3175806

8/8/2019 3175806

1/17

8/8/2019 3175806

2/17

Jenny SharpeGayatri Chakravorty Spivak

A Conversation with GayatriChakravortySpivak:Politicsand the Imaginationayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been instrumental n introducing a fem-inistagendato the fieldof postcolonial studiesand, in doing so, forcingwomen's studies to interrogate the underlyingprinciplestraditionallyrelied on for gender analysis.Whether addressingthe language of feministindividualismor the surreptitioussubjectof power and desire, she has neverlost sight of the women on the other side of the internationaldivision oflabor, while at the same time refusing an all-too-easyrecuperationof their

subjectivities.I first met Spivak n Austin, Texas, a little more than twenty years ago.As an entering freshman at the Universityof Texas,I was instructed to takea class with a new English professor, who, like me, was from India. I,resenting the assumption behind the recommendation, avoided studyingwith Spivak.But her reputation as a Marxist-feminist-deconstructionistasshe was known at the time) soon caught up with me, and I decided topursue a graduate degree and write a dissertation under her direction. Itwas the early 1980s, when the now-familiartermspostcolonialand colonialdiscourseanalysis were beginning to enter an academic vocabulary, andSpivakwas at the forefront of defining the emergent field. Since she leftthe University of Texas shortly thereafter,I continued working with heronly by traveling to places as scattered as Urbana-Champaign,Toronto,London, Houston, Middletown, and Ithaca. I still remember sitting in aclassroom at Cornell University,where she was a seniorfellow at the Societyfor the Humanities, and being transfixedby the most remarkablecritiqueof the subjectof knowledge and semiosisof woman in Foucault and Hindulaw. Little did I know that she was working through the argument thatwould become "Canthe SubalternSpeak?" 1988)-perhaps the most well-known, if misunderstood, of her writings.Spivak'scriticstook her phrasingof "the subalterncannot speak"to bea definitive statement rather than an interrogation of the academic effortto give the gendered subalterna voice in history. On revisingthe essayfor[Signs: Journal of Women n Culture and Society2002, vol. 28, no. 2]? 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2802-0008$10.00

8/8/2019 3175806

3/17

610 I Sharpe and Spivak

her book, A Critique of PostcolonialReason (1999), she characterizesher"passionate ament: the subalterncannot speak!"as "an inadvisableremark"(308). But she also notes that so many of the examples her critics gave ofthe subaltern speaking tended to equate subalternitywith women in thethird world or ethnic minorities in the United States, a conflation that heressaywas intended, in part, to critique. Indeed, one of the concerns of herrecent work is to show the complicity of diasporic South Asians with acorporate globalization that maintains subaltern women in a position ofsubalternity.I askedSpivakto return to the problem of speakingabout the genderedsubalternthat she first introduced in "Canthe SubalternSpeak?"She spoketo me of a need to attend to "intranational" ulturaldifferences betweenan elite South Asianbourgeoisie and the ruralpoor who have been bypassedby decolonization. She described what it meant to engage the everydaylives of subalterns,characterizing ieldworkas the only model for such anengagement. As Spivak spoke, it became clear to me that what is oftenidentified as her pessimism about social change is intended to offset theeuphoria of the political activistwho thinks that she is transformingruralwomen's everydaylives. Spivak'sdeconstructive thinking is evident in hercharacterizationof social change as being more provisionalthan one wouldlike to believe. But it is an affirmativedeconstruction that findsvalue in theneed for the ongoing work of a constant critique.This conversationtook place in Los Angeles in June 2001, while Spivakwas en route to her home in New York from Hong Kong via Sonoma,California,where she had just attended the "Crossing Borders Initiative,"a Ford Foundation meeting to consider the future of area studies. Theimprint of her travelsis clearlyvisible in the discussion we had. As Spivakdescribed to me her interaction with small farmersin ruralBengal, post-doctoral Chinese students at the Hong Kong University of Science andTechnology, and her students at Columbia University,her strategicuse ofwhat one might call a "politicsof the imagination"startedto emerge. TheSignseditors and I decided to call this conversation "Politicsand the Imag-ination" becausewe wanted to emphasizethe argumentthat Spivak s mak-ing about the imaginative power of corporate globalization and how itrequiresan equally forceful appealto the imagination for contestation.

