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 * Full citation? **

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the subaltern speak?." (1988).


 * Where are the author/s located, what are their backgrounds and what kinds of expertise do they have? **

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a Indian literary theorist and philosopher and works as a Professor at Columbia University. She is often cited as the founder of postcolonial studies but is also acclaimed for her translation of Jacques Derrida's //Of Grammatology// to English.


 * List of at least three details or examples from the text that point to something important about culture, education and/or the challenge of environmental sustainability in the United States. **


 * What three quotes capture the critical import of the text? (3 critical in bold) **

Ignoring the international division of labor; rendering ‘Asia’ (and on occasion ‘Africa’) transparent (unless the subject is ostensibly the ‘Third World’); reestablishing the legal subject of socialized capital – these are the problems as common to much poststructuralist as to structuralist theory. Why should such occlusions be sanctioned in precisely those intellectuals who are our best prophets of heterogeneity and the Other? (67)

The unrecognized contradiction within a position that valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being so uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual, is maintained by a verbal slippage. (69)

The banality of leftist intellectuals’ lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent. (70)


 * In the Foucault-Deleuze conversation, the issue seems to be that there is no representation, no signifier (Is it to be presumed that the signifier has already been dispatched? There is, then, no sign-structure operating experience, and thus might one lay semiotics to rest?); theory is a relay of practice (thus laying problems of theoretical practice to rest) and the oppressed can know and speak for themselves. This reintroduces the constitutive subject on at least two levels: the Subject of desire and power as an irreducible methodological presupposition; and the self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of the oppressed. Further, the intellectuals, who are neither of the S/subjects, become transparent in the relay race, for they merely report on the nonrepresented subject and analyze (without analyzing) the workings of (the unnamed Subject irreducibly presupposed by) power and desire. (74)**

In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to put the economic ‘under erasure’, to see the economic factors as irreducibly as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased, however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified. (75)


 * I have argued that, in the Foucault-Deleuze conversation, a postrepresentationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda. In subaltern studies, because of the violence of imperialist epistemic, social and disciplinary inscription, a project understood in essentialist terms must traffic in a radical textual practice of differences. The object of the group’s investigation, in the case not even of the people as such but of the floating buffer zone of the regional elite-subaltern is a //deviation// from an //ideal// – the people or subaltern – which is itself defined as a difference from the elite. It is toward this structure that the research is oriented, a predicament rather different from the self-diagnosed transparency of the first-world radical intellectual. What taxonomy can fix such a space? Whether or not they themselves perceive it – in fact Guha sees his definition of ‘the people’ within the master – slave dialectic – their text articulates the difficult task of rewriting its own conditions of impossibility as the conditions of its possibility. (80)**


 * When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern the notion of what the work //cannot// say becomes important. In the semioses of the social text, elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of ‘the utterance’. The sender – ‘the peasant’ – is marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness. As for the receiver, we must ask who is ‘the real receiver’ of an ‘insurgency’? The historian, transforming ‘insurgency’ into ‘text for knowledge’, is only one ‘receiver’ of an collectively intended social act. With no possibility of nostalgia for that lost origin, the historian must suspend (as far as possible) the clamor of his or her own consciousness (our consciousness-effect, as operated by disciplinary training), so that the elaboration of the insurgency, packaged with an insurgent-consciousness, does not freeze into an ‘object of investigation’, or, worse yet, a model for imitation. ‘The subject’ implied by the texts of insurgency can only serve as a counterpossibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial subject in the dominant groups. The postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss. In this they are a paradigm of the intellectuals. (82)**

It is within the context of this ethnocentrism that [Derrida] tries so desperately to demote the Subject of thinking or knowledge as to say that ‘//thought// is ... the blank part of the text’ (OG, p. 93); that which is thought is, if blank, still //in the text// and must be consigned to the Other of history. That inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text is what a postcolonial critic of imperialism would like to see developed within the European enclosure as //the// place of the production of theory. The postcolonial critics and intellectuals can attempt to displace their own production only by presupposing that //text-inscribed// blankness. To render thought or the thinking subject transparent or invisible seems, by contrast, to hide the relentless recognition of the Other by assimilation. It is in the interest of such cautions that Derrida does not invoke ‘letting the other(s) speak for himself’ but rather invokes and ‘appeal’ to or ‘call’ to the ‘quite-other’ (//tout-autre// as opposed to a self-consolidating other), of ‘rendering //delirious// that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us.’ (89)

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. (91)


 * What is the main argument of the text? **

Spivak sets forth that, as Western intellectuals collect information and then write about, and thus represent, marginalized populations, they are rendered transparent, ignoring the historical and political situatedness that their work is defined by and that allowed them to do so. As such, marginalized populations, defined as subaltern and spoken for by a transparent researcher, are rendered speechless. Western individuals are permitted to rewrite their history for them. Importantly, she calls for radical changes to representation, taxonomy, and text in order to break the process of inscribing the marginalized into their positions.


 * Describe at least three ways that the main argument is supported. **

Spivak is critical of what she labels as essentialist projects in the work of Foucault and Deleuze, particularly as they claim to, in the spirit of poststructuralism, shift towards a post-representationalist vocabulary. She claims that Western scholarship on the subaltern is hopelessly wrapped up in Western modes of defining the world - particularly by class-consciousness -, which leads scholars to constantly be inscribing the Other into their position as subaltern. These scholars have conflated an "aesthetic representation" of the subaltern with a political one - power and desire are presupposed, and oppression is reported upon.

