Can The Subaltern Speak 2kr5i

Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) by Gayatri Spivak relates to the manner in which western cultures investigate other cultures. Spivak uses the example of the Indian Sati practice of widow suicide, however the main significance of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" is in its first part which presents the ethical problems of investigating a different culture base on "universal" concepts and frameworks. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" critically deals with an array of western writers starting from Marx to Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida. The basic claim and opening statement of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" is that western academic thinking is produced in order to western economical interests. Spivak holds that knowledge is never innocent and that it expresses the interests of its producers. For Spivak knowledge is like any other commodity that is exported from the west to the third world for financial and other types of gain. Spivak is wondering how can the third world subject be studied without cooperation with the colonial project. Spivak points to the fact that research is in a way always colonial, in defining the "other", the "over there" subject as the object of study and as something that knowledge should be extracted from and brought back "here". Basically we're talking about white men speaking to white men about colored men/women. When Spivak examines the validity of the western representation of the other, she proposes that the discursive institutions which regulate writing about the other are shut off to postcolonial or feminist scrutiny. This limitation, Spivak holds, is sue to the fact that critical thinking about the "other" tends to articulate its relation to the other with the hegemonic vocabulary. This is similar to feminist writers which abide by the patriarchic rules for academic writing. In the following parts of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Spivak is criticizing different critical writers and then moves on to the example of the Indian "Sati" practice. pivak achieved a certain degree of misplaced notoriety for her 1985 article ―Can the Subaltern Speak?: Speculations on Widow Sacrifice‖ (Wedge 7/8 [Winter/Spring 1985]: 120-130). In it, she describes the circumstances surrounding the suicide of a young Bengali woman that indicates a failed attempt at selfrepresentation. Because her attempt at ―speaking‖ outside normal patriarchal channels was not understood or ed, Spivak concluded that ―the subaltern cannot speak.‖ Her extremely nuanced argument, ittedly confounded by her sometimes opaque style, led some incautious readers to accuse her of phallocentric complicity, of not recognizing or even not letting the subaltern speak. Some critics, missing the point, buttressed their arguments with anecdotal evidence of messages cried out by burning widows. Her point was not that the subaltern does not cry out in various ways, but that speaking is ―a transaction between speaker and listener‖ (Landry and MacLean interview). Subaltern talk, in other words, does not achieve the dialogic level of utterance. Beyond this specific misunderstanding (proof perhaps that Gayatri Spivak cannot speak?) Spivak also objects to the sloppy use of the term and its appropriation by other marginalized, but not specifically ―subaltern‖ groups. ―Subaltern,‖ Spivak insists, is not ―just a classy word for oppressed, for Other, for somebody who‘s not getting a piece of the pie.‖ She points out that in Gramsci‗s original covert usage (being obliged to encrypt his writing to get it past prison censors), it signified ―proletarian,‖ whose voice could not be heard, being structurally written out of the capitalist bourgeois narrative. In postcolonial

, ―everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern — a space of difference. Now who would say that‘s just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It‘s not subaltern‖ (de Kock interview). Another misreading of the concept is that, since the subaltern cannot speak, she needs an advocate to speak for her, affirmative action or special regulatory protection. Spivak objects, ―Who the hell wants to protect subalternity? Only extremely reactionary, dubious anthropologistic museumizers. No activist wants to keep the subaltern in the space of difference … You don‘t give the subaltern voice. You work for the bloody subaltern, you work against subalternity‖ (ibid). She cites the work of the Subaltern Studies group as an example of how this critical work can be practiced, not to give the subaltern voice, but to clear the space to allow it to speak. Spivak is particularly leery of the misappropriation of the term by those who simply want to claim disenfranchisement within the system of hegemonic discourse, i.e. those who can speak, but feel they are not being given their turn. ―Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus, they don‘t need the word ‗subaltern‘ … They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They‘re within the hegemonic discourse wanting a piece of the pie and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call themselves subaltern‖ (ibid). Unlearning one’s privilege as one’s loss Privilege is also a kind of insularity which cuts off the privileged from certain kinds of ―other‖ knowledge. One should strive to recognize these limitations and overcome them, not as a magnanimous gesture of inclusion, but simply for the increase of knowledge. The way to do this is by working critically through one‘s beliefs, prejudices and assumptions and understanding how they arose and became naturalized. Any Zen master, chiropractor, or guitar teacher will tell you that real learning can only begin once years of mental habit, bad posture, and learning riffs the wrong way are undone, or unlearned. What we are asking is that the holders of the hegemonic discourse should de-hegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other rather than simply say, ―OK, sorry, we are just very good white people, therefore we do not speak for the blacks‖

Read more: http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/gayatri-chakravorty-spivak/#ixzz2lrkyq1pw Spivak's essay is concerned with the subaltern; for our discussion, let us define the subaltern as someone within the realm of the hegemonic umbrella, who has no means of access to upward mobility (or the hegemonic discourse)--the subaltern figure could be historically understood as those under the control of colonial powers or a victim of slavery; they can be understood as the completely powerless. Spivak argues that while thinkers like Foucault and Derrida recognized and deconstructed political power structures, they were unaware ofideology, and so erroneously believed that the subaltern could "speak for themselves"; essentially, this is a problem of subject formation or representation--for Foucault the

subject is knowable and for Derrida the subject is always a subject of the West. For Spivak, this is a problem of assumed transparency in Western intellectualism, which dismisses the problem of representation without acknowledging that ideologies are often delineated through what remains unsaid. Hopefully I can make this clearer with Spivak's primary historical example representing the problem that silences the subaltern. Spivak describes an obscure tradition in parts of India, Sati, where when a husband dies, the wife may choose to burn herself on the husband's funeral pyre; often it was expected of a 'good wife'--it is important to note that at this time, widows could inherit the husbands property, so it makes sense from a patriarchal perspective to encourage this behavior so that sons could directly inherit--this is taking place under Britain's colonial rule. The British at once are appalled by this tradition, and yet misunderstand many aspects of it (much is lost in translation for lack of a better phrase--they even literally misspell the Sati as Suttee); they have a rescuing impulse, and consult local Hindu leaders (they had promised to not infringe upon local law) yet they had an apparent ethical dilemma; eventually this practice is in outlawed. Spivak, while understandably recognizing that this was a good act by the British, and not a violent imperial imposition (like so many other they performed) insists that it still reflects the problem of representation and transparency. The British give their of the phenomenon (representation); the Hindu leaders are likewise able to give (representation), however, the women who were performing Sati were never heard from. This leads Spivak to conclude that, in fact, the subaltern cannot speak. In Hindu religion, there are four stages of life individuals are expected to go through: "Student (celibacy and preparation for life) [...] Householder (marriage and family; it is acceptable to accumulate material things and establish yourself in society); Hermit (retirement and meditation; one withdraws from the material world, renounces possessions and social identity) [and] Wanderer (complete renunciation of the material world, including all possessions, family and personal identity[...]) (Aboul-Hosn, 2009, p. 254) Spivak asserts that women are restricted to being the subject of men because they are only included in the student and marriage life stages, since this aspect of the problem with Sati (and the larger problem with the lack of gender parity) was never articulated by either the British or the Hindu leaders, it becomes apparent that ideology is at play and that the subaltern position (as oppressed woman) is effectively silenced. I found this essay fairly convincing; it is painfully clear to me that the voices of the oppressed are marginalized and silenced in the hegemonic discourse. I cannot adequately reflect the voice of the subaltern figure because I am part of the hegemonic discourse (we all are, we are absolutely wealthy, recall Singer; moreover, we are Western intellectuals; our voices reside within the hegemonic discourse). I cannot adequately assume transparency; we should not attempt to do so. What is the solution? How can the subaltern be empowered to speak? If the subaltern speaks, in Spivak, I assume that it is because the hegemony has sanctioned it, worse, that the hegemony is likely skewing this representation. The only qualm I have with the argument is that there have been instances in history where the deeply oppressed have spoken, and when the world has heard. I think of Ghandi, Spivak mentions him, but only briefly and says that this is a different topic; fine, what about Martin Luther King, Fredrick Douglass, surely these were deeply oppressed men who had a large impact? But is this because they learned the language of the oppressor? Or because they were men? What about Rosa Parks? Her act was surely not sanctioned at the time by the white hegemony. The subaltern is all too often silenced, it is true; swallowed

in ethnocentric representation, or muted outright by the interests of power--we cannot give voice to the subaltern without supplanting it; perhaps much of the problem lies in our ability to listen for the quiet voices; perhaps we need to listen for what the silence signifies; otherwise, we are complicit in maintaining it. Since I am painfully aware that I cannot do justice to Spivak's article, I urge my classmates to read it, it is worth the struggle (and rereading); also, I am including a couple of links here to videos of Spivak herself speaking on the subject in case anyone is interested in the subject. This first link is Spivak explaining her journey of thought regarding subaltern studies, it is lengthy, but fascinating: http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=2ZHH4ALRFHw&feature=endscreen

Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"--originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg's Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988)--perhaps best demonstrates her concern for the processes whereby postcolonial studies ironically reinscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. In other words, is the postcolonial critic unknowingly complicit in the task of imperialism? Is "postcolonialism" a specifically first-world, male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse that classifies and surveys the East in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial dominance it seeks to dismantle? According to Spivak, postcolonial studies must encourage that "postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss" (Ashcroft. et al 28). In "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci's term "subaltern" (the economically dispossesed) in order to locate and re-establish a "voice" or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the "epistemic violence" done upon Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people, and 2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to "speak for" the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their subordinate position in society. The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos--a totalizing, essentialist "mythology" as Derrida might describe it--that doesn't for the heterSpivak‘s essay ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ – originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg‘s Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988)[3] – perhaps best demonstrates her concern for the processes whereby postcolonial studies ironically reinscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. In other words, is the post-colonial critic unknowingly complicit in the task of imperialism? Is ―post-

colonialism‖ a specifically first-world, male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse that classifies and surveys the East in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial dominance it seeks to dismantle?

According to Spivak, postcolonial studies must encourage that ―postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss‖ (Ashcroft. et al 28). In ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖, Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci‘s term ―subaltern‖ (the economically dispossesed) in order to locate and reestablish a ―voice‖ or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the ―epistemic violence‖ done upon Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people, and 2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to ―speak for‖ the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves.[4]

As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their subordinate position in society. The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos–a totalizing, essentialist ―mythology‖ as Derrida might describe it–that doesn‘t for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic.

Spivak‘s essay should be required reading for everyone. But if you don‘t have the time or if you do have the time and want a critical companion, there‘s one listed below for you.

Thesis:

―My view is that radical practice should attend to this double session of representation rather than reintroduce the individual subject through totalizing concepts of power and desire.‖ (279) Fourfold Argument of the Essay: 1.

Problematize the Western subject and see how it is still operational in poststructuralist theory (Foucault and Deleuze)

2. Re-read Marx to find a more radical de-centering of the subject that also leaves more room for the formation of class identifications that are non-essentialist (Derrida, also) 3. Argue that Western intellectual production reinforces the logic of Western economic expansion 4. Perform a close reading of sati to analyze the discourses of the West and the possibilities for speech that the subaltern woman has (or does not have) within that framework

Arguments 1-3 are addressed in the first half of the essay, which address Spivak‘s theoretical framework and argument, while argument 4 is addressed in the second half of the essay, which serves as an example of Spivak‘s argument and her conclusion.

Spivak‘s article moves from a critique of current Western efforts to problematize the subject to a still more radical de-centering of the subject implicit in Marx and Derrida. It makes the point that western intellectual production is complicit with Western international economic interests, and finally raises the question of how the third-world subject is represented within Western discourse, using the example of sati (widow sacrifice).

The juxtapositions brought into play over the course of the article emphasize how ‗benevolent‘ Western intellectuals can paradoxically silence the subaltern by claiming to speak for their experience (by asserting that the subaltern ‗knows‘) in the same way that ‗benevolent‘ colonialists silenced the voices of the women who ‗chose‘ to immolate themselves on their husbands‘ funeral pyres i.e. it is in the appropriation of the voice of the subaltern that s/he is silenced.