Jenny Sharpe(JS): You have been most vocal against the tendency ofacademics to equate globalization with migrancy and diaspora.You insistthat the ruralis the new front of globalization through seed and fertilizercontrol, population control, microloans to women, to name a few in-stances. Can you elaborate some more on how you see the rural as the

8/8/2019 3175806

4/17

S I G N S Winter2003 1 611

new front of globalization and what this says about the kind of face weare giving to globalization in our critical discourse?Gayatri Spivak(GS): Things have become more specific since I wroteabout globalization understood as or presented as the movement of peo-ple. It seems to me that now there are four models of globalization thatare in circulation.First, that there is nothing new about it, in other words,that globalization is simplya repetition. Second, that globalization as suchcan be identified with the efforts of global governance signaled by theBretton Woods conference remotely inaugurating the postcolonial andthe postnational world. This is the more sophisticated face of the old

identifying-with-the-people movement. And the third model is that theentire globe is in a common culture fix, and its signature is urbanism. It'sagainst this one that I bring up the question of the rural. Finally, I dis-tinguish globalization from let's say "world trade." It is true that thetendency towards expansion is as old as the hills, but information tech-nology has given it a dimension which deserves a special name. The"globe" signifies some more abstract, more virtual thing, distinguishedfrom "world systems" by relating to the ascendancyof specificallyfinancecapital,competitive markets n negotiable instruments. This technologicalphenomenon is the condition and effect of the fall of the Berlin wall. Inother words, at that point, globalization is seen as a rupture. In these fourmodels we have a view of globalization from repetition to rupture. In thefourth one, we're not looking so much at the movement of money as themovement of data. Given this, I point out the virtualization of the rural,the conversion of the ruralinto data through the patenting of indigenousknowledge and through pharmaceutical nterests in seeds and populationcontrol. Indigenous peoples, for example, are fined by trade-related in-vestment and intellectual property measures, because they obviously hadnot patented their knowledge over the last few thousand years and sothat'sretroactivelyseen as anillegal tradepractice.Through the conversionof the phenomenon of the rural,not blue skies and green trees, into data,the rural front is a real front of globalization. The urban phenomenon,which is much more spectacular, s what is visible and instrumental.DonnaLandryhas recently commented on the fact that-in Britainat least-thecountryside was recoded for consumption by the GameAct of 1681 (Lan-dry2001). What I'm talkingabout displacesthe consumption/productionbinary into a virtuality that can include consumption as tourism.'JS: Is it the visibilityof urbancenters that accounts for ruralareasfallingoff the map of our critical discourse on globalization? I ask this because

1 See Meyda Yegenoglu's work on Turkey (forthcoming).

8/8/2019 3175806

5/17


if, as you indicate, the rural is a site of intensified globalization, it is whatwe should be talking about.GS:But you don't need them on an old-fashioned map, you need themon geographical information systems. I've been talking about this for sometime, and it doesn't seem to register.This relatesvery strongly to womenbecause ruralpractices, especiallyat the grassroots level, were quite oftenshared by women and men equally.Whereas field labor sometimes wentto men, though not exclusively, more of the conserving practices seemsto have gone to women. I'm not romanticizing the indigenous com-munities, what one might call aboriginal communities; I'm just sayingthat cultural conformity within those areas shows us patterns wherewomen are not necessarily inferior persons who are not active in whatone would call the "public sphere," even if it's not the public sphere aswe know it through European and colonial history. In that context, thevirtualization of the ruraland its transformationinto data within financecapital involves and does indeed obliterate women's practices. As a majorphenomenon within globalization, this does not seem to ring a bell be-cause it does not resemble the colloquial meaning of the word in thedictionary, which is then translated into simply "immigration patterns."And then of course you can move into the usual lines that have been inplace now for twenty-odd years for describing those patterns.

