdity of the nonrepresenting intellectual making space for her to speak is achieved. The woman is doubly in shadow.” (84)

“The question is how to keep the ethnocentric Subject from establishing itself by selectively defining an Other… For those of us who feel that the ‘subject’ has a history and that the task of the first-world subject of knowledge in our historical moment is to resist and critique ‘recognition’ of the Third World through ‘assimilation’, this specificity is crucial.” (87-88)

“…the European subject … seeks to produce an Other that would consolidate an inside, its own subject status.” (88)

“Derrida calls the ethnocentrism of the European science of writing in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a symptom of the general crisis of European consciousness. It is, of course, part of a greater symptom, or perhaps the crisis itself, the slow turn from feudalism to capitalism via the first waves of capitalist imperialism.” (89)

“Can the subaltern speak? What must the elite do to watch out for the continuing construction of the subaltern? The question of ‘woman’ seems most problematic in this context.” (90)

“In seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman, the postcolonial intellectual systematically ‘unlearns’ female privilege. This systematic unlearning involves learning to critique postcolonial discourse with the best tools it can provide and not simply substituting the lost figure of the colonized. [In other words,] to question the unquestioned muting of the subaltern woman.” (91)

“…imperialism establishes the universality of the mode of production narrative… to ignore the subaltern today is … to continue the imperialist project. … Imperialism’s image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind.” (94) For example the practice of sati, or ritual self-immolation of Hindu widows on the death husband’s pyre.

“It is in terms of this profound ideology of the displaced place of the female subject that the paradox of free choice comes into play… marked prevalence in eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Bengal. Certainly its prevalence there … was because in Bengal, unlike elsewhere in India, widows could inherit property. Thus, what the British see as poor victimized women going to the slaughter is in fact an ideological battleground. As P. V. Kane, the great historian of the Dharmasāstra, has correctly observed: ‘In Bengal, [the fact that] the widow of a sonless member even in a joint Hindu family is entitled to practically the same rights over joint family property which her deceased husband would have had … must have frequently induced the surviving members to get rid of the widow by appealing at a most distressing hour to her devotion to and love for her husband.’ Yet benevolent and enlightened males were and are sympathetic with the ‘courage’ of the woman’s free choice in the matter. They thus accept the production of the sexed subaltern subject.” (96)

“When the law was finally written [by the British Government in India] … the language celebrated the noble Hindu who was against the bad Hindu, the latter given to savage atrocities.” (97)

“Just as the general law for widows was unquestioned, so this act of female heroism persists among the patriotic tales told to children, thus operating on the crudest level of ideological reproduction. It has also played a tremendous role, precisely as an overdetermined signifier, in acting out Hindu communalism. Simultaneously, the broader question of the constitution of the sexed subject is hidden by foregrounding the visible violence of sati. The task of recovering a (sexually) subaltern subject is lost in an institutional textuality at the archaic origin.” (99)

“Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization.” (102)

“There is no space from which the sexed subaltern subject can speak.” (103)

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” (In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, 1994)