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Introduction
1
universalist, and colonial. In this new epistemological context, the act of representation becomes
multifaceted, fragmentary, deconstructive and postcolonial.
It was Michel Foucault who theorized the interconnection between text and the question of
power in the postmodern epistemological context. Foucault unsettled the settled notions of
(modern) historiography which categorized or ill-treated the ‘subjugated’.4 For Foucault, the
insurrection of the ‘contested knowledges’ of the ‘subjugated’ invoke new resistances and
politics. Jean-Francois Lyotard, in the same vein of thought, criticizes the modern
historiography as metanarrative. By metanarrative he means, “master stories that serves as a
comprehensive narratives, which subordinate, organize and account for other narratives. For
Lyotard, the authoritative, over-arching, and totalizing narratives are no longer tenable because
they reject and invalidate the difference of the local/ little narratives that hesitate to be
accommodated, appropriated, and emplotted.5 Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction shook the
Euro-centric epistemic foundation, through which modernity rationalized the existence of ‘non-
European,’ ‘variations,’ ‘aberrations,’ and ‘marginal identities.’ Deconstruction brings out the
politics behind the construction of meaning and the desire for representation of the ‘other’ in the
historiography and culture. It was this post-humanist epistemological context that enriched the
insurrection of the postcolonial knowledges and historiographies from the ‘non-European’
peoples and cultures. Postcolonial historiography envisages a radical turn in the writing of
history and politics locally and globally.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, as a literary critic and political theorist, locates herself in this wider
spectrum of post-humanist theoretical location. Engaging with Edward Said, Spivak addresses
the question of ‘worlding’ and ‘othering’ in historiography in order to expose the unequal power
relationships embodied in the representation of the West’s Other-the ‘Third World’ and the Third
World’s Other –the subaltern. Critiquing both postcolonial and poststructural engagement to
‘speak for’ the subaltern, Spivak argues that there is no ‘unrepresented’/ ‘essentialist’ subaltern
who can know, speak, and represent themselves in history, culture and politics. Spivakian theory
of subalternity makes its representation impossible and at the same time denies any kind of
2
essentialist position of subaltern identity. This ‘im/possible subalternity’ makes Spivakian
method unique in the question of representation and thus signals a methodological shift in the
hermeneutical program of historiography, culture, politics, theology, and philosophy.
The Spivakian methodology is highly informed and influenced by three theoretical frameworks:
Marxism, postcolonialism and deconstruction which constitute the triadic theoretical foci of her
methodology. However, Spivak offers a feminist critique of all these theories and even re-
locates feminism itself in a subverted way. Spivak may use one theory of this triadic focus to
interrogate the other and adopts a novel method of interchanging and exchanging of theoretical
gift to envisage a deconstructive, interdisciplinary and trans-theoretical methodological approach
of feminism. Even though she is designated as one among the ‘postcolonial trinity,’ Spivak
hesitates to be located as a postcolonialist.7 One of the main reasons for this rejection of the
label ‘postcolonial’ is an increasing recognition that postcolonial theory focuses too much on
past forms of colonial domination, and is therefore inadequate to criticize the impact of
contemporary global economic domination of the economic agencies of the West on the
economies and societies of the global South.8
At the same time, Spivak’s relationship with deconstruction is very complex and contestatory.
Spivak’s use of deconstruction is to question the cultural and philosophical foundations of the
Western imperialism. Spivak uses an ‘affirmative deconstruction’ in order to exemplify how
textuality justifies colonial expansion and thereby intersects postcolonialism and deconstruction
for an effective political hermeneutics. Spivak has been persistently critical of the universalist
claims of Western feminist thoughts to represent all women, rather than acknowledging its
culturally partial and relatively privileged position. She warns the Western deconstructionist
feminism not to become ‘complicit with an essentialist bourgeois feminism.’9 Spivak exhorts the
‘first world’ feminists to learn to stop feeling privileged as a woman.10 What she is intended to
do with feminism is to re-locate the gendered subaltern/ the Third World women/ the marginal
women and to emphasize the differential, dispersed, and heterogeneous location of women. In
short, Marxist-deconstructionist-feminist epistemology seems to be her methodological focal
point through which she tries to attend the issues of the representation of the colonized,
disempowered, marginalized and disenfranchised women in the complex context of
postcolonialism, postmodernism and globalization.
Spivak’s use of the term ‘subaltern’ is primarily informed by the work of the Italian Marxist
thinker Antonio Gramsci on the rural-based Italian peasantry and the research off the
international Subaltern Studies collective11 on the histories of subaltern insurgency in colonial
and postcolonial South Asia. The Italian term subalterno, as used by Gramsci, translates roughly
as “subordinate” or “dependent.”12 Gramsci used this term to question the received Marxist
emphasis on the urban proletariat and economy neglecting the culture and the consciousness of
the peasantry. The peasantry was dynamic and numerically predominant in Gramsci’s Italy and
3
thus Gramsci wanted to bring them into the alliance with the revolutionary forces in the city.