There is a significant bind that Spivak points out in her essay. The category subaltern is only definable because of its difference - if the subaltern were able to speak, they would no longer be identified as subaltern. Thus simply in labeling/representing the subaltern as subaltern, the researcher renders them speechless. Spivak sets forth, in this and other works, that in order to establish an ethical relationship with the subject, the researcher must systematically unlearn his or her own privilege, slashing the difference that allows the researcher to speak for the subject.

Scholars, she claims, must learn radical forms of textuality that appropriately approach difference and highlight an aesthetic representation of Other in order to break away from a re-colonial project of inscribing Others into their marginalized positions.

Spivak uses examples of archives on widow self-immolation practices in India in order to highlight how British colonial legislation, in interpreting the practice with a political representation, inscribed it as barbaric rather than as an exercise of 'free will.' This example is meant to compare the work of Western scholars to that of the colonial era.


 * What parts of the argument did you find most and least persuasive, and why? **

Many scholars have set forth the notion that Western scholars should take a hands-off approach to researching the situation of the subaltern, simply because they can't escape the colonial contexts. Often, when I find myself describing something about Africa, it feels dirty, and I get uncomfortable, yet, I don't get that same sense talking about Europe. And I think that this a problem - if we are rendered silent about certain parts of the world, yet are able to talk freely about others, it further creates disparities and demarcations between those that it is deemed okay to talk about and those that can't be broached. The bind, however, comes in the fact that, if we are to permit free talk, due to existing power relations, Western parts of the world have a greater capacity to claim knowledge for Others, usurping their agency. I like Spivak because she works us through how to contend with this bind. Her calls for unlearning privilege, (strategic essentialism - cited elsewhere), aesthetic representation, and radical forms of text that highlight difference and employ new taxonomies are set forth as strategies that overcome the sense of paralysis that Western scholars may find themselves in as they approach the developing world.


 * What kinds of corrective action are suggested by the text (either overt or implied)? **

Spivak provokes Western intellectuals to rethink how to approach representing subjects in their writing - how to develop a taxonomy that highlights instead of suppresses difference. Particularly, she calls upon scholars to render themselves visible - making transparent their difference - and highlighting the ways in which scholars speak with and not for the subaltern. Part of this involves the process of unlearning one's own privilege.


 * Explain how the argument and evidence in the text relates to our effort to conceptualize, design and deliver EcoEd? **

In broad strokes, Spivak sets forth a program for dealing with binds - for accepting their conditions and finding ways out of paralysis. In her project, it involves massaging out the tensions in relationships with communities marked by difference and reconsidering modes of textuality. These are the types of strategies we need to incorporate into our efforts to deliver education. Students must not be left feeling bound without escape but instead recognize how to approach seemingly impenetrable challenges.


 * What additional information has this text compelled you to seek out? (Describe what you learned in a couple of sentences, providing at least two supporting references). **

Some of the media on the anniversary of the genocide pointed my roommate (well ex-roommate) to this video and reminded me of the work of people like Lina Srivastava and Linda Raftree: @http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-tongue-tied-storyteller-in  Both would identify themselves as international development workers that are specifically focused on navigating the ethical issues of how human rights/global development organizations represent individuals in the Global South. (See in particular their project Regarding Humanity: @http://regardinghumanity.org/ ) I'm inspired by this work but often can't get over a state of confusion over the binds of kindness - how and if it's possible to perform kindness in a way that promotes speaking with rather than speaking for, particularly in postcolonial contexts.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #222222; font-family: arial,sans-serif;">Additionally, I returned to some of the quotes that I had pulled out of The Post-Colonial Critic:

The next item, where you say that I declare myself allied to the subaltern. I don’t think that I declare myself to be allied to the subaltern. The subaltern is all that not is not elite, but the trouble with those kinds of names is that if you have any kind of political interest you name it in the hope that the name will disappear. That’s what class consciousness is in the interest of: the class disappearing. What politically we want to see is that the name would not be possible. So what I’m interested in is seeing ourselves as namers of the subaltern. If the subaltern can speak then, thank God, the subaltern is not a subaltern any more. (158)

I think it’s absolutely on target to take a stand against the discourses of essentialism, universalism as it comes in terms of the universal – of classical German philosophy or the universal as the white upper-class male ... etc. But // strategically // we cannot. Even as we talk about // feminist // practice, or privileging practice over theory, we are universalizing – not only generalizing but universalizing. Since the moment of essentializing, universalizing, saying yes to the onto-phenomenological question, is irreducible, let us at least situate it at the moment, let us become vigilant about our own practice and use it as much as we can rather than make the totally counter productive gesture of repudiating it. (11)

But if I think in terms of the much larger female constituency in the world for whom I am an infinitely privileged person, in this broader context, what I really want to learn about is what I have called the unlearning of one’s privilege. So that, not only does one become able to listen to that other constituency, but one learns to speak in such a way that one will be taken seriously by that other constituency. And furthermore, to recognize that the position of the speaking subject within theory can be an historically powerful position when it wants the other actually to be able to answer back. As a feminist concerned about women, that’s the position that interests me more. (42)