Foucault and Deleuze (Guattari): 

Spivak‘s criticism: 

They [Foucault and Deleuze] short-circuit the radical implications of the ‗crisis of the subject‘ by introducing the concept of ‗subject effects,‘ which differ in name, but not in function, from traditional subjects (273)



She criticizes Foucault for emphasizing the pervasiveness and heterogeneity of power while ignoring how power produces ideology, and instead filling the place of ideology with a generalized notion of ‗culture‘ (274)



Spivak finds a contradiction between Foucault and Deleuze‘s valorizing of the concrete experience of oppression while providing little explanation of the baggage of the

intellectual in the conflation of the ideas of ‗representing‘ (as in politics/speaking for the interests of a group of people) and ‗re-presenting‘ (when what is presented becomes fused with its signified and takes on an immediacy of presence) (274-275) 

Spivak‘s response: 

While many of their contributions are useful, their political effectiveness is impaired by systematically ignoring the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history



She objects to their use of ‗master words‘ such as ‗the workers‘, which generalize the experience of a diverse range of people (272) 



Conversely, her own use of the term ‗subaltern‘ is emphatically multiple

Beginning with Deleuze and Guattari‘s implementation of an undifferentiated ‗desire‘ ing all kinds of revolutionary movements and acts, Spivak demonstrates how the unspoken and un-interrogated assumptions behind these totalizing theories end in reinforcing the subject positions of the theorists themselves (273-274)



To Spivak, the idea that desire and interest may work in opposition to one another under the effects of ideology seems to escape Deleuze and Foucault (273)

Marx and Derrida: 

Spivak refers to Marx to demonstrate how his concept of class formation clearly differentiates between darstellen (re-presentation) andvertreten(representation) (276-278) 



Darstellen 

Re-presentation



Rhetoric as trope



Class as a descriptive concept, class in a system



Class consciousness



Vertreten 

Representation



Rhetoric as persuasion



Class as a transformative concept, through substitution/representation



Transformation of consciousness

Spivak uses Derrida as a tool to deconstruct and de-center, particularly when it comes to Foucault (primary motives of the essay and of Spivak‘s work generally) 

―I have tried to argue that the substantive concern for the politics of the oppressed which often s for Foucault‘s appeal can hide a privileging of the

intellectual and of the ―concrete‖ subject of oppression that, in fact, compounds the appeal.‖ (292) 

Following up this age, Spivak notes that: ―though it is not my intention here to counter the specific view of Derrida promoted by these influential writers [Anderson and Said], I will discuss a few aspects of Derrida‘s work that retain a long-term usefulness for people outside the First World…yet he is less dangerous when understood than the first-world intellectual masquerading as an absent non-representer who lets the oppressed speak for themselves.‖ (292)



Spivak cites a chapter of Derrida‘s ―Of Grammatology As a Positive Science‖ (a book she famously translated and provide a critical introduction for in 1976) 

For Spivak: Derrida = Deconstruction

ogeneity of the colonized body politic.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's original essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism's "worlding" of the world. Spivak's essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, to be able to access the state, and to suffer the burden of difference in a capitalist system that promises equality yet withholds it at every turn. Since its publication, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued. In these phenomenal essays, eight scholars take stock of the effects and response to Spivak's work. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights. Then, through the lens of Spivak's essay, they rethink historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates "Can the Subaltern Speak?" within contemporary issues, particularly new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico. In an afterword, Spivak herself considers her essay's past interpretations and future incarnations and the questions and histories that remain secreted in the original and revised versions of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"—both of which are reprinted in this book. an the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea began as a conference, hosted by the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, at Columbia University. The title was a seductive simplification, marking the spot where, it was hoped, several debates and discourses might converge in the consciousness of their debt to an extraordinary essay, ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ penned by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak some twenty years previously. We might have subtitled the conference, or this volume, something as infelicitously expansive as

Reflections on the history of some ideas about the s/Subject of history, the international division of labor, the contemporary relevance of Marxism, deconstruction, Asia, Europe, gender, and capitalism‘s worlding of the world. Though the fulsome description would perhaps have provided a better index of the scope and ambition of the original essay, it too would have been a mere placeholder for the many difficult questions that unfold out of Spivak‘s essay. The conference was not occasioned by a retirement; it marked no (anticipated) diminution in the pace or output of Spivak‘s continued writing. Neither of these possibilities occurred to me when organizing the event. It was, rather, prompted by the felt need to respond to the more intellectually ambiguous demand of an institutional anniversary which simultaneously remarked 250 years of Columbia‘s University‘s operation and 20 years since women were itted to Columbia College. It seemed appropriate to turn to Spivak‘s essay in this context—not out of any misplaced overidentification with third world women on the part of Western academic feminists, but, rather, in an effort to grasp, once again, the full implications of her insistent and uncompromising introduction of the questions of gender and sexual difference into the critique of radical discourse in the universities of the West and in subaltern studies in India and South Asia. Our project was, I hope and believe, innocent of nostalgia. Few interventions have retained with such tenacity the radicality or the relevance that Spivak‘s essay continues to possess today. It has been cited, invoked, imitated, summarized, analyzed, and critiqued. It has been revered, reviled, misread, and misappropriated—in its original and its abridged forms, in English and in translation. And it has, of course, been revisited by Spivak herself, in the expansive ―History‖ chapter of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present . One often encounters inadvertent testimonies to the revolutionary quality of the thought contained in ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ Occasionally, these run to the comic, though the pathos of the diffe rend (the mutual untranslatability of discourse), which appears as a merely lexical matter, also reveals something about the particular difficulty of writing and reading gender into historical analysis. Consider, for example, a recent translation of the title into Russian (within a translation of a more recent essay on terror). In the initial draft the translator rendered in Russian what, when translated back into English, might have read ―Can Junior Officers Speak?‖ The ―woman,‖ as Spivak tells us, inevitably ―is doubly in shadow.‖ Problems of translation are less analogues than metonyms for the problems of reading that ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ simultaneously performs, thematizes, and theorizes. But if we are stretched to the limits of our intellectual capacity in the act of reading Spivak‘s writing on reading the silences of history—there are some categorically untenable misreadings that need to be dispatched before anything further can be said. Among them: those that understand the silence of the subaltern as a simple absence in the record—to be supplemented and transcended by the work of information retrieval (Spivak endorses such retrieval, but she understands it to be a matter distinct from the question of theorizing the impossibility of subaltern speech as audible and legible predication); those that discern in the essay a constitutive opposition between practice and theory, variously attributing to Spivak‘s own intervention an advocacy for one or the other (she emphatically rejects that binarity); those that claim she has rendered the Indian case representative of the third world (she insists on the choice of India as an accident of personal history and as a nonexemplary instance in which, nonetheless, global processes can be seen to generate their effects); and those, in the most egregious misreadings, that discern in the text a nativist apologia for widow burning on the grounds of its authentic ritual status! (it is a position that she herself a ―parody of the nostalgia for lost origins‖ [297/000]). Perhaps the most quoted and misquoted age from the text, a sentence conceived as such, as a grammatical form , is that in which Spivak writes, ―White men are saving brown women from brown men.‖ The sentence appears, in the ―spirit‖ of Freud, but, significantly, in answer to two questions. This doubleness of the question follows on the doubly shadowed status of the woman previously mentioned. Spivak writes—and we note the plural: ―When confronted with the questions, Can the subaltern speak? And can the subaltern (as woman) speak? we will be doubly

open to the dangers run by Freud‘s discourse.‖ What were those dangers? They were the dangers of a ―reactionformation to an initial and continuing desire to give the hysteric a voice‖ (296/000). For Spivak, the same ideological formation informs the desire to give a voice to the hysteric as that which would speak for the subaltern. The one produces the narrative of the ―daughter‘s seduction‖ to explain a certain silence or muteness of the pathological woman, the other offers the ―monolithic ‗third world woman‘‖ as the tautological name of a need to be spoken for. In both cases the ―masculine-imperialist‖ ideology can be said to produce the need for a masculine-imperialist rescue mission. This circuitry obstructs the alternative histories that might have been written— not as the disclosures of a final truth, but as the assemblages of utterances and interpretations that might have emerged from a different location, namely, the place of the subaltern woman. These utterances would not, as she herself remarks, have escaped ideology; they would not have been the truth of the women who uttered them. But they would have made visible the unstable claims on truth that the ideology of masculine imperialism offered in its place. The importance of reading the statement as such and of thereby reflecting upon the act of reading lies in its displacement of the question of what a subaltern woman really said or wanted to say (and hence what could be said on her behalf) and its consequent emphasis on the question of audibility and legibility. It enables an investigation of what conditions obtrude to mute the speech of the subaltern woman, to render her speech and her speech acts illegible to those who occupy the space produced by patriarchal complicity (whether of imperialism or globalization). Had Spivak conceived of the ideological question only in of an earlier Marxism, as one of capitalist imperialism and bourgeois nationalism or international socialism, the question might not have been double. The woman, or more specifically, the subaltern as woman, is a figure in whom the question of ideology—as the production of subjects in whom desire and interest are never entirely symmetrical or mutually reinforcing—splits wide open. This, then, is the incitement to Spivak‘s explosive historical excavation of two impossible ―suicides‖—that which resides in the mutilated s of something called sati , in the process of Britain‘s abolition of widow sacrifice in India, and that which lurks in the half-ed tale of a woman, Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, who took her life in 1926, apparently after losing heart in the task of political assassination to which she had promised herself. I say apparently because, in the first version of the essay, Spivak does not finally decide the question of motivations. She reads them, but the text of what happened that day, when a young woman, menstruating, took her own life, remains somewhat oblique for the reader who has not systematically unlearned the suspicions that ideology attaches to almost any young woman‘s suicide. Perhaps most readers have wondered ―Are there other readings?‖ But if this intractable doubt refuses to leave us, at the end, it is at least partly because the possibility of another reading has been forcefully opened to us by Spivak‘s text. And we remain transfixed by the enigma of Bhubaneswari. One concedes that the pyromaniac metaphor may be in bad taste, in this context. Nonetheless, the story of Bhubaneswari flares up at the end of the essay, and nearly overwhelms all that has gone before. It is not that the story stands as an example—to be emulated or repudiated. It is, rather, that the difficulty of comprehending what might have occurred in the act of suicide confronts us, forcing us to go back, to ―unlearn‖ with Spivak the normative ideals of piety and excess with which the third world woman has come to be associated in the interlaced ideological formations of both West and East. By now, the reading is widely familiar. It commences with a rigorous interrogation of those Western writers who, at the time of Spivak‘s first writing on subalternity, were endeavoring to produce a radical critique of the (presumptively) Western s/Subject: Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. It is at the point where, in Deleuze‘s and Foucault‘s otherwise brilliant claims to have decentered the subject of theory (and of history, in its Hegelian conception), Spivak discerns its secret reconsolidation, precisely through Deleuze‘s and Foucault‘s double incapacity to recognize, on the one hand, the nonuniversality of the Western position and, on the other, the constitutive place of gender in the formation of the subject—as the subject of language not only in the grammatical sense but in the sense of having a voice that can be heard. The argument on subalternity takes place here, Spivak‘s text breaking away from

its earlier discourse on Western theory (a discourse shaped by the deconstructionist imperative to perform critique from within, reading as unraveling the weave of the dominant text), first through an interrogation of the historical record and then through the insertion of a fragmentary and speculative of the suicide of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri. A schematic diagram of the argument‘s concluding movements might run as follows: An imperial tradition that rendered widow sacrifice as the sign of a cultural failure subsequently outlawed it and misidentified it as sati (while misspelling it assuttee ). This imperial tradition legitimated itself as a rule of law and resignified a ritual—a performatively compulsive discourse—as a crime (and not merely as superstition), while discerning in it the evidence of a retrograde patriarchy. Even contemporary commentators realized, however, that the prevalence of sati was historically recent and theologically illegitimate. As Spivak‘s tentative excavation of the scriptural treatises and philosophical commentaries onsati (good wife) and widow sacrifice in Bengal point out, widow sacrifice, when practiced, tended to be most prevalent in those areas where women could inherit their husband‘s property (in the absence of male heirs). Hence the rite that represented for colonial powers the most transparent evidence of an absolute negation of female agency was awkwardly situated at a place where a woman might, by law, have at least had some economic power (though her assets would have been managed for her). It would be easy to conclude, as Marx had done, in his reading of Henry Sumner Maine, that the ideological justification for widow sacrifice rested in an economic jealousy of her rights to the deceased husband‘s property. Marx had chastised Maine for an unforgivable naïveté when he had attributed to the Brahmin priests a ―purely professional dislike to her enjoyment of property.‖ He was even more derisive when Maine attempted to argue, in a manner that reproduces precisely the logic of white men saving brown women from brown men (a logic Spivak writes into a sentence that she produces as a homology of Freud‘s statement), that only the Church had saved women from the deterioration of their status after the fall of the Roman Empire. The prohibition on divorce, Marx noted, could hardly be construed as a protection of the woman‘s freedom. But, in the schematic notations that filled his Ethnological Notebooks , he generally approved of Maine‘s conclusion that ―the ancient . . . rule of the civil law, which made her tenant for life , could not be got rid of, but it was combated by the modern institution which made it her duty to devote herself to a frightful death.‖ Spivak confirms the economic analysis, as have many commentators, but she repudiates the simple ideological reading, which would have made the woman a mere victim of false consciousness. Her reading of the Dharma ? astra teaches her and us that suicide —a term that she shows does not mean self-knowing self-killing so much as it means the enactment of a recognition of nonidentity—is rarely sanctioned and only for men. Scripture provides no basis for its normativization, especially for women, whose proper duty is seen in that context as a static grieving commemoration of the husband. ―Widow sacrifice‖ is therefore, Spivak insists, a mark of excess. Moreover, this excess is the only form in which something like woman‘s agency can be apprehended—as a self-negating possibility. The entire ideological formation seems designed to foreclose the possibility of a woman acceding to the position from which she could actually speak—as a subject. It would seem that one cannot retrieve anything but the image of excess and the impossibility of full subjectivity from the discourse on sati. There is no place for the woman outside her relation to the marriage contract, no agency that is not excess. The story of Bhubaneswari is heartbreakingly fascinating because it expresses, to such an extraordinary degree, an agency (―unemphatic and ad hoc‖ in Spivak‘s idiom) that consists in resisting misreading . By Spivak‘s , the young woman, who decides against committing an act of political violence, kills herself to safeguard the group. At the time, her hip in the struggle for independence was unknown. Bhubaneswari did nothing to reveal this hip, perhaps out of solidarity with her colleagues, but she at least foreclosed the interpretation that would have imagined her death to be an act of shame for an illegitimate pregnancy. Menstruation was proof of that. Her (young) woman‘s body offered the signs by which she could resist being reduced to the mere effect of the patriarchal discourse—but only from within the same system. This is why Spivak refers to the suicide in of a ―trace-structure,‖ what she describes in such powerful shorthand in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason as ―effacement