According to Gramsci it is the responsibility of the intellectual “to search out signs of subaltern
initiative and incipient class identity that could be nurtured and educated into true class
consciousness and effective political action.”13 In the program of the Subaltern Studies
Collective, this Gramscian category was extended to “the general attribute of subordination in
South Asian society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or
in any other way.” 14
The subaltern has been used by the Subaltern Study Collective as a category that cut across
several kinds of political and cultural binaries such as colonialism vs. nationalism, or
imperialism vs. indigenous cultural expression, in favor of a more general distinction between
subaltern and elite.15 For them, it was a category that points to the subordinate sections-the
marginalized-the Dalits, the Tribals, the Adivasis, the farmers, the unorganized laborers, the
minorities, the women etc. who have not been considered as subjects of their own histories and
consciousness in the colonial and national elite historiographies.16 Spivak argues that the
subaltern in the early Ranajit Guha of the Collective was the name of a space of difference;
although Guha seems to be saying that the words “people” and “subaltern” are interchangeable.17
By reviewing the Subaltern Study Collective, Spivak proposes a new definition of subalternity-
subalternity as ‘identity-in-difference’, as it charts two distinct but related problems of othering,
the first concerning the politics of identity and the second contemplating an ethics of alterity.18
In her essays ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’ and ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’
Spivak offers a productive critique of the theoretical methodology of the Subaltern Study
Collective and there by proposes a revised version of Subalternity. These essays have been
revised and incorporated in the expansive “History” chapter of A Critique of Postcolonial
Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp.
198-312) published in 1999.19 In this chapter, Spivak exposes the exclusions and the gapes in
the representation of the subaltern subject in the colonial and postcolonial historical records.
First, the essay addresses the question of the ‘worlding’ of the ‘native’ or the formation the
‘other’ by the European self.20 It is the colonial epistemological trajectory, Spivak argues that,
through which the ‘other’ comes to know and narrate its ‘self.’ It is the moment in which the
colonial authority speaks for/ as ‘the native’-the other becomes self. Here Spivak destabilizes
both colonial and postcolonial representations of subaltern identity that can provide an “authentic
voice” in history. As Ritu Birla clearly contents, it is a call to “quit-other,” or the problem of
alterity, that is, that which escapes consolidation into narrative and identity.21
4
Deleuze who endeavor to produce a radical critique of the Western subject or an authentic
postcolonial subject by exposing their double incapacity to recognize the ‘non-universality’ of
the Western position and the constitutive space of the gender in the formation of the subaltern
subject.22 By rereading Marx through the lens of Derrida, Spivak brings out the Marxian
dichotomy between Vertreten (proxy) and darstellen (portrait), and exposes the politics and
dilemma of representation. Spivak rejects both the idea that “the masses” are known to
themselves and able to make their interests manifest politically (Foucault and Deleuze), and the
idea that intellectuals can fulfill their political responsibility by representing or speaking for the
masses (Marx). Spivak’s criticism on the postcolonial method of the Subaltern Study Collective
who draws heavily on Foucault-Deleuze conversation is that by constituting a self-speaking
postcolonial subject as an ‘essentialist other’, and trying to speak for them, in effect, the ‘true
subaltern’ becomes silent. Spivak here problematizes the ‘radical autonomy’ / the claim of the
authenticity of the “real experience” of the subaltern and on the other hand, signifies its ‘radical
alterity’ and ‘irreducible difference.’
Spivak rejects any kind of essentialist notion of subaltern subjectivity and asserts that there is no
such essentialist postcolonial subject who can speak and know their conditions by themselves.
She contends that “there is no unrepresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself”
and asks, “With what voice-consciousness can the subaltern speak?”23 Spivakian thesis is
double bind; on the one hand, she argues that the colonialists and postcolonials have
misrepresented the subaltern subject and on the other hand, there cannot be an ‘essentialist
subaltern subject’ to speak against the colonial representation as it was proposed by the
Subaltern Study Collective. It is out of this epistemological context, the Spivakian thesis arises:
“The subaltern cannot speak themselves”24 which indicates the ‘irreducibility’ and the
‘untranslatability’ of subalternity in historiography and politics.
Spivak exemplifies this ‘shadowing’ of the voice of the subaltern women by narrating the story
of the suicide of a young woman-Bhubaneswari Bhaduri- in Calcutta in 1926. Bhubaneswari
Bhaduri was a young woman of sixteen or seventeen; she hanged herself in her father’s house.
