Gayatri Spivak (1942)

• Has described herself as a "practical deconstructionist feminist Marxist".
• explores how truth is constructed through deconstruction
• deploys the arguments of one intellectual / political position to interrupt another
• focuses on denouncing the harm done to women, non-Europeans and poor people done by the West, while constantly putting into question the base on which radical critique makes its argument
• her ethical aspiration is a "politics of the open end"
  • she wishes to use deconstruction as a protection against the exclusion of others
• She translated Derrida’s Of Grammatology into English
• introduced French theory into American and British literature departments between the 70s and 80s.
• because deconstruction fought the hierarchical binaries’ violence , it could allow a passage from literary theory to radical politics.
• within feminism she studied silenced women and then within Marxism, her concern was extended to the political, economic and cultural oppression of non-white people.

Can the Subaltern Speak?

• best known, most controversial essay
• Intellectuals’ role in the constitution of the other as a shadow of the self.
• interest in marking critics’ positionality when investigating subjects
• critics may have interest in giving silenced subjects a voice, but may be silencing them themselves in spite of good intentions
  • colonialist often thought they were doing a good deed.
  • Applies Foucault’s concept of "epistemic violence" to the project of constituting a colonial subject as the Other
    • intellectual power functions discursively to produce the subject which then subjugates
    • not all alternative discourses can be dispelled
    • Intellectuals often try to offer counterdiscourses with which they try to connect to the acts of resistance of the oppressed
    • Postcolonial studies are an attempt at enabling the other to experience and articulate the parts of themselves which fall outside what the dominant discourse has constituted as its subjecthood
    • She thinks this enterprise cannot succeed
    • she uses the term subaltern for its connotations in the experience of Kipling, who often viewed imperialism from this ambivalent position, caught between superiors he hated and natives he feared
    • Then Gramsci adopted the term to name the unorganized masses that need to be politicized for the revolution to succeed
    • Later in India the word was named to create a group of historians who study the disenfranchised peoples of India. Spivak herself maintains relationships with this group
    • subaltern entails an ambiguous relationship with power, subordinating to it but never wholly consenting to its norms, never adopting the dominant point of view or vocabulary to express its own identity
    • however the subaltern subject is irretrievably heterogenous.
    • can this be articulated and by whom?
    • subalterns exist to some extent outside of power, and that is why they are often seen as a motor for change
  • but Spivak argues against the romanticization of the other by political movements (especially the idea that third world people must lead the fight against multinational global capitalism)
    • this is to repeat colonialism violence, which is to consider non-Westerns relevant insofar as they follow the Western script for them
    • further why should the least powerful involved in capitalism be the ones fighting it.
    • further, viewing all third world peoples as relating to capitalism in the same way and the idea that they should respond to it in the same way is essentialist.
      • Essentialism is the belief that a group of people or entities share the same essential unchanging quality that ensures their membership in a category.
        • feminist targeted essentialism and responded to it with difference feminism which meant to unite women across their differences and to leave behind a solidarity based on essential common experiences and qualities.
        • Spivak believed in strategic essentialism: sometimes it is strategically pertinent to make essentialist claims,and they are effective as long as one is aware that these are generalizations
      • Intellectuals who romanticize the oppressed essentialize the subaltern and in doing so reproduce the colonialist discourses they want to critique
      • a person’s group or identity is relational, there is no pure other, only the other in relation to the discourse that named it so
      • Spivak states that capitalism is triumphant, and that Western discourses organize the world. Not all are aligned, but because they are so many, they end up reinforcing the marginalization of nonwhite women
      • This picture is bleak, so she recurs to Freud for an answer as to how intellectual work should be
      • Freud helps us see:
        • how the identity of whiteness is created in part through the self-proclaimed benevolence of colonial action
        • the dangers of scapegoating or creating saviors
        • instead, keep the sentence open, do not immediately assign roles but try to understand the relationships between people in their complexity
        • in their claims intellectuals reveal their political interests. She and Freud, for example, speak from their place of belonging (albeit qualified by their experiences as minorities) and within the dominant discourse
        • the subaltern, instead, enters official and intelectual discourse rarely and usually through mediation of someone who is more at home in those discourses
        • Spivak offers a twist, stating that a historian can revisit certain events and "sketch the itinerary of the trace" that the silenced subaltern has left, should mark the sites where the subaltern was erased, and should delineate the discourses that did this erasing.
        • Spivak remains wary of representations, but a line of communication is desirable. Every discourse excludes something, she reserves the word subaltern to point to the heterogeneity of the of decolonized space
        • "moral love": the traces of these exclusion should haunt us, we should try to hear them in every utterance and to be willing to change to a new discourse that gets closer to the unspoken than the old ones (still, it will also have silences).

Criticism

• difficult style and leaves no place to stand
• no solution apart from openness (vague, theatrical, undiscriminating)
• continually dismantling one’s assumptions is privileged

From A critique of postcolonial reason. Chapter 3. History

• If the intelectual is complicit in the constitution of the other as the Self’s shadow
• Epistemic violence: the construction of the colonial subject as the Other
• One explanation and narrative of reality was established as normative
• the subaltern: anti essentialist category, a difference from elite.
• how about the intellectual?
  • attempt to represent the subaltern which can know and speak itself
  • but the subaltern cannot speak