in disclosure‖ (310). Within that system the ―suicide‖ remains enigmatic, indecipherable, though not completely invisible. So it is with a certain bitterness that Spivak recounts the various interpretations to which Bhubaneswari‘s death has been subjected—interpretations that tend to presume a romantic crisis, interpretations that even the most astute feminist reader must have allowed herself to ponder, at least momentarily, if only in shame. Unlearning ideology is never an easy task. One may wonder, without ceding any iration for Spivak‘s text, whether the absolute termination of Bhubaneswari‘s life doesn‘t provide too literal a form for the problematic of the general muting that occurs at the place where two mutually untranslatable discourses collide. It is perhaps important to recognize that the story was not offered as a model or even as an example; it was offered as a text—a very moving one—to be read. In reading this text, Spivak showed us how and to what extent historical circumstances and ideological structures conspire to efface the possibility of being heard (something related to but not identical to silence) for those who are variously located as the others of imperial masculinity. And she has itted, as she must, that the middle-class woman seeking political independence is not in the same position as the unemployed subproletariat of the urban slums, the sweatshop worker, or the child prostitute forced into sexual labor by a depleted environment and diminishing agricultural returns. But this may only prove the point that true subalternity remains in shadow. Why does this matter now? Much has changed since the initial formulation of ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ To name only the most obvious of the epochal transformations to which we have all been subject: the demise of state socialism in the Soviet Union; the globalization of capital; the resurgence of masculinist religious ideologies as reaction formations to the desire for liberation from the false (because not realized) secularity of European capital; and the intensification of global ecological crisis, felt most intensely in the rural peripheries of the global South. Sometime between the planning of the conference from which this volume issued and its publication, the United States commenced a war in Afghanistan and Iraq, ostensibly to pursue the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks in New York City—the scene of the conference. Among the most potent ideological weapons in the war on terror has been the claim that radical Islam, the putative incubator of terror and the ideological center of opposition to the U.S., is relatively oppressive to women. The emancipation of women once again becomes the legitimating discourse for imperial agendas. And Spivak‘s sentence returns to condense and expose the many acts and statements by which an ideology is operating. Even in the aftermath of the Bush istration‘s ignominious departure from power and the rise of a new liberal agenda in the United States under President Obama in 2009, the war in and against Afghanistan has been construed as a morally necessary war, one of whose critical motivating factors is the defense of Afghan women against local patriarchy. In a world where the international division of labor is so often organized to permit the effective exploitation of women and girl children in the urban and rural peripheries (in sweatshops, factories, and brothels), the imperial project is, we must it, mainly interested in liberating women for labor, which is to say, surplus value extraction. Human rights have often provided the alibi for that process. So we can be as cautious now of the promise for women‘s salvation being proffered in the name of war and imperial domination as when Britain made the abolition ofsuttee the mask and means of its own imperialism. This does not mean that we cannot want women, and others, everywhere, to be free of the constraints that inhibit their access to and capacity to speak from a position of subjectivity, representation, economic liberty, and political agency. Nor does it imply a relativist defense of the masculinist ideologies that operate everywhere under the cover of ―culture.‖ And it certainly does not mean that the task of progressive politics can be imagined as ―giving a voice‖ to subalterns. Subalternity is not that which could, if given a ventriloquist, speak the truth of its oppression or disclose the plenitude of its being. The hundreds of shelves of well-intentioned books claiming to speak for or give voice to the subaltern cannot ultimately escape the problem of translation in its full sense. Subalternity is less an identity than what we might call a predicament, but this is true in very odd sense. For, in Spivak‘s definition, it is the structured place from

which the capacity to predicate is radically obstructed. To the extent that anyone escapes the muting of subalternity, she ceases being a subaltern. Spivak says this is to be desired. And who could disagree? There is neither authenticity nor virtue in the position of the oppressed. There is simply (or not so simply) oppression. Even so, we are moved to wonder, in this context, what burden this places on memory work in the aftermath of education. What kind of representation becomes available to the one who, having partially escaped the silence of subalternity, is nonetheless possessed by the consciousness of having been obstructed, contained, or simply misread for so much of her life? Is there any alternative to either the positivist euphoria that would claim to have recovered the truth of her past or the conflation of historiography with therapeutic adaptation by which ideology finally makes the silence of subalternity seem normal? Today in the halls of the academy it is possible to discern a certain displacement of the critique of power and class, and hence of history, by the cultural analysis of memory. If the latter offers itself as an alternative to the positivism of empiricist historiography, and as a critique of the teleologies implicit in so much Marxist theory, it nonetheless tends to surrender utopianism only to embrace nostalgia. Nostalgia, in this sense, is but the inverse of utopianism, a utopianism without futurity. Ironically, this nostalgia often bears a secret valorization and hypostatization of subalternity as an identity—to be recalled, renarrated, reclaimed, and revalidated. We need to resist the narcissism implicit in this gesture—which ultimately demands a whole image as the mirror of ourselves, not merely as the basis for misrecognition (and hence our own subject formation) but also as the alibi for a politics that imagines the project of emancipation to be over. A quick survey of the contemporary social landscape demands the recognition that it is not. This volume does not pretend to for all of the social-theoretical itineraries enabled by ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ nor all those that sought to defend institutional knowledges against its provocations. But it may be helpful to review, in a very schematic manner, the contours of its future history. There are, by now, a few book-length studies of Spivak‘s work and thought. There are, in addition, numerous volumes in which her theorization of subalternity as gendered muting, and her argument for an ethical kind of reading attentive to the aporetic structure of ―knowing‖ in the encounter with the other, are attended to in individual chapters. In general, the two most receptive fields to her work have been South Asian history and feminist studies. We might begin, in this effort at a genealogy of future history, with prehistory. In 1986, David Hardiman reported on the second subaltern studies conference in Calcutta for theEconomic and Political Weekly . There, he remarked, approvingly, Spivak‘s argument that ―the colonial state often viewed the Indian people as an undifferentiated native ‗other.‘ [Spivak‘s] paper showed this well, revealing how the body became a space of politics.‖ One can hear, in his , the echo of ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ which had already been delivered as a public lecture but not yet published in the Nelson and Grossberg volume. Hardiman continued by attributing to Spivak a rebuke to subaltern studies, in the form of a definition with the force of a not yet realized norm: ―‗Subaltern Studies‘ [Spivak asserted] does not deal only with subaltern consciousness and action; it is just as important to see how the subaltern are fixed in their subalternity by the elites.‖ And he remarked her call for the deployment of deconstructionist reading practices in the service of this more reflective project. The acuity of Hardiman‘s observation can be seen, in retrospect, by assessing the changes in the ubaltern studies group and its theory, and in the disciplines adjacent to it, following the essay‘s publication. Leela Gandhi revealingly opens her capacious summary of postcolonial theory with Gayatri Spivak, invoking the date of her lecture (1985) rather than the publication of the essay. In this context she notes, despite the range and profundity of the questions emanating from ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ that the essay and its provocations solicited more response from postcolonial studies than any other field. To a large degree the rest of her book is devoted to an unfolding of that response—thought it takes her through territory dominated by other postcolonial theorists, from Edward Said and Homi Bhabha to Partha Chatterjee and Dipesh Chakrabarty. Gandhi‘s book confirms Gyan Prakash‘s 1994 tracking of the arrival of subaltern studies into the field of South Asian historiography, at least in the

United States, as a kind of model for postcolonial criticism (albeit as an ―ambivalent practice, perched between traditional historiography and its failures, within the folds of dominant discourse and seeking to articulate its pregnant silence‖). This movement beyond the object-determined field of subaltern studies, he suggests, was made possible partly by virtue of the rapprochement between Marxism and poststructuralism that it performed—largely under Spivak‘s influence. A case in point would be the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose book, Provincializing Europe,provides a useful aperture onto the mechanism of that infiltration, that generalization of the analysis of subalternity beyond the field of subaltern studies. Indeed, Provincializing Europe owes much to Spivak‘s formulation of the subaltern, though it is not heavily citationally dependent on her essay. This debt—which is exclusive of neither the debt owed to others in the collective nor that to the philosophical architect of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida—saturates the book at a methodological level. That is to say, despite the contingent overlap in their objects of study, it is the epistemological and historiographic implications of Spivak‘s essay that inform Chakrabarty‘s disquisition. Consider, for example, his argument that the forms of knowledge production institutionalized in the university have been constitutively incapable of ing the antimodern except as the antecedent to a teleologically inevitable modernity: ―the antihistorical, antimodern subject, therefore, cannot speak as ‗theory‘ within the knowledge procedures of the university even when these knowledge procedures acknowledge and ‗document‘ its existence.‖ He continues, ―Much like Spivak‘s subaltern . . . it can only be spoken for and spoken of in the transition narrative, which will always ultimately privilege the modern, (that is, ‗Europe‘).‖ The nonexclusivity of Chakrabarty‘s debt is related to the fact that it is sometimes difficult to discern the relative force of Spivak‘s interventions when read in relation to the influence of the group‘s other luminaries: Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee foremost among them. One of the effects of that collective‘s writings, and its meticulous recuperation of Antonio Gramsci‘s thought, was the discernment and analysis of subalternity outside South Asia. Florence Mallon‘s of subaltern studies‘ impact upon Latin American studies illuminates the history of this impact, which would be ed most visibly in the publication of the voluminous collection edited by Ileana Rodríguez, The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader . But one sees its elsewhere, with s of oppressed communities in places as remote from each other (and as far from the Indian experience of British imperialism) as Algeria and Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Uruguay, Turkey and Thailand, Mexico and Morocco, Zimbabwe and Zanzibar. Of course, the crucial marker, and the orienting question, of Spivak‘s particular intervention within the theorization of subalternity revolves around the question of gender. This is why, as I said earlier, one of the most receptive disciplines to ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ beyond South Asian history, was gender studies. As with the uptake of the essay in history outside of South Asian history, the initial impetus was a methodological and philosophical one. To take but one example, Judith Butler opens her landmark text, Bodies T hat Matter, with an epigraph from an interview of Spivak by Ellen Rooney and continues to invoke Spivak‘s program of reading (a deconstructionism that does not negate the utility of what it deconstructs) as the basis for her own effort to radically rethink the concept of sexual difference. Butler‘s enormously influential writings—addressed initially to a queer problematic (as seen from within feminism) and increasingly expanding to encom the subject of politics in general and, finally, the supplementation of politics by ethics—constitute a significant pathway for Spivak‘s writings‘ movement out of the regionalist container in which some of her more acerbic Eurocentric critics would like to have kept it. Nonetheless, there have been many others. Indeed, there are few readers in feminist studies that do not include and remark ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ as an episteme-changing text, a landmark in the necessary displacement of second-wave feminism and a still-to-be actualized call for the transformation of disciplinary feminism. The direction pursued by Butler nonetheless runs along a path that diverges considerably from that traveled by so many other feminist scholars under the influence of a revisionist historiography and a desire for the retrieval of

women‘s experience. One gets a sense of that other direction in Shetty‘s and Bellamy‘s response to ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ one that takes the essay as an incitement to rethink not only historiographical method but the archive per se. Writing in Diacritics, they describe their purpose as ―demonstrate[ing] just how crucial the concept of an ‗archive‘— perhaps even a ‗postcolonial archive‘—is for a more sympathetic understanding of Spivak‘s now notorious ‗silencing‘ of the subaltern woman.‖ They then continue with the following question, derived from a reading of Spivak‘s essay: ―Can we approach the gendered subaltern more productively if our project is to recover not ‗lost voices‘ but rather lost texts?‖ If this very significant question tends to invite the reader to fantasize ―the text‖ as the satisfying substitute—an accessible and bound object behind which the speaking subject‘s disappearance loses its status as problem—it nonetheless offers an alternative to the kind of longing for authenticity that interpretive social science often sought in Spivak‘s essay. It is well, in this context, to recall that Spivak‘s essay entered the American academy at approximately the same time as there occurred, in the interpretive social sciences, a new and powerful drive to discern and articulate something that was variously termed resistance,unconscious resistance, and, sometimes, the agency of the oppressed. This drive expressed, on the one hand, an intuition of the collapse of Soviet socialism (which, when it occurred, was nonetheless experienced as a crisis for left intellectuals), but, more generally, it expressed an exhaustion with or turning away from more overtly organized oppositional politics and the questions of class consciousness or class formation that had dominated the radical discourse of the previous two decades. It was, of course, the period of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and thus of the near defeat of organized labor within both the U.S. and Britain, the dispute with traffic controllers in the former and coal miners in the latter providing the ground for a statist attack against organized labor on behalf of capital. In this milieu, under the growing influence of a Gramsci revival and spurred by what appeared to many to be a confluence between Gramsci‘s and Michel Foucault‘s thought, when alternative forms of political possibility and intellectuals‘ participation in it were being sought, interpretive social scientists identified forms of practice, habits of being, ethical dispositions, temporalities of laboring, and so forth, which Spivak would term ―defective for capitalism,‖ but often read those forms as traces of an agency that, though unconscious (of its interests or bases in the contradictions of economic organization), could nonetheless be read as evidence of something like nonconformism. This is not the place to examine the complexities and contradictions of a theory of agency as unconscious. It must suffice here to note that such analysis sometimes foundered on the incapacity to differentiate between the ontic realm‘s incommensurability with the conceptuality from within which it is represented, the abrasive but socially mediated presence that interrupts or obtrudes upon rationalism‘s ambitions, and the intentionalized nonconformity to dominant and/or normative structures that, though more insurgent than oppositional, can be seen to comprise an intuition for critical politics. It was often coupled with statements of good intention and sympathetic if not identificatory sentiment and an avowed aim to ―give voice‖ to the previously silenced ―people without history,‖ as Eric Wolf so named them. Nonetheless, Spivak‘s essay is somewhat incompatible with this latter ambition. It is a willful misreading that permits Donald Moore to claim, though he is not alone, that ―Significantly, Scott, Guha, and Spivak share a tendency to locate culture in a textual metaphor that smuggles an originary autonomy into the field of subaltern cultural production‖ or that all three are guilty of ―positing of an originary space of authentic insurgency and insurrectionary otherness.‖ Even Paul Rabinow, a typically acute reader of Michel Foucault, for whom the impossibility of analytic objectivity or critical exteriority to the operations of power was an axiom, asserts in a recent essay, ―Spivak‘s plaintive query about whether the subaltern could ever speak reflected a normative goal of transparency: if only power relations were different, then.‖ It may be that anthropologists, historians, and those interpretive social scientists less trained in the reading practices that guide literary criticism may be more susceptible to this kind of misreading, but misreading it is. At no point does Spivak ever express a normative goal of transparency; her essay and, indeed all her writing, testifies to the impossibility of such transparency, not because representation is always already inadequate to the real that it seeks to inscribe, as some psychoanalytically inflected readings might have it, but because the subaltern (as woman) describes a relation between subject and object status (under imperialism and then globalization) that is not one of silence—to be overcome by representational heroism—but aporia. The one cannot be ―brought‖ into the other.