She was menstruating at the time, which would indicate that she was not pregnant. Years later it
emerged that she had killed herself because she had been unable to carry out a mission for a
revolutionary group of which she was a member. According to Spivak, Bhubaneswari’s suicide
was an act of subaltern re-writing of the social text of Sati-suicide.26 Yet the “message” self-
inscribed on her body was not read. “She ‘spoke,’ but women did not, do not, ‘hear her.”27
Thus, Spivak argues that the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read even though they speak
or write.
Spivak here problematizes the dilemma of the subaltern subject who even tried to speak or re-
inscribe something on her body. According to Spivak, the silence of the subaltern women is not
a failure of articulation but the result of the failure of representation.28 The point here is not that
subalterns do not know how to speak for themselves; rather, the claim on the part of the
intellectual that subalterns can and do speak for themselves stands in favor of their civilizing
mission of benevolence while occluding the question of audibility. Spivak argues, while the
intellectuals’ claim that the subaltern can speak for themselves, they assume the position of
‘proxy’ and the absence/ presence of the subaltern voice remains as aporia-the im/possibility.
Subalternity according to Spivak is a sheer space of this aporia-the im/possibility where the
possibility and the impossibility of absence and presence, voice and viocelessness, essentialism
and constructionism coincides each other. It is here Spivak’s most controversial phrase comes in
to the discussion-‘the strategic use of positive essentialism.’
It is out of this theoretical lacuna of representation, Spivak proposes what she calls the ‘strategic
use of positive essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest’.29 Spivak explained it
latter in an interview where she denied any kind of theoretical sanction for essentialism.30 She
warns that it can be used as a theoretical alibi for proselytizing academic essentialisms. For her
it is not a theory but a strategy or tactic fitting a specific situation. It is a political space of
alterity and difference which has nothing to do with identitarianism. As she remarks in the
interview: “I think identitarianism ignores what is most interesting about being alive, that is to
say, being angled towards the other. I therefore found that it was unfortunate that people liked
that phrase (‘strategic essentialism’).”31 On this Spivakian phrase, Stephen D. Moore and
6
Mayra Rivera comment: “rather than assuming that action flows naturally from identity, strategic
essentialism acknowledges the employment of or appeal to an essentialized concept of identity,
however deconstructible, as a sometimes necessary political tactic.”32
What Spivak reiterates is that subalternity is a political position-a ‘decolonized space’ without
identity through which the subalterns are speaking and resisting. She defines the word -subaltern
as the “sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space”33 and denies it as a synonym for the word
“oppressed”. Spivak explained this in a recent interview with some of the postcolonial
theologians at Drew University: “if the subaltern speaks, and it is heard; then he or she is not a
subaltern.”34 Subaltern speaks, but, she argues, ‘it is not heard” and of course “it cannot be
heard”. By defining ‘speaking’ as ‘transaction between the speaker and the listener,’ 35 Spivak
contents that “Bhubaneswari has spoken in some way”, but “it is effaced even as it is
disclosed.”36
For Spivak, Subalternity is a ‘rhetorical space,’ that cut across any essentialist position in terms
of caste, class, gender and nationality. Spivakian subalternity is a “secrete”-the irreducible
alterity—the (im)possible. If subaltern speaks, it demands deconstruction; because it is “an
Echo.”37 According to Spivak, ‘Echo’ is an attempt to give gendered subaltern a space to
deconstruct her out of the representation and non-representation, however imperfectly. The
intellectuals, who defend for the autonomy of the subaltern voice, stand for their civilizing
mission of benevolence and speak for the subalterns and the make the true subaltern silent. The
true subalternity is a ‘secrete,’ ‘Echo’, which is ‘indefinable’ and ‘unrepresentable.’ As it is
exemplified in the case of Bhaduri, it is beyond our gaze, cognition, and representation, because;
it lies in the realm of death. It lies ‘in-between’ representation and non-representation. It is ‘in
between’ human right slogans and the desire for the infinite justice-the justice to come. Thus, for
Spivak, subalternity is the im/possibility that makes the subaltern voice or viocelessness a
possibility in the contemporary social engagements. What is most dynamic in the assumption of
Spivakian subalternity, it destabilizes the ‘epistemic violence’ of the ‘othering’ of the subaltern
and it postpones the ‘truth’ of subalternity in order to rescue it from any kind of representation in
history, culture, and politics.