Thus far, I have indicated an expansion of the sphere of influence for ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ over the past two decades, while suggesting that the result of its movement was a set of profound transformations in the disciplines adjacent to subaltern studies, including South Asian history, history of the global South, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and gender studies. Nonetheless, Gandhi‘s diagnosis of the containment to which the essay has been subject retains a measure of truth; ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ has moved less smoothly across those fields of literary critical study (including that dominated by the strands deconstructionism) that are not also specifically concerned with postcolonial literary production. By the early 1980s Spivak‘s translation of Derrida‘s Of Grammatology had opened for English-speaking readers a broader aperture through which to receive deconstructionism than had previously existed. At the same time, the status of postcolonial criticism (and critical race theory) within the field of literary criticism was being solidified by the interventions not only of Spivak herself but many others. It nonetheless remained the case that deconstructionism most dominated those spaces of the literary critical establishment where the textual objects of reading could be recognized as cultural artifacts of the same philosophical system to which it turned its critical eye. Spivak has often reminded her audiences of her training as a Europeanist. And one notes that, in that second subaltern studies conference reported on by David Hardiman, she delivered a paper in which she read Brecht‘s ―Threepenny Opera‖ next to Mahasweta Devi‘s ―Stranadayini.‖ Nonetheless, it is for the reading of Devi more than of Brecht that her intervention is recalled. The isomorphism between the subject and the object of knowledge, which Spivak shows to be an impossibility for the subaltern in ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ is nonetheless a demand made upon ―minoritized‖ persons (women, people of color, persons of alterior sexuality) within the identitarian formation of the U.S. academy—especially, if ironically, in those domains that resist most vociferously the rise of identitarianism. It would be tendentious to adduce here the place of European literary productions in Spivak‘s analysis of subalternity, but it is not tendentious to note the degree to which deconstructionist (and other) literary criticism in the Anglo-American academy tends to attribute to the third world literary text an irreducible particularity, to withhold from it the capacity to signify the general (a capacity it grants begrudgingly even to the ―women‘s literature‖ of Charlotte Brontë, Jean Rhys, or Mary Shelley) and to demand, instead, that it signify itself as, precisely, ―third world‖ literature. This gesture constitutes the inverse and displacement of the desire that subalternity be given a voice. The resistance here is not of or by the third world writer and/or her writings, let alone by the subaltern; it is the resistance of dominance to its possible displacement from the exclusive claim on universality. It is not my intention to conclude or to supplant the work of the writers whose various contributions to this volume pursue many of the threads mentioned so briefly here. Rather, I mean to sketch the space within which their analyses might be productively read. This book is divided into four parts and has as its bookends an introduction and an afterward, the latter by Spivak herself. Part 1 comprises both the origin and the revised versions of ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ as they appeared, first in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg) and Spivak‘s own A Critique of Postcolonial Reason . Readers will discern a vast movement, but also significant continuity, between these ―versions‖ of the text, and the subsequent essays in the volume help to map and to comprehend the space and the consequences of the distance traveled during the decades between the first and the revised publication. The essays in part 2 are concerned to situate and reflect upon the historic, rhetorical, and philosophical aspects of ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ Partha Chatterjee‘s essay, written by an original member of the subaltern studies group and Spivak‘s constant interlocutor, sets the stage by describing the intellectual milieu into which the essay arrived in India. It then sketches for us the arguments ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ made possible within that country‘s tradition of radical social analysis. Ritu Birla‘s essay performs a careful reading of the arguments and rhetorical gestures that structure the original essay, while providing us with a sense of how and in what ways its revision for A Critique of Postcolonial Reason reflected new emphases and conceptualizations of the problematic of ―speaking.‖ Drucilla Cornell‘s essay then situates Spivak‘s essay in the broader context of European philosophical modernism and the

ethical turn in deconstructionism as part of an effort to understand what ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ made possible as a revised approach to the possibilities and pitfalls of human rights discourse. Part 3 focuses specifically on the problematic of death in the theorization of subalternity, asking not merely about the material deaths of those who are called subaltern in Spivak‘s writings but also about the constitutive place of death in the (often thwarted) claim to subjectivity that the subaltern makes, if only in the enabling negation of her subalternity. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan‘s essay brings to bear new reflections on the case of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri and the question of suicide in the analysis of subalternity, asking once again how and what we can know about subalternity on the basis of this particular figure. Reading Spivak against Guha and Bhubanswari against Chandra, Sunder Rajan both questions the ways in which the body is made to speak in these critics‘ analyses and reiterates Spivak‘s conclusion that the subaltern cannot speak. Abdul JanMohammed‘s essay on African American literatures of death in/and slavery revisits Hegelian dialectic and the labor of the negative in the context of what he perceives to be Spivak‘s demand for a measurement of silence and offers an ethically demanding alternative to the memory industry. By separating out the question of what preconditions structured the production of speech for deceased slaves, from the issue of what kinds of audition can be learned now in the service of ―hearing‖ the fugitive call of slavery‘s deathbound-subjects, JanMohammed offers the strongest argument in the collection for the project of recuperation, reading deconstructionism as a labor of the negative in a neo-Hegelian mode. Michèle Barrett, similarly plumbing the archive, takes a contrary approach. Her of the subaltern soldiers in the British military campaign in Mesopotamia does not point in the direction of a re-presentable but occluded presence. Rather, mobilizing Spivak‘s concept of ―erasure in disclosure,‖ she traces the debates surrounding the memorialization of the subaltern solders as the scene of an effacement of Indian and other colonial combatants in British war memorials. Part 4 offers readings of the contemporary geopolitical scene with reference to the insight and questions that ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ posed for an analysis of the international division of labor as well as for the relations between analysis and the political of resistance. Pheng Cheah‘s essay moves us into the contemporary moment with a reconsideration of Spivak‘s debate with Foucault on the question of biopower and then exposes the operations of the new international division of labor in the Asian Pacific. To conclude, Jean Franco‘s essay on women‘s writing in Latin America reframes the question of silence in of secrecy to introduce an agency that might function through strategies of illegibility and dissimulation rather than self-disclosure. The volume closes with Gayatri Spivak‘s final reflection on the metamorphoses and interpretive readings to which the essay has been subject and on the questions that emerged in the context of the conference. Bhubaneswari Bhaduri returns there as the haunting figure of a continually misread woman whose impossible story has, in so many ways, accompanied and perhaps even possessed Spivak in her own effort to be able to and for history. From her we learn that, though ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ answered its own question in the negative, its corollary question, How can we learn to listen? remains radically open. ... COPYRIGHT NOTICE: Copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher, except for reading and browsing via the World Wide Web. s are not permitted to mount this file on any network servers. For more information, please email us or visit the permissions page on our Web site. Related Subjects

Spivak is wondering how can the third world subject be studied without cooperation with the colonial project. Spivak points to the fact that research is in a way always colonial, in defining the “other”, the “over there” subject as the object of study and as something that knowledge should be extracted from and brought back “here”. Basically we’re talking about white men speaking to white men about colored men/women. When Spivak examines the validity of the western representation of the other, she proposes that the discursive institutions which regulate writing about the other are shut off to postcolonial or feminist scrutiny. This limitation, Spivak holds, is sue to the fact that critical thinking about the “other” tends to articulate its relation to the other with the hegemonic vocabulary. This is similar to feminist writers which abide by the patriarchic rules for academic writing. In the following parts of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak is criticizing different critical writers [Marx, Foucault, Delueze, Derrida] and then moves on to the example of the Indian “Sati” practice. In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak is criticizing the intellectual west’s “desire for subjectivity”. Spibak claims that “research” or “knowledge” have served as a prime justification for the conquest of other cultures and their enslavement, as part of the European colonial project. The western scholar authoritatively presented himself and his produced knowledge about the other culture as objective. He presented himself is without interests, and scientific, ethical and accurate. This is, for Spivak, very much not the real case for the opening statement of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is that knowledge about the third world was always tainted with the political and economical interests of the west. Spivak points to the fact that the west is talking to itself, and in its own language, about the other. Like other commodities, data or raw material (ethnographical ,for example) is harvested in the third world country and taken back to the west, to be produced and sold for the benefit of the western readers and especially the western writer. Spivak wonders if under these conditions it can be possible for the west to speak about the non-west without sustaining the colonial discourse. Spivak is hardly impressed with western efforts to speak for the other or try to “present his own voice”. She believes that the west is obsessed with preserving itself as

subject, and that any discourse is eventually about the discoursing agents themselves. Spivak is opposed to the western attempt to situate itself as investigating subject that is opposed to the investigated non-western object. Spivak’s answer to “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is no, they cannot, not when the western academic field is unable to relate to the other with anything other than its own paradigm. Another summary points out the dangers of Western intellectuals trying to ―give a voice‖ to formerly colonized peoples: Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”–originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988)–perhaps best demonstrates her concern for the processes whereby postcolonial studies ironically reinscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. In other words, is the post-colonial critic unknowingly complicit in the task of imperialism? Is “post-colonialism” a specifically first-world, male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse that classifies and surveys the East in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial dominance it seeks to dismantle? According to Spivak, postcolonial studies must encourage that “postcolonial intellectuals learn that their privilege is their loss” (Ashcroft. et al 28). In “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci’s term “subaltern” (the economically dispossesed) in order to locate and reestablish a “voice” or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the “epistemic violence” done upon Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people, and 2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to “speak for” the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe their subordinate position in society. The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos–a totalizing, essentialist “mythology” as Derrida might describe it–that doesn’t for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic. To do so Spivak gave some of the examples regarding to the studies of subaltern. She discussed about the definition of the subaltern. According to her ―Subaltern‖ refers to the people who have been as equally instrumental in history as the Europeans, but have been under-represented, their hidden history, and to the historiographers who study them. Subaltern can be broken up into sub, meaning under, and altern, meaning alternative or marginalized. Spivak‘s main concern is with the people of India, and repressed females in Asia. Spivak‘s main argument concerning the subaltern is that there is no way the subaltern can ever be heard. She addresses this problem in one of her most influential essays, Can the Subaltern Speak?. The answer, according to Spivak, is no. As soon as the subaltern tries to acquire a voice, they must move into the dominant discourse to be understood. Therefore, they must remove themselves from the subaltern position, which also means that they are no longer speaking from that position. Since there is no way to get out of this cycle, Spivak has concluded that the subaltern is a silent position.

In this essay, Spivak questions the notion of the colonial (and Western) "subject." She argues that European intellectuals have assumed that they know the "other" and can place it in the context of the narrative of the oppressed: "Intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society's Other." Spivak notes that Deleuze's focus on the "workers' struggle" is characteristic of his Eurocentrism. It is a "genuflection." There is no way, for example, in which Deleuze can for ideas, culture, or ideology. This problem is also seen in the trendy "claiming" of Chairman Mao by the perennially "new" Left: to use the term Maoist in the European context is to cause Asia to be transparent. Additionally, on Spivak's , the microlevel histories of Foucault glorify only the personal nature of resistance. These histories ignore the macrohistorical trends that might place the subaltern as a key player. Looking at the larger concentrations of power--an approach almost antithetical to Foucault's whole project--would expose the oppressive nature of colonialism in a way that Foucauldian histories cannot. Foucault cannot "see" the intellectual continuity of history; he sees only the disjuncture. Yet the struggles of the colonial people are "played out in the context of global capitalism and imperialism." She focused on the Foucault and Deleuze, According to their conversation First World intellectuals, share with the subaltern studies group is the notion no less dangerous for being naive that "the oppressed . . . can speak and know their conditions." And thus to the general plague of essentialism which in truly internationalist fashion circulates freely between the First and Third Worlds, Spivak proposes the antidote of a single question: can the subaltern speak? It is a testimony to the power of Spivak's essay that this question has come to dominate an entire theoretical field to such an extent that the vast majority of responses have consisted of answers to, rather than examinations of, her question. It is as if there exists a simple dilemma before us: either we argue that the subaltern can indeed speak, in which case according to one's perspective we have either brought agency back in or, in contrast, lapsed into essentialism; or we argue with Spivak that the subaltern cannot speak, which means for some that we have silenced the oppressed, which for others we have refused the myth of the originary subject. Few have ventured to question the question itself, to ask how such a question functions and what are its practical effects. Spivak seeks to drive a Derridean wedge between the two thinkers. Spivak wants to expose the complicit nature of literature and the intellectual elite, which often appears innocent in the political realm of oppression To scrutinize Marxism's relation to the subaltern, Spivak analyzes Marx's notion of "representation," This "usable Marx" cannot be based on antediluvian notions of representation. Marx, on Spivak's , uses two German for the verb to represent. They are vertreten, which means something like "to fill in for" or "to stand in the place of," and darstellan, which implies a "re-presentation." These are confused (in translations) when Marx writes: "The small peasant proprietors cannot represent themselves; they must be represented." However, in other languages both are characterized generally as represent. Yet "[t]hese two senses of representation--within state formation and the law, on the one hand, and in subject-prediction, on die other--are related but irreducibly discontinuous." Spivak argues against essentialism because the subaltern cannot be easily or neatly categories. "Leftist intellectuals who romanticize the oppressed...essentialize the subaltern and thus replicate the colonialist discourses they purport to critique." "A person's or group's identity is relational, a function of its place in a system of differences." She does argue for a "difference

feminism" "which stresses alliances among women across their differences." She introduces the concept of "strategic essentialism": "In some instances, she argued, it was important to strategically make essentialist claims, even while one retained an awareness that those claims were, at best, crude political generalizations." Vertreten implies a total understanding of the subject being "represented." It is almost as if the representative has the total "agency" of the subject--a complete "filling in." In contrast, dartelling is about representing a "constituency." "[I]t is not about giving voice but is concerned with constituting, working for, representing for and with, the marginalized group." Hence, the Western approach to the subaltern is either to speak for or to silently let them speak for themselves. Both strategies silence the subaltern because they ignore the positional relations of the dominant to the subaltern. Thus the amalgamation of the two notions of representation establishes a silencing of the subaltern. They can never speak because they are both being "stood in for" and "embodied" by others in the dominant discourse. Using "Marxist" , the relationship between global capitalism and national alliance cannot explain the "textures of power." In other words, the Marxists silence the subaltern by representing them in discourse in which they have no speaking role. Spivak writes that "the banality of leftist intellectuals' lists of self-knowing, politically canny subalterns stands revealed; representing them, the intellectuals represent themselves as transparent." In other words, the representation of the other destroys the subjectivity of the subaltern. Applying this mode of deconstruction, Spivak argues that the case of Indian sati is illustrative of how the subaltern cannot speak. She asks, "What did Sati say?" Can the subaltern be understood? Or is it always a "speaking for?" Sati was understood either, through the English, as the slaughter of innocent women or, through the male Hindus who spoke for the female Indians, as a voluntary act. In other words, the subaltern in this instance, the Indian women, have no voice: In fact, Spivak points out that the British ignored that sati was often motivated by widows' inheritance of property. Hence, sati was understood as the "noble Hindus" versus the "bad Hindus," or as the civilized British versus the primitive dark-skins. The widow's act is never considered a form of martyrdom, "with the defunct husband standing in for the transcendental One." It was just considered a crime. The nationalist Indians accepted the British reading of sati, and made it a point to reclaim the practice. "Caught in the relay between 'benevolent' colonial interventions and national liberation struggles that both construct her will for her, the subaltern," Spivak suggests, "cannot speak." Spivak elaborates on this concept in her excellent discussion of the Western films portraying the Third World versus movies with a "native" location. Spivak argues that one can rarely tell the time period of a Third World film, yet the temporal details of a "period piece" set in the West are almost always readily evident on the celluloid. Spivak's language, using Frederick Jameson as an intellectual backdrop, is so insightful it is appropriate to quote her at length:

Almost from the start, she emphasized how deconstructions interest in the 'violence' of traditional hierarchical binary oppositions (between male and female, the West and the rest, etc.)

afforded a age from literary theory to radical politics." Spivak herself writes that "the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self's Shadow." She sees postcolonial studies as a new instance of this attempt to liberate the other and to enable that other to experience and articulate those parts of itself that fall outside what the dominant discourse has constituted as its subject hood." Spivak argues against essentialism because the subaltern cannot be easily or neatly categories. "Leftist intellectuals who romanticize the oppressed...essentialize the subaltern and thus replicate the colonialist discourses they purport to critique." "A person's or group's identity is relational, a function of its place in a system of differences." She does argue for a "difference feminism" "which stresses alliances among women across their differences." She introduces the concept of "strategic essentialism": "In some instances, she argued, it was important to strategically make essentialist claims, even while one retained an awareness that those claims were, at best, crude political generalizations." Spicak turns to Frued's analysis of colonialism. "She remains leery of any attempt to fix and celebrate the subaltern's distinctive voice by claims that the subaltern occupies the position of victim, abjected other, scapegoat, savior, and so on." Spivak notes that her analysis offers an acknowledgement of the the dangers of "interpreting and representing the other." "The subaltern is not privileged (within the dominant discourse), and does not speak in a vocabulary that will get a hearing in institutional locations of power. The subaltern enters the official and intellectual discourse only rarely and usually through mediating commentary of someone more at home in those discourses. If the problematic is understood in this way, it is hard to see how the subaltern can be capable of speaking." Deconstruction: The influence of Deconstruction: Subvert the binary opposition between Subjects / object, Self / the other, the Occident / the Orient, Center / Marginal, and Majority / Minority. Spivak's central motif is always very deconstructive .Much more influenced by Derrida's 'the trace', 'under erasure', 'difference', Spivak can explicitly manipulate cultural discourses in of deconstruction. 

Psychoanalysis: psychological teachings of Sigmund Freud, method for treating mental illness by studying unconscious mental processes. In this section Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak use theexample considering a text by two great practitioners of the critique: „Intellectuals and power: a conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze‟.



post-colonial theories. : The-third-world background intellectuals. Searching for individual, cultural, and national identity. Post-Colonial theory is a sustained attention to the imperial process in colonial and neo-colonial societies, and an examination of the strategies to subvert the actual material and discursive effects of the process. It begins from the very first moment of colonial , and is the discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being. Although it is almost hopelessly diverse, there are some identifiable characteristics of Post-Col theory; -Rejection on master-narrative of Western imperialism. -Concern with the formation (within Western discursive practices) of the colonial and postcolonial “subject”.

Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci's term "subaltern" (the economically dispossesed) in order to locate and re-establish a "voice" or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the "epistemic violence" done upon Indian subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people, and 2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to "speak for" the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for themselves. I Think by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact reinscribe their subordinate position in society. The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric extension of Western logos--a totalizing, essentialist "mythology" as Derrida might describe it--that doesn't for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic. Spivak's description of the Third World becoming a "signifier that allows us to forget that 'worlding'" resembles in many ways Marx's notion of the commodity fetish that he describes in volume one of Kapital. In "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret," Marx suggests that commodity products become part of an obfuscating network of signs that obscure the history of labour that went into their production. Spivak suggests that the Third World, like the commodity fetish, becomes a sign that obscures its mode of production, thus making Western dominance appear somehow given or natural. In Spivak's paper, the subaltern appears as a woman of some resource, but whose specific situation in British-colonized India results in her being, in some ways, silenced. Spivak's essay tackles the complex politics of widow self-immolation (sati) and the less familiar suicide in 1926, for political reasons, of the young woman Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri (revealed at this event as a member of her own family). Some of the speakers at the symposium took up the issue of death directly, others addressed more general issues of indigenous political movements, and the current state of 'post-colonial theory'. I came away from the event with some very useful responses to my 'subalterns at war' talk, on the Indian Army and the First World War. "almost from the start, she emphasized how deconstructions interest in the 'violence' of traditional hierarchical binary oppositions (between male and female, the West and the rest, etc.) afforded a age from literary theory to radical politics." Spivak herself writes that "the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self's Shadow." Spivak argues against essentialism because the subaltern cannot be easily or neatly categories. "Leftist intellectuals who romanticize the oppressed...essentialize the subaltern and thus replicate the colonialist discourses they purport to critique." "A person's or group's identity is relational, a function of its place in a system of differences." She does argue for a "difference feminism" "which stresses alliances among women across their differences." She introduces the concept of "strategic essentialism": "In some instances, she argued, it was important to

strategically make essentialist claims, even while one retained an awareness that those claims were, at best, crude political generalizations." Spicak turns to Frued's analysis of colonialism. "She remains leery of any attempt to fix and celebrate the subaltern's distinctive voice by claims that the subaltern occupies the position of victim, abjected other, scapegoat, savior, and so on." Spivak notes that her analysis offers an acknowledgement of the the dangers of "interpreting and representing the other." Spivak explores the relationship between the "S/subject" and the other and the subaltern's identity in power and discourse. The subaltern subject is unable to "know and speak itself" because it exists only within imperialist histories and is characterized by its unconsciousness of its conditions of existence

It may be worth first defining what Spivak mean by "subaltern". Rather than just being a term for the oppressed class, Homi Bhaba provides this definition in 'Unsatisfied: Notes on Vernacular Cosmopolitanism': Oppressed, minority groups whose presence was crucial to the self-definition of the majority group: subaltern social groups were also in a position to subvert the authority of those who had hegemonic power. Spivak's question, therefore, about the consciousness of the subaltern, becomes quite pertinent when set against Bhaba's definition. The problem comes to a head when we consider that whatever we read of the subaltern is usually set through the prism of an "intellectual" historian, who, despite their best efforts, necessarily transform the subaltern's consciousness into, at best, 'serv[ing] as a counterpossibility for the narrative sanctions granted to the colonial subject in the dominant groups.' Whilst discussing the subaltern, it is important to that this does not only apply to racial groups, but can also be used as a term when discussing feminism. Spivak says that '[i]f, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow.' Another criticism coming regarding to the famoys article are describing below  In fact, he questions the whole notion of postcolonial criticism, implying that is a sham marketing tool that enables lazy scholarship. He notes that few thinkers will embrace the term themselves:  There are several difficulties to the traditional approach to Spivak. A pressing problem, as implied above, is the Spivakian bias toward "action" or, at least, active speaking. The search for the subaltern voice pretends that there is a "true" subaltern into which the careful Western can tap. The poverty of this position is revealed by Spivak's own analysis, which used the (de)centered Derridean self as a (non)starting point. Yet the decentered self has a trace of the universal subject, and it is often limited by its subordinate position to a notion of the centered self. The Derridean/Spivakian self is--to a certain extent--a "new universal structure of subjectivity-as-difference."In other words, Kant is creeping around every corner.

 This article is often described as one of the seminal pieces in a rather distinguished career. I found it incredibly difficult to decipher. I've tried, though, and this is what I've gleaned from it. Luckily my favourite critic (if it's not too nerdy to have one of those), Terry Eagleton, has said that Spivak attempts to be 'as obscurantist as you can decently get away with', so I don't feel too inadequate. In her essay, Spivak begins by considering two other critics, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and begins by asserting what she considers the most important contributions of French Postructuralist theory:First, that the networks of power/desire/interest are so heterogeneous, that their reduction to a coherent narrative is counterproductive--a persistent critique is needed; and second, that intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of society's Other.  Neither Deleuze nor Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labour. By arguing for this concrete experience (in factories, schools etc.), these theorists are actually contributing to the artificial formation of different classes. This is problematic, especially, as Spivak contends, that the idea of representation and re-presentation (the difference between a proxy and a portrait) is insufficient as it does not allow a place for the 'oppressed subject to speak, act and know for themselves'. This is where the problem arises. Quoting Marx, Spivak notes that: The small peasant proprietors 'cannot represent themselves; they must be represented. Their representative must appear simultaneously as their master, as an authority over them, as unrestricted governmental power that protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. Groups without a voice are therefore given a voice by those above them. This leads to a continuing cycle where '[c]lass consciousness remains with the feeling of community that belongs to national links'. This is problematic when considering that the intellectuals, purporting to critique this system, are actually just "reporting" it.  The most obvious example of oppression comes when considering nineteenth-century territorial imperialism. For once, Spivak's own words explain this in the clearest manner: A group of countries, generally first-world, are in the position of investing capital; another group, generally third-world, provide the field for investment In the interest of maintaining the circulation and growth of industrial capital transportation, law and standardized education systems were developed--even as local industries were destroyed, land distribution was rearranged, and raw material was transferred to the colonizing country. The problem, Spivak contends, is that we produce a 'homogeneous Other' which reflects our Self. By confronting this issue we are not representing them, but ourselves. In order for the subaltern to speak, the postcolonial intellectual has to undergo a process of 'unlearning'. Spivak relates the Indian nativist argument: 'The women actually wanted to die.' Whether this is true or not, it highlights an important aspect of women as subaltern: the white men are "saving" brown women without assent from a single woman. In practice, however, Hindu women had a free choice in the matter (Spivak does concede that they were often talked into it by their family). What seems to the West to be a heathen practice is actually shown to be 'one diagnosis of female free will substituted for another.' Put another way, this is Spivak's arguing against an "essentialist"

reading of the subaltern class, race or gender. She hones in on Freud's use of women 'as a scapegoat', transforming her into the voice and 'subject of hysteria.'  Finally, after a lengthy discussion of the idea of the subaltern through the practice of sati (the widow throwing herself on her husband's funeral pyre, discussed briefly above), and recounting a young woman's suicide, Spivak reaches the conclusion to her essay: 'The subaltern cannot speak'. It is only heard when one of the dominating classes speaks for it,

and as her examples show, they present the subaltern's situation through the discourse of their society.

Many readers of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" have been disturbed by Spivak's controversial answer to her own question, which is that "no scene of speaking" can arise for the subaltern woman; no discursive space can emerge from which she could formulate an "utterance." One way of rephrasing Gayatri Spivak's highly resonant question might be, Can there be such a thing as a "postcolonial archive"? The purpose of our essay is to demonstrate just how crucial the concept of an "archive"--perhaps even a "postcolonial archive"--is for a more sympathetic understanding of Spivak's now notorious "silencing" of the subaltern woman. The underread and scarcely commented-on third and fourth sections of Spivak's essay raise the question, Can we approach the gendered subaltern more productively if our project is to recover not "lost voices" but rather lost texts? In the process of unpacking the textual complexities underlying Britain's 1829 abolition of sati(the widow's self-immolation on her husband's funeral pyre), Spivak pushes us further back in time when she observes intriguingly that "the archival . . . work involved here is indeed a task of 'measuring silences'" [286, our emphasis]. We contend that her choice of the term "archival" is highly motivated and can serve as the long-overdue occasion for a return to the largely unread sections of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" We can think of at least two risks involved in our undertaking. For one thing, revisitations to well-known essays can often seem more regressive than innovative. We are well aware that we may have to overcome a certain indifference on the part of readers who, feeling confident that they know it well, judge that "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (now over ten years old) has had its theoretical "moment" and should now give way to more current efforts to locate nonelite, subaltern subjectivity within a politics of resistance. A second concern is that because our project of reading the subaltern woman "archivally" must necessarily reexamine and justify Spivak's career-long engagement with Derrida and with deconstruction, we must be aware of the extent to which her deconstructive feminism has been prematurely and unfairly associated with the supposed political shortcomings of Derridean deconstruction, the regrettable result being an almost reflex aversion to her deconstructive theory within both feminism and postcolonialism. Despite these risks, however, we hope that our use of the archive as the governing principle for our return to Spivak's essay can pave the way for a more sympathetic reading of Spivak's "silent" subaltern. Our essay will argue that "Can the Subaltern Speak?" deserves a foundational or canonical status within postcolonial theory and should experience a "staying power" on the current critical scene as far-reaching and significant as Edward Said'sOrientalism. Spivak's essay at one point refers quite literally to the concept of an archive, that is, the colonial "archive" of the East India Company, consisting of the "correspondence among the police stations, the lower and higher courts, the courts of directors, the prince regent's court," and so on [298]--all the documents instrumental in British law's recodification of sati from "ritual" to "crime" (also, we might add, the archive of subaltern historiography). However, as Foucault's concept of the archive reminds us, the archive is not just "that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive [in this case, legal] formation," but can also be conceptualized more abstractly as the "law of what can be said, the system that governs the

appearance of statements as unique events" [126, 129]. Foucault's reference to "the appearance of statements as unique events" within the archive can, in turn, remind us of Spivak's own "sentence" (her term) summarizing British law's abolition of widow sacrifice: "White men...