Conclusion
Spivak problematizes the representation of subaltern in historiography, culture and politics. For
that purpose, Spivak uses an interdisciplinary method that spans between Marxism,
postmodernism, postcolonialism and feminism. Spivak offers a radical critique to any kind of
approach that easily appropriates, accommodates, and emplotes the ‘subaltern consciousness’ in
the name of obligation, duty or solidarity. Spivakian subalternity is a ‘decolonized space,’ where
any kind of ‘worlding’ or ‘othering’ is being denied. Voicing against the silencing and the
foreclosure of the subaltern, Spivak upholds the irreducibility and the alterity of the subalternity
which cannot be emplotted. Spivakian method of writing history is neither objective nor
subjective; rather ‘in between.’ This ‘in between’ space is a ‘dialogical space’ where the
7
relationship between the historian and the historicized are re-imagined and re-constituted. It is
the ‘deconstructive space’ where the historian becomes no-historian and it is the ‘postcolonial
space’ where the historicized denies any kind of fixity of subjectivity. It is here, as Wolfgang Iser
contends, we recognize the representation as an act of performance through which we re-define
ourselves not on the basis of the other. Writing historiography demands a self-interruption
(kenosis) within the historian before he or she inters into the act of representation which is
nothing but a political activity. Historiography has never been an innocent activity whether it is
colonial or postcolonial. Spivakian subalternity is an ‘im/possible space’ in which the historian
tries to listen to the silence-the echo-the secrete of the silenced. It is here the act of writing
history becomes an act of im/possibility.
Notes
1
Wolfgang Iser, “Representation: A Performative Act”, in The Aims of Representation, Subject/ Text/ History edited
by Murray Krieger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 232.
2
Edward Siad, Orientalism, (London: Routledge, 1978).
3
For a detailed study on humanism and post-humanism, see Patrick Fuery and Nick Mansfield, Cultural Studies and
Critical Theories (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
4
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 96.
5
See Willie Thompson, Postmodernism and History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Emplotment is the
concept propounded by Hayden White who draws attention to the reality that any historical narrative requires to be
represented in a manner that is analogous to certain forms of literature. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The
Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: MD, 1973).
6
Edward Said, Orientalism, 6.
7
Edward Said and Homi Bhabha are the two other most influential exemplars of postcolonial theory.
8
Stephen Morton, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Ethics, Subalternity and the Critique of Postcolonial Reason
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 2
9
Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987), 132.
10
Ibid., 136
11
It was a group of historians who aimed to promote a systematic discussion of subaltern themes in South Asian
Studies. The group-formed by Ranajit Guha, and initially including Shahid Amin, David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee,
David Hardiman and Gyan Pandey-has produced five volumes of Subaltern Studies: essays relating to the history,
politics, economics and culture of subalternity.
12
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
(New York: International Publishers, 1971), 52-120.
13
Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 28. Stephen Morton argues that “it is hard to read
Gramsci’s use of the term subaltern only as a simple code –word for the more familiar Marxist category of
proletarian; rather it seems to precisely denote subordinate group such as the rural peasantry in Southern Italy,
whose achievement of social and political consciousness was limited and their political unity weak.” See, Stephen
Morton, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 96.
14
Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies, Vol.I, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1982), vii
15
Bill Ashcroft, et al. Post-Colonial Studies; The Key Concepts (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 218
16
For a detailed study of the epistemological trajectories of the category-subalternity in the theoretical methodology
of the Subaltern Study Collective, see the introductory essay ‘A brief History of Subalternity’ in Reading Subaltern
Studies, edited by David Ludden (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 1-42
17
Spivak, ‘Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular,’ Postcolonial Studies, 8 (4) (2005): 476
8
18
Ritu Birla, “Postcolonial Studies,” in Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea, edited by
Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 87-99
19
Spivak’s most controversial essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” exists in different forms. It was first published in
1985 and revised in Marxism and the Interpretation of Cultures, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg
(pp. 271-313) in 1988. Here, I will examine the updated version of this text appeared in the expansive “History”
chapter of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1999), pp. 198-312.
20
‘Worlding’ is Spivak’s term for the process whereby a colonizing agent assimilates a subject people through acts
of epistemic violence, such as naming or remapping. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 211-212.
21
Ritu Birla, “Postcolonial Studies,” 88
22
I Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 252
23
Ibid. 262
24
Ibid., 273
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid, 307
27
Ibid.,247
28
Ibid., 72-74.
29
Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, 205
30
Chakravorty, Milevska, and Barlow, Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (London and New York:
Seagull Books, 2006), 64
31
Ibid., 64
32
Stephen D. Moore and Mayra Rivera, eds., Planetary Loves: Spivak, Postcoloniality, and Theology (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2011), 10-11
33
Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 310
34
Spivak, The Post-Colonial critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. By Sarah Harasym (New York: Rutledge,
1990), 158. This idea is reiterated in her discussion with the postcolonial theologians recently. See Stephen D.
Moore and Mayra Rivera, eds., Planetary Loves, 145-6
35
Spivak, ‘Subaltern Talk’, in The Spivak Reader, eds Donna Laudry and Gerald Maclean, (New York and London:
Routledge, 1996), 289
36
Spivak, ‘Introduction’, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds, Selected Subaltern Studies, (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), 11
37
See, Spivak, ‘Echo’, The Spivak Reader, 177