Spivak starts with a critique of Foucault and Deleuze, arguing that their inattentiveness to their own intellectual position and stance made them at certain points blind to the role of ideology in reproducing of oppressive and hegemonic social relations of production between West and the rest of the world. She, in particular, focuses on the fact that when intellectuals take the task of representing ―subalterns,‖ they actually represent those images of subalterns which they created themselves, falsely pretending to be ―transparent,‖ that is, speaking for oppressed groups without changing meanings of their message. Spivak then explores how Marx speaks of a Subject: it not a canny individual with undivided personality, but rather ―a divided and dislocated subjects whose parts are not continuous or coherent with each other.‖ (71) Subjectivity, thus, not only is not individual; neither it is collective: while capital/power imposes on oppressed classes interests which actually do not belong to them, this operation fails to create any kind of unity (a feeling of community, political organization). If economic conditions form a class as a socio-economic category, but it does not exist as a political-cultural category, power structures and intellectuals come in and act to ―represent‖ the class, failing to acknowledge that this class still doesn‘t have its own interests. Thus, Spivak attacks an implicitly promoted in contemporary critical theory distinction between a totalizing Subject of desire and power and ―the self-proximate, if not selfidentical, subject of the oppressed.‖ (74) She claims that intellectuals, even such critical as Foucault and Deleuze, have deep roots in socialized and institutionalized capital and their emphasis on discourses and ignoring of the role of economics, class warfare, etc. is misleading. She sees the problem of this ―blindness‖ in the fact that European (and a priori American) philosophers belong to ―the exploiters‘ side of the international division of labor‖ (75) and their intellectual baggage is part of European production of the Other, so their writing only reinforces ―the constitution of the Subject as Europe‖ (ibid). In this process, they stood on the side of West as a kind of oppressor of the rest of the world, in the way that they participated in taking away the original forms of speaking from colonized nations. Spivak then looks at the ways the British codified Hindu law in order to ask a question: the international division of labor created a situation when Third World territories don‘t have socialized capital operated by intellectuals (such as Foucault), which had been subordinated through political violence, education and similar forms of discipline and control, and, most importantly, economic exploitation: are there possibilities for the subaltern to speak? Spivak addresses the problem of ―epistemological violence‖: how imperialist powers created

structures of knowledge which silenced actual experience of colonized people, reinterpreted it in case of open confrontation (―mutinies,‖ ―riots‖) and imposed their meanings which facilitated colonial exploitation. Contemporary situation is not principally different, she argues, only that direct colonial exploitation is replaced with international division of labor. Exploited classes in colonial countries are not ―trained‖ in the ideology of consumerism, class mobility is almost non-existent, women are subordinated through cultural patterns of patriarchal social relations. And there are people outside of the international division of labor who are in an even deeper silence (Third World farmers or unemployed). Thus, Spivak mostly accuses Foucault and Deleuze for ignoring ―the epistemic violence of imperialism and the international division of labor‖ (84). Foucault is, in particular, criticized for not making a difference between exploitation and domination, which makes his analysis of power flawed in that he doesn‘t draw parallels between modern power and structures of colonial exploitation. His concept of subject and subjectivity is, consequently, also pretty closely tied to a specific time and place (modern First world), so while its analytical potential is pretty high in the field of European studies, it is more useless elsewhere. To overcome the pro-Western bias in contemporary scholarship, Spivak suggests that Derrida‘s approach to textual analysis should be rehabilitated. ―The question is how to keep the ethnocentric Subject from establishing itself by selectively defining an Other‖ (87). Derrida gives tools and insights into criticism of European ethnocentric tradition of constituting Others; his research also provides an understanding that historical and geographic position of European intellectuals doesn‘t allow them for ―transparent‖ representation of the Others, no matter by what benevolent desires this representation is driven. ―Yet the assumption and construction of a consciousness or subject sustains such work and will, in the long run, cohere with the work of imperialist subject-constitution, mingling epistemic violence with the advantage of learning and civilization.‖ (90) Spivak takes an artificially constructed sentence ―White men are saving brown women from brown men‖ to deconstruct possible meanings related to hegemony and oppression underlying it, to look for silences which serve the oppression and to identify meanings which reinforce intellectual and cultural trends (western intellectuals as playing on the part of the oppressor) she had described above. Analysis of 19th-century ideological debate over sati as an example of situation when two ―male‖ visions were involved in a conflict where women remained silent subalterns. Analysis of jauhar as another phenomenon by which men reinforce their rule and possession of women, objectify them: patriotic stories of mass self-immolation serve to impose these gender categories from early childhood in a very effective way. But British abolition of sati was imposed in such and cultural categories that it didn‘t liberate them, but simply changed modes and models of male domination.

Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) by Gayatri Spivak relates to the manner in which western cultures investigate other cultures. Spivak uses the example of the Indian Sati practice of widow suicide, however the main significance of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is in its first part which presents the ethical problems of investigating a different culture base on “universal” concepts and frameworks. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” critically deals with an array of western writers starting from Marx to Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida. The basic claim and opening statement of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is that western academic thinking is produced in order to western economical interests. Spivak holds that knowledge is never innocent and that it expresses the interests of its producers. For Spivak knowledge is like any other commodity that is exported from the west to the third world for financial and other types of gain. Spivak is wondering how can the third world subject be studied without cooperation with the colonial project. Spivak points to the fact that research is in a way always colonial, in defining the “other”, the “over there” subject as the object of study and as something that knowledge should be extracted from and brought back “here”. Basically we’re talking about white men speaking to white men about colored men/women. When Spivak examines the validity of the western representation of the other, she proposes that the discursive institutions which regulate writing about the other are shut off to postcolonial or feminist scrutiny. This limitation, Spivak holds, is sue to the fact that critical thinking about the “other” tends to articulate its relation to the other with the hegemonic vocabulary. This is similar to feminist writers which abide by the patriarchic rules for academic writing. In the following parts of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak is criticizing different critical writers and then moves on to the example of the Indian “Sati” practice. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b.1942) was born in India and educated at both Indian and American universities. She is well-known for her translation of and preface to Derrida's/Of Grammatology and her influential essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In the essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" she is primarily concerned with the issue of whether people who have been historically dispossessed or exploited by European colonialism are able to achieve a voice.

The term subaltern conventionally refers to a junior ranking officer in the British army. The Italian Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, used the term interchangeably to mean subordinate or non-hegemonic groups or classes, specifically the unorganized groups of rural peasants based in Southern Italy. The Subaltern Studies Collective developed the term further to include the subordinates in South Asian society. Their use of the tern 'subaltern' encomed the continued oppression of rural peasantry, working class and the untouchables in post-independenceIndia. Spivak, however, felt that the Subaltern Studies Group privileged the male as the primary agent of change and she believed that the word should have a more flexible definition so as to include the lives of women and their histories.

Spivak, using nuanced arguments, moves the essay from a critique of current Western efforts to problematize the subject to the question of the representation of the third world subject within the Western discourse. She begins by stating that some of the most radical criticism coming from the West is a result of the West conserving itself as the Subject by talking about, narrativising or othering the East. She refers to critics like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze who emphasize that a. it is counterproductive to reduce the networks of power/desire/interest because they are so heterogeneous and b. intellectuals must attempt to disclose and know the discourse of the Other. Both these critics, Spivak points out, 'ignore the question of ideology and their own implication in intellectual and economic history.' She then proceeds to question their use of two master , namely, ‗A Maoist' and ' the worker's struggle'. The use of essentialist such as the ones mentioned above assumes a cultural solidarity for a group that is heterogeneous in nature and the use of these by intellectuals such as Foucault and Deleuze casts the intellectual in the role of a medium who represents the voice of the oppressed. However, it is only possible to represent another through one's own value system. Constituting the colonial subject as the other is an example of what Foucault ‗epistemic violence‘, which is the imposition of a given set of beliefs over another. Foucault locates an epistemic overhaul in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and Spivak proposes that the epistemic violence carried out in the nations that were colonized byEurope was a consequence of this epistemic overhaul. Spivak explains the notion of epistemic violence with the example of the British reformulation of the Hindu legal system and reveals that such epistemic violence is kept alive by the establishment of one explanation and narrative of reality as the normative one. Spivak goes on to indicate that on ‗the margins of the circuit marked out by epistemic violence are men and women among the illiterate peasantry, the tribals‘. According the Foucault and Deleuze, the oppressed if given a chance can speak out or revolt, in other words, Spivak, while pointing out that in the discourse of the First World or Europe the subaltern can ‗speak and know their conditions‘ asks ‗can the subaltern on the other side, the third world, speak?‘ Gayatri Spivak also considers the works of The Subaltern Studies Collective which studies the colonized subject. While she understands and s the aims of the group, she expresses concern over the fact that the voice of the subaltern is being heard through them – a group of intellectuals. She likens this to what Foucault and Deleuze do when they speak about oppressed groups like the workers or Maoists. Additionally, she points out that The Subaltern Studies Collective, like Foucault and Deleuze, suppressed the heterogeneity of the subaltern itself when they attempted to describe ‗subaltern consciousness‘ by talking about it as one single homogenous entity. She begins the final part of her essay by asking what the elite must do in order to avoid continuing to construct the subaltern. As mentioned earlier, Spivak broadens the definition of the subaltern to include women and their histories. Spivak uses the example of sati in colonial Indiaand the story of Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri to affirm that the woman is assigned no position of articulation. Everyone else speaks for her. Spivak formulates the sentence ‗White men are saving brown women from brown men‘ and

states that the sentence discloses her politics. Applying this sentence to the example of the practice and subsequent abolishment of the practice of sati, Spivak shows us that it is either the white man explaining why Sati is a barbaric custom and must be abolished or the brown man insisting that it is a ritual that renders the woman sacred. At no point is the voice of the ‗brown woman‘ heard. It is the woman who becomes sati, yet no one comes across the ‗testimony of the women‘s voice consciousness‘. She is continuously written as the object of either patriarchy or of imperialism. Spivak also narrates the story of Bhubaneshwari Bhaduri, a young girl who committed suicide in 1926 because she was unable to go through with a political assassination that was assigned to her. Spivak observes that the girl committed suicide at the time of her menstruation to discourage people from assuming that she killed herself because of an illicit pregnancy. She sees the girl‘s suicide as an ‗unemphatic, ad hoc subaltern rewriting of the social test of sati-suicide. However, when Spivak herself spoke to the girl‘s nieces they seemed to believe it to be a case of ―illicit love‖ thus continuing the process of silencing her voice. She also reveals that another Bengali woman, a philosopher and Sanskritist also responded to her question about Bhubaneshwari‘s suicide by asking her why she wished to dwell on the ―hapless Bhubaneshwari‖ when her two sisters led such full and wonderful lives. Thus even intellectuals are complicit in silencing the voice of the subaltern. She concludes her essay by emphatically stating that the subaltern cannot speak as long as the subaltern continues to be represented. In conclusion we can say that Spivak in her essay does not ask whether the subaltern does speak, what she asks is if it is possible for her to speak, in other words, she asks if the subaltern has the agency to speak.

Not that Gayatri Spivak needs to be told any of this. Her essay "can the Subaltern Speak?" (which exists in several forms--I'll be examining the longest version, which appears in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture) displays a dazzling array of tactical devices designed to ward off or pre-emptively neutralize the attacks of critics. We might say of Spivak what Althusser said of Lacan--that the legendary difficulty of the essay is less a consequence of the profundity of its subject matter than its tactical objectives: "to forestall the blows of critics . . . to feign a response to them before they are delivered" and, above all, to resort to philosophies apparently foreign to the endeavor "as so many intimidating witnesses thrown in the faces of the audience to retain the respect." To acknowledge this does not automatically imply a criticism of Spivak (which is precisely why I cited the case of Lacan the importance of whose work for me at least is unquestionable): after all, tactics are dictated by the features of the concrete situation. 3. Of course, the difficulty of the essay cannot be reduced to a matter of tactics alone. Its difficulty is also a consequence of the fact that Spivak carries on several struggles simultaneously. the first, and perhaps the most important, is her intervention in the debates surrounding the field of Subaltern Studies as it existed in India in the

early eighties, particularly as represented by the work of Ranajit Guha. As a critical er of Subaltern Studies as a project, Spivak seeks to point out a discrepancy between its research and the way its practitioners theorized that research. In particular, she objects to the notion that Subaltern studies seeks to allow the previously ignored voice of the subaltern finally to be heard and that its objective can be to "establish true knowledge of the subaltern and its consciousness." The notion that the subaltern is a kind of collective individual, conscious of itself, an author, an actor, in short, the classical subject, allowed the movement to differentiate between the subaltern and the representation of the subaltern by imperialism, and thus to call attention to the blank spaces imperialist discourse. The subaltern studies movement did so, however, only by suppressing the heterogeneity and non-contemporaneity of the subaltern itself, that is, by asg it an essence and therefore falling into a metaphysical abyss from which Spivak seeks to rescue it. 4. And according to Spivak they found themselves in some very distinguished company in that Abyss. The other major objective of the essay is to intervene in a quarrel not so much between Foucault and Derrida (who did engage in a philosophical debate which Spivak curiously neglects to mention) as between their champions, acknowledged and unacknowledged, in the U.S. A third figure, Deleuze, also comes to play a part, if a minor one, in this scene as Foucault's accomplice. In particular, she seeks to lay to rest the "received idea" that "Foucault deals with real history, real politics and real social problems; Derrida is inaccessible, esoteric and textualistic." She will show, in contrast, that "Derrida is less dangerous" than Foucault, who not only privileges "the 'concrete' subject of oppression" but even more dangerously conceals the privilege he thus grants himself by "masquerading as the absent nonrepresented who lets the oppressed speak for themselves." While this may seem a surprising charge to lay at the feet of Foucault, who, after all, asked the famous question, "What is an Author?" and in doing so had a few things to say about Derrida that Spivak might profitably have consulted, she invokes "the labor of the negative" to sustain her accusation. Foucault's critique of the subject is itself a ruse of subjectivity. The ruse is so clever that its work cannot be glimpsed in any of Foucault's major texts where it labors to dissemble the negation of the subject that it will finally itself negate. Accordingly, Spivak must turn to what she calls "the unguarded practice of conversation," i.e., an interview to discover Foucault's thought. Of course, one might be tempted to argue that it is not only possible but inevitable that Foucault would contradict himself not only in interviews but in his most important works, unless that is, we assign to Foucault the position of Absolute subject, whose writing, despite the appearance of contradiction , possesses total coherence and homogeneity. Spivak, however, suggests that what Foucault utters in apparently "unguarded" moments can only reveal a truth kept carefully hidden under a veil of appearance; such a procedure

of reading resolves the apparent contradiction to restore Foucault's work to the bad totality that it has always been. 5. What Foucault and Deleuze, First World intellectuals, share with the subaltern studies group is the notion no less dangerous for being naive that "the oppressed . . . can speak and know their conditions." And thus to the general plague of essentialism which in truly internationalist fashion circulates freely between the First and Third Worlds, Spivak proposes the antidote of a single question: can the subaltern speak? It is a testimony to the power of Spivak's essay that this question has come to dominate an entire theoretical field to such an extent that the vast majority of responses have consisted of answers to, rather than examinations of, her question. It is as if there exists a simple dilemma before us: either we argue that the subaltern can indeed speak, in which case according to one's perspective we have either brought agency back in or, in contrast, lapsed into essentialism; or we argue with Spivak that the subaltern cannot speak, which means for some that we have silenced the oppressed, which for others we have refused the myth of the originary subject. Few have ventured to question the question itself, to ask how such a question functions and what are its practical effects. 6. A recent exception has focused on the putative subject or non-subject of speech: the subaltern. Chakrabarti and Chaudhury have criticized Spivak's use of the term as suppressing class antagonisms, not simply essentialistic or reductive ways of understanding these antagonisms, but class contradictions per se. In fact, if we examine the essay closely we can go even further to say that Spivak has elevated the contradiction between the First World and Third World as opposing blocs to a position of strategic and political dominance, as if the working classes in the West (and it appears that only the West has working classes--from the essay one would think that India was a primarily peasant society rather than one of the largest manufacturing economies in the world) is structurally allied more closely to its own bourgeoisie than to those forces traditionally regarded as its allies in the nations outside of Europe, North American and Japan: workers, rural laborers, landless peasants, etc. Thus, the idea of international alliances between the working classes East and West is for Spivak only a relic of so-called orthodox Marxism, it is even more menacingly a component of the strategy to maintain the domination of First World over Third World by subordinating the interests of the subaltern to those of their privileged counterparts. It is worth remarking that this is hardly a new position: on the contrary, it has a long history in the socialist and communist movements. Lenin flirted with it in his attempts to explain the capitulation of European social democracy in the First World War, Stalin embraced it and its very language derives from the period of the Sino-Soviet split and the consolidation of Maoism as an international

current. Accordingly, those who hold this position might want to draw their own balance sheet of its real political effects. 7. My objective, however, is to question the question itself, "Can the Subaltern Speak," which even if we replace the subaltern with another noun of our choice (the working class[es], the people, the oppressed, etc.) rests on an obvious paradox. Of course the subaltern speak and write; the archives of the world are filled not only with the political tracts of their parties and organizations, but there are literary texts, newspapers, films, recordings, leaflets, songs, even the very chants that accompany spontaneous and organized protests all over the world. To all appearances, there is speaking and writing always and everywhere and even more where there is resistance to exploitation and oppression. But here we must be very careful; Spivak does not ask whether the subaltern does speak but whether it is possible for them to speak. Her question is a question of possibility which as such functions as a transcendental question, akin to Kant's famous question: what can I know? That is, what we take to be the subaltern speaking may in fact be determined to be only the appearance of their speaking, if our theory deems it impossible for them to speak. Such transcendental questions thus necessarily produce a distinction between appearance and reality: if what is, is impossible then it must be declared no longer to be what is and a second real reality substituted for it. 8. Even more curious than this transcendental turn itself is the argumentation Spivak musters to her declaration, against all appearances, that the subaltern cannot speak. And she has called forth some very intimidating witnesses on her behalf, the primary one, of course, being Derrida. Who better than the translator of Of Grammatology to remind us of the relevance of Derrida's critique of Western logocentrism and phonocentrism to political life and to show the utter folly, if not the disingenuousness, of Foucault's call to publish the writings of prisoners as an integral part of the movement against the prisons, or the attempt to set up and archive for the workers' voices as part of the project of proletarian self-emancipation (a project which Spivak has already criticized in categorical )? It appears, however, that no one has thought to ask whether Derrida's argument's (especially in Grammatology, the work in which such questions are most extensively examined, lead to such conclusions). Is there anything in Derrida's critique of logocentrism that would allow us to say the subaltern cannot speak but must be spoken for, that is, represented both discursively and politically by those who can speak, those who are real subjects of speech? In fact, it would appear that Derrida's argument leads in precisely the opposite direction. For if we accept Derrida's arguments against the speaking subject as ideal origin of speech, present to its utterances as a guarantee of their truth and authenticity, that is, that speech is always already a kind of writing, material and irreducible, we are left only with the fact that there is no pure, original working class

or subaltern (or ruling class), possessing a consciousness expressed in its speech or for that matter its acts. There is speech and writing (although these are only modalities of action which are in no way privileged) always and everywhere. It is precisely in and through the struggles that traverse these fields of practice that collectivities are constituted. The question of whether or not the subaltern, or to use the Leninist term, the masses can speak cannot be posed transcendentally but only conjuncturally by the disposition of opposing forces that characterizes a given historical moment. 9. To recognize this is to recognize that Spivak has carried out a double displacement: not only has she replaced the question of whether the subaltern does speak at a given moment with the question of whether it is possible for them to speak at all, she has even more importantly substituted speech for action, as if, again, there exist opposing worlds of language (in which we are trapped) and being (which remains inaccessible to us). Had she not carried out this substitution, her essay would have been far less effective; for the subaltern or the masses never cease to resist and rebel even as they are constituted by these actions as the masses. Here we must draw a line of demarcation: on the one side, the transcendental questions that declare what exists impossible so as to declare necessary and inevitable the representation of the masses by others; on the other a materialism that recognizes the irreducibility of what exists, including the voices and actions of the masses as they wage their struggles for self-emancipation with or without intellectuals of the Third and First World at their side. Primarily, Spivak offers a sharp critique of Foucault (F) and Deleuze (D). This large, first portion of her text pivots around F and Ds focus on interest, desire, and power: specifically looking at the (S)ubject from the view of the western intellectual. She accurately brings out F and Ds oversight of not correctly acknowledging the role of ideology within social relations, and labor structures: "Because these philosophers seem obliged to reject all arguments naming the concept of ideology as onlyschematic rather than textual, they are equally obliged to produce a mechanically schematic opposition between interest and desire. Thus they align themselves with bourgeois sociologists who fill the place of ideology with a continuistic "unconscious" or a parasubjective 'culture'" And so, Spivak suggests, "Neither D nor F seems aware that the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor"

Spivak fills out this point with a look at the difference and utility of "representation" (vertreten) and "representation" (darstellen). The first sense of representation brings out the political and economical impacts of the western intellect. This invovles a complex understanding of the relationship of colonialism, ideology, and most importantly an actual subsitution of the subject. The act of representation inherently involves Marx's notion of class consciousness. Spivak questions the notion of class consciousness, steering away from any monolithic solid notion and suggesting that though heterogenitically made up, it might be possible to group peoples, yet inherently problematic: "The gravity of the problem is apparent if one

agrees that the development of a transformative class "consciousness" from a descriptive class "position" is not in Marx a task engaging the ground level of consciousness. Class consciousness remains with the feeling of community that belongs to national links and political organizations, not to that other feeling of community whose structural model is the family" Here, Spivak wishes to push the notion of class consciousness away from the patriarchal notion of the family, which is inherently influenced through representation and ideology. Again, she underscores her point on the notion of class consciousness as inherently influenced by ideology and textual. Furthermore, she asserts that the intellectuals position through this sort of representation is textual as well and has lead to a continuation of the patriarchal, ideological, notion of class consciousness: "The absence of the nonfamilian artificial collective proper name is supplied by the only proper name "historical tradition" can offer--the patronymic itself--the Name of the Father. ... It is the Law of the Father (the Napoleonic Code) that paradoxically prohibits the search for the natural father. Thus, it is according to a strict observance of the historical Law of the father that the formed yet unformed class's faith in the natural father is gainsaid." Further, Spivak enters into the conversation concerning re-presentation, or the philosophical concept of representation. Here the idea of representation is inherently related to values, "as produced in necessary and surplus labor, [it] is computer as the representation sign of objectified labor. She focuses on the impacts of global capitalism, and the influence of ideology and finally she asserts that theorists who uphold Marxist s of capitalism and ideology cannot avoid looking at representation with a dual meaning, or impact. "They must not how the staging of the world in representation--its scene of writing, its Darstellung--dissimulates the choice of and need for 'heroes' paternal proxies and agents of power-Vertretung. Constrasting his continuing critiques of F and D, Spivak continues to look at Derrida and intends to uphold his more tedious, yet nonetheless effective deconstruction. Continuing, she introduces the influences of ideology, power, interest, desire, upon the S/subject and object. All of her critique on past authors works well in the fact that, she is addressing an issue (when she finally gets to it, about 20 pages in) that deals with class consciousness. The very idea of the subaltern calls into question relational issues with other class, societies, cultures, (colonialism) and power issues as well (colonial issues again). Her of the subaltern as a woman is a calculated step: meaning that she accurately brings out the distinct otherness of a woman in Indian hindu society. She spends time delving into Hindu mythology and the societal structures that result because of this. The proposes the question of can the subaltern speak while concomitantly proposing a sentence that can be problematized and scrutinized to her answer. The idea that white men and saving brown women from brown men; furthermore she introduces the flip side of the issue by the native, indian response/question of what if the brown woman wants to die.

She begins by introducing the history of British colonialism in India through education (and she includes a age from an essay we read). Next she explicates the act that she plans to address: the suicide of women upon their husbands funeral pyres. She explains how the british government, opposed the act through constitutional law. She addresses the various names that a woman may be called, and finally she uses a personal example to elucidate the point taht the subaltern cannot speak, and is not heard.

-Alright, this is where I'll just talk and try to sound as intelligent as I can. One of the difficulties was the differentiation between subject and object. I felt that she was long winded at times, spending time covering her explaining things that are extra and only applicable to those who operate in the high minded intellectual world.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an unsettling voice in literary theory and especially, postcolonial studies. She has describes herself as a ―practical deconstructionist feminist Marxist‖ and as a ―gadfly‖. She uses deconstruction to examine "how truth is constructed" and to deploy the assertions of one intellectual and political position (such as Marxism) to "interrupt" or "bring into crisis" another (feminism, for example). In her work, she combines ionate denunciations of the harm done to women, non-Europeans, and the poor by the privileged West with a persistent questioning of the grounds on which radical critique takes its stand. Her continual interrogation of assumptions can make Spivak difficult to read. But her restless critiques connect directly to her ethical aspiration for a "politics of the open end," in which deconstruction acts as a "safeguard" against the repression or exclusion of "alterities"-that is, people, events, or ideas that are radically "other" to the dominant worldview. She writes against the "epistemic violence" done by discourses of knowledge that carve up the world and condemn to oblivion the pieces that do not easily fit. Characteristically, she does not claim to avoid such violence herself; rather, she self-consciously explores structures of violence without assuming a final, settled position. Can the Subaltern Speak? "Can the Subaltern Speak?" may be Spivak's best-known essay; it is certainly her most controversial. Postcolonial critics, like many feminists, want to give silenced others a voice. But Spivak worries that even the most benevolent effort merely repeats the very silencing it aims to combat. After all, colonialists often thought of themselves as well-intentioned. Spivak points to the British outlawing of sati, the Hindu practice of burning a widow on her husband's funeral pyre. While this intervention saved some lives and may have given women a modicum In essence: a critical review of works and publications ranging from Marx to Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida, which criticize the Western, pedantic approach to eastern, colonial, anthropological studies. "[We] must conserve the subject of the west." (p.68) Pedantic and often condescending overtures regarding the colonial dominance of the "Other(s)" by the "Subject(s')" acquisition of knowledge The "Others" The dominated group: could be an entire nationality or a sub-demographic such as women, children, et cetera. ( The "Subjects" Dominant colonial power Can be representative/metaphorical The "Subaltern" A synonym for lover class "Conserve the Subject of The West" "Subaltern Studies Group" Create a 4-part caste system (India) Macaulay‟s quote: "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 color, but English in taste…” Refrain from having Lowest classes understand capitalistic system Separation and further disillusionment of worker = less chance of servile insurrection (Marxist)

Representation/Re-presentation Flaws of Focault & Deleuze: "Two sides of representation are being run together: representation as „speaking for‟, as in politics, and representation as „re-presentation‟, as in art or philosophy Since the theory is also only „action‟, the theoretician does not represent (speak for) the oppressed group" "Their representative must appear simultaneously as their master… as unrestricted governmental power" "Conserve the Subject of The West" Representation/Re-presentation Underlying Concepts Western ideals regarding verdantly used for system of control Knowledge is exportable like other commodities (Marx) Can the Subaltern speak? Do even virtuous attempts at propagating knowledge become inherently racists or inadvertently discriminatory? Dues true altruism exist?

Spivak is perhaps best known for her landmark essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1985) in which she comes to the controversial and often misunderstood conclusion that "the subaltern cannot speak." By this phrase, Spivak means that those individuals in the most extreme positions of marginalization have no way of having their voices heard, and of becoming visible through any process of self-representation. Such circumstances arguably arise out of a powerful capitalist narrative which writes into the margins all those who do not fit its story. This is problematic because if the subaltern cannot be heard, read, or seen, then she also cannot claim personal or political autonomy; she is effectively barred from realizing any kind of meaningful selfhood or agency. Some of Spivak's other well-known ideas include "transnational literacy" and "strategic essentialism," the latter being when oppressed groups may temporarily assume an identity based on a single dimension (i.e., being a woman, being a Pakistani, being a lesbian) in order to achieve certain political goals. Also notable is Spivak's work as a translator, which includes a translation of French philosopher Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) as well as three short stories by the Indian writer Mahasweta Devi, published in the book Imaginary Maps (1994). Despite the fact that Spivak is sometimes criticized for her obscure, inaccessible writing style, her work still manages to reach a diverse global activist audience. Although she currently holds a teaching position at Columbia University, Spivak spends a good deal of her time travelling, engaging in what she calls "fieldwork." This fieldwork includes training teachers in different parts of rural India and Bangladesh as part of a larger campaign for rural literacy. She also speaks to farmers in these areas about issues of ecological injustice and about the "sacredness" of Nature. Spivak identifies the rural (as opposed to the urban) as the real front of globalization. In particular, she argues that through such mechanisms as seed and fertilizer control, genetic engineering, and the patenting of indigenous knowledge, the rural landscape of the Global South has become a site of intensified globalization — much to the detriment of the local peoples and land. As a way of addressing what she sees as the destructive realities of globalization, Spivak offers the counter concept "planetarity," to which she devotes a chapter of her book Death of a Discipline (2003). Spivak argues that the popular conception of globalization as the financialization and computerization of the globe leads to a vicious system of exploitation, whereby it is assumed that the globe (as a kind of imaginary terrain that exists only on our computers) can and should be controlled to produce capitalist gains. Planetarity, on the other hand, is a more sensitive and attuned way of understanding the materiality of the world and our collective place and responsibility as humans within it. Spivak suggests that rather than being global agents we should instead imagine ourselves as planetary subjects, inhabiting a planet that is merely "on loan" to us. The first is ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ (1988). This essay argues that ―there is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak‖, meaning that colonised women experience a double subjection due to their race and gender, and are therefore silenced. (The ―subaltern‖ means an oppressed subject). In response, Benita Parry argues that Spivak assigns too much power to the hegemonic discourse in constituting and disarticulating the native woman. She believes that ―the subaltern cannot speak‖ is derived from general statements in which the subaltern woman is conceived as a single and homogeneous category, and that there are ways that these women have articulated their

presence. However, in a later interview, Spivak explained that ―the subaltern cannot speak‖ means the subaltern cannot be heard by the privileged of either the First or Third Worlds. If she were heard, she would cease to be subaltern. The second often quoted essay is ―Three women's texts and a critique of imperialism‖ (1985). This essay contains a critique ofCharlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, where she argues that Jane Eyre's progress throughout the novel is predicated upon the violent effacement of the Creole woman Bertha Mason. She places this as indicative of feminism's lack of engagement with the Third World. Spivak seeks social change through her work. One of her most important arguments is about ―unlearning‖ racism and privilege. She states that our privileges, whatever they may be in of race, class, nationality, or gender may prevent us from gaining a certain kind of Other knowledge: not simply information that we have not yet received, but the knowledge that we are not equipped to understand by reason of our social positions. To ―unlearn‖ one's privilege is a vital step that marks the beginning of an ethical relation to the Other. Spivak's style can be impenetrable and off-putting for those initially coming to her work. When reading Spivak, it can be useful to also read what other scholars have said about her work and how they have interpreted it. It is worth persevering with Spivak even if she can be difficult, as she has had a profound influence on multicultural studies, postcolonial studies and feminist theory.

The subaltern cannot speak. — From "Can the Subaltern Speak?" This pithy answer to the question posed in my essay's title has gotten me into some serious trouble over the years. It's been read out of context, treated like a sound bite, and very badly misunderstood. As I explain yet again in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, I define the subaltern as the person "removed from all lines of social mobility." That is, the subaltern is barred from access to all public resources that would allow for upward movement, out of dire poverty and into political invisibility. (Check out the "Buzzwords" section for more on what I mean by subaltern.) My whole point in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" is that you can't simply makethe subaltern visible or lend her a voice. (Heads up: the subaltern is very often, though not quite always, gendered female in my work… because women the world over are still structurally subordinated to men.) But just to make sure you've all got it into your heads this time, I'll say it again: there's no quick fix for inequality. And if the subaltern is to be taught to speak, as I believe she must be, humanitarian efforts (wouldbe quick fixes) won't cut it. We also need what I call "infrastructural followup." This followup, often taking the form of public schools, will do long-term good by manifesting our commitment to improving the material conditions of far-away lives and honing the mental skills of far-away young people. (SeeA Critique of Post-Colonial Reason for more on infrastructural followup.) Lots of European theorists—smart ones, too, like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze—didn't get this memo. They thought they could access the subaltern's voice directly. My essay tries to show why this project is doomed to fail. And it's not because the subaltern cannot pronounce words or produce sentences. The subaltern "cannot speak," instead, because her speech falls short of fully authorized, political speech. Too much gets in the way of her message's being heard, socially and politically.

What gets in the way, you ask? Well, first there's the subaltern's lack of access to institutionally validated language. Not everyone grows up knowing how to write and talk like a scholar, right? Then there's the European theorist's sense that he knows what the subaltern will say when she goes to speak, because he knows what's good for her. Sometimes, when I read the classics, I feel like their authors are saying, "Sit down, little girl, and let the big boys talk business." Gross. Anyway, I've got truckloads (bookloads?) to say on this topic, so just go read some of my other work if you want to know more about what stands between a subaltern and her true "voice." White men are saving brown women from brown men. – From "Can the Subaltern Speak?" "Wait, what?" is the common reaction to this quote. Yep, this little sentence has gotten me in a lot of trouble as well. (I've never been one to shy away from controversy.) Maybe I should have been more moderate in my wording here, but I needed people to snap their imperialist heads up from their desks and listen here. This sentence aims to convey how certain brands of feminism—and cultural gender norms more generally—become an excuse for colonial and neo-colonial forms of violence. So, when white men are all like, "Hey, you! Yeah, you Third World Women, you! You look oppressed! Why don't you come live in our super progressive (but still sexist, heyo) First World countries and be free from harm? Why don't you come marry us and be free from harm?" they're actually further silencing the subaltern. These seeming acts of benevolence are actually acts of violence. This is because the privileged male theorists in this example are, in a way, claiming to know how Third World women think and feel, what they desire, and so on. So the quote highlights how European and American academics are often quick to try to save Third World women, when their idea of "saving" might not be what these women want at all. In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" I show how white men attempted to save brown women from brown men in colonial India. At the time, natives were defined as barbaric, and the British intervened to "save" Indian women from their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons. Later, I argued that this happened again in the post-9/11 American "war on terror," a war that I believe aims not only to redeem the nation but also to "save" women oppressed by Islam. This kind of thinking makes me squirm. Yeah, this is heavy stuff. I may be shaking up some of what you came to this page believing: certain ideas about what happened when, what gender oppression looks like, and what wars are about. But, in my opinion, if you're feeling uncomfortable, confused, or scared, you're doing something right. Of course, I don't deny that women are oppressed the world over. What I do deny is the right of "civilizing" or colonizing projects to claim to rescue and free women from this oppression. So I composed my firecracker of a sentence—"White men are saving brown women from brown men"— to put people on their guard, and to get them to ask of future civilizing missions: is this really about saving women? Or is it about a superpower further consolidating its power, and denying others speech?

The impossible solution is the infinite unguaranteed patience to learn to learn from below how to teach the subaltern. – From "What's Left of Theory?" now in An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization Now you know why people call me impossible… and sometimes even have the nerve to ridicule my hard-to-read writing style. But the joke's on those fools in the end, if you ask me. Because if they learned to learn the patience to read me, they'd be sharper thinkers for it—and better, more ethical, people, I might add! In any case, in this quote, I am continuing my discussion of the subaltern two decades after writing "Can the Subaltern Speak?" But here, in 2000, I state explicitly that we do need to "teach the subaltern." Lots of people misread my earlier essay as a demand that the subaltern be allowed to stay in her place. Nuh-uh. That wasn't what I was saying at all, and I've spilled a lotta ink in my later work clearing up that unfortunate misunderstanding. Keeping the subaltern in her place is no solution. , the subaltern is excluded from all kinds of institutions, including democratic ones, and we want her to have a role in the governance of herself and others. In fact, we want everyone to be able to govern; that's true democracy after all. So a desire to keep the subaltern in her place would be antidemocratic, and that's just crazy talk IMO. What we need to do is figure out how to best teach the subaltern so that she can become literate, and eventually govern. But we can't teach her in a top-down way, European Scholar Tells Third World Brown Woman What To Do-style. On the contrary, we need to unlearn our intellectual prejudices in the encounter with the subaltern. Otherwise we're not "learning to learn to teach" her, we're just lecturing. And even if I've been known to get up on my soapbox from time to time, do as I say, not as I do, okay? When you teach, don't hold forth. Learn to learn. I call this solution to the problems of global capitalism "impossible" not because I think it really can't be done. If there weren't any hope for it, I wouldn't be prescribing this medication for all that ails ye ole subaltern. I say that because "learning to learn" ain't easy. We're used to imagining solutions as quick fixes, but my work is all about encouraging a shift in this way of thinking. You see, real revolution happens slowly, one school, and even one student, at a time. The meaning of the figure is undecidable, and yet we must attempt to dis-figure it, read the logic of the metaphor. We know that the figure can and will be literalized in yet other ways. All around us is the clamor for the rational destruction of the figure, the demand for not clarity but immediate comprehensibility by the ideological average. This destroys the force of literature as a cultural good. Anyone who believes that a literary education should still be sponsored by universities must allow that one must learn to read. And to learn to read is to learn to dis-figure the undecidable figure into a responsible literality, again and again. — From Death of a Discipline When I start with a word like "undecidable," you may be tempted to throw the book across the room. I know, I know, I've seen it all before: you're afraid you'll never decide what on earth I'm talking about.

But bear with me. If you spend a bit of time—okay, maybe a whole lot of time—with my texts, they'll reward you. I'm no Jacques Lacan. But I do value difficulty in writing, as this age both shows (with how it's written) and tells (with what it's written about). A bit of background: I am a staunch defender of the social good of literature and a firm believer that education in the humanities is crucial to the building of a better world. We cannot imagine a future that is different and better than the present if we cannot imagine, period. And we cannot imagine unless our imaginations are trained by what I call, in the age above, learning to read. Now, what's all this business about the figure and dis-figuring? Can't make head or tails of the above prose, which itself looks dis-figured to you? My heart goes out to you, reader, but only to a degree. Keep up with me now and ya might learn something. Literature, in the above age, is the repository or container for figures. The demand for "immediate comprehensibility by the ideological average" comes from business, finance, philanthropy, science, mainstream politics, and other sectors that can't accommodate the "undecidable" as this is figured in literature. Oh, and I borrow the word "undecidable" from Derrida, who uses it to name the uncertainty behind any decision. See, deconstructionism teaches us that there will always be undecidability lurking in every choice. Once you deconstruct the classics of great literature and social theory, it can be pretty hard to find anything to believe in, 100%, without a doubt. Doubt is good, you know? And this goodness of doubt explains why it's crucial to invest in literature. Literature teaches us to live with the undecidable, rather than ignore it in the rush to do something certain, be something certain. Ideology is all about "I am X (woman, Indian, …), hear me roar!" But as us dedicated deconstructionists have said before, the seed of activism lies not in knowing, but in not knowing. That any reader will waste the time to parse the desires (not the needs) of collective examples of subalternity is my false hope. — From the introduction to An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization This sentence ends the hefty introduction to my latest collection of essays, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. It sounds a sad note, because I've become more and more hopeless as the years have ed, global capital has conquered all, and Marx's dream of world equality has come to seem ever more remote. Impossible, even. Notice that I'm still fighting the good fight. I'm continuing to draw attention to the subaltern, as I have since the beginning. But, this time, I'm trying to shift the focus from the "needs" of subaltern groups to their "desires." I do this because so much humanitarian work thinks the job is done when it has met, or begun to meet, what privileged white people in air-conditioned offices think are the needs of the global poor.

This kind of humanitarianism acts as though the subaltern can't even have desires—they have only needs. By forgetting that everyone has desires, First World Humanitarianism forgets the whole question of education, which I define elsewhere as the "rearrangement of desire." To "parse the desires" of subaltern groups is, therefore, to look closely at how these groups imagine the world, valuing their differences from Euro-American and capitalist ways of "worlding." But it's not enough to ooh and aah and say, "Isn't that subaltern beautiful?" Or: "Look, how cute, she speaks!" No. You have to learn from the subaltern even as you're bringing her into democracy through education. Your desire has to be rearranged, just like hers.

his is a short discussion on 'subaltern' studies (i.e. people interested in postcolonial societies) and a method of inquiry for post-colonial feminist studies. The author looks at whether subaltern can speak or not through the example of women in post colonial world. She discusses the role of colonization in discourse formation (without actually calling it a discourse formation). In short, she approaches the problem from a literary criticism point. She first gives the example of 'poor,black,female' (as an example of expression). He then underlines (pretty much like S. Hall) color is useless in the context of third world. Moreover "the post-colonial intellectual systematically unlearns female privilige" (p.549 3rd edition) So, then what can we do to unmute subaltern women? Culler talks about producing difference by differing or appealing to a sexual identity defined as essential and privilege experiences associated with that identity. Spivak refuses this understanding. (Here is where I get completely confused). She starts comparing theory with positivism/essentialism. She gives the example of Hindu women and how some practices were abolished by colonists (White men saving brown women from brown men.) This so-called protection of woman is then somehow considered as a sign of good society (equity of legal policy). Summary quote: I remain generally sympathetic in aligning feminism with the critique of positivism and the defetishization of the concrete....I tactically confronted the immense problem of the consciousness of the woman as subaltern....The analogy here is between the ideological victimization of a Freud and the positionality of the postcolonial intellectual as investigating subject.