JS: It is well known that, as one of the largest developers of biotech-nology, the Monsanto Company patents its genetically engineered seedso that farmerswho use it are prevented from holding back a few seedsto plant the next year, which is a traditional practice. You have writtenabout how the incursion of biotechnology giants like Monsanto into SouthAsia has affected women.

GS:After a certain flood incident in Bangladesh, the handing out ofloans was made incumbent upon accepting only these engineered seeds.But that's just one instance. The way in which chemical fertilizers areinserted into the life cycle of rural folks as reward is quite staggering.JS: So what is transpiringunder the rubric of loans to rural areas is acertainkind of traditionaldomain, to use that phrase,of women being taken

awayfrom them.GS:Well, it's been recoded into another kind of discourse. And ulti-mately it's the transformationinto data that interests me because it is notonly a source of human interest stories but an example of a much biggersystemic change. And that's what I've been trying to say about the rural.It's not just women as we understand them as human beings of a certainkind but a kind of systematization of a certain way of being into this

8/8/2019 3175806

6/17

S I G N S Winter 2003 I 613

abstractaverage knowledge power, if you like, which is data, which doesin fact signal a much bigger change than just women's oppression.JS:If you consider datacollecting to signalsomething largerthan simplywomen's oppression, how would you respond to the argument that thenew electronic technology is giving third-world women a direct access to

global markets?GS:Superficially f courseit's true. Capital n its newer formationsseemsmore sociallyproductive, but when people speakabout this, they arespeak-ing very abstractly.They are not thinking about actual people. I'm nowgoing 180 degrees from invitingpeople to understand the virtualizationofthe rural as a huge systemic change, a recoding, a reterritorialization.Butat the sametime, in orderto understandthe terrifyingpower of the abstractas such, one must supplement it with the human beings within these kindsof situations. The enthusiasmfor these abstractgroups of women accessingthe marketplacethrough the Internet leaves completely untouched whathappens to these women on the ground. Even when you interview thewomen, you are not getting the whole picture. First of all, the questionsproduce the answers.Secondly, the subaltern is so disarmed by attentionthat in factthe answersarepatheticallyuntrustworthy. f you actually nvolveyourself into the life detail of these women who are accessing the market,you would see that their accessmay superficiallybring in a better income,but it does nothing else for the human qualityof the woman's life. Then,you come to the third point: have these people made a broad-range qual-itative analysisof what group has access to global markets through theInternet?What class stratum?Where? In what kinds of societies?BecauseI can assureyou, I have had a good deal of experienceover the last twelveyearswith hundreds of women with whom it has been my good fortuneto associatemyself; the bottom layersof the ruralpoor have no access tothe Internet. They don't even know what the Internet is. This is the largestsector of the electorate in the global South. And to access the Internetwithout infrastructuralaccompanimentsdoes not lead to a just society.JS: You have written that the problem of international feminism todayis the deployment of the upper-class hybrid female as a model for thegender training of poor ruralwomen. You have identified, as a definingmoment in this shift, a restructuring of the World Bank's "Women inDevelopment" programs as "Gender and Development," which you seeas coterminous with the Fourth World Women's Conference at Beijingin 1995. We've been through the criticism of "Third World Woman" assignifier and of the universalization of a certain kind of feminist modelthrough the idea of global feminism. The language of international fem-

8/8/2019 3175806

7/17

614 I Sharpeand Spivak

inism has now shifted to terms like heterogeneity,multiplicity, decentering.Yet it appearsthat there is still some kind of universalizing logic at workin the "Gender and Development" programs. What kinds of problemsdoes such gender training pose for feminism as an intellectual discourseand political movement?GS: I would like to say that I don't have an unexamined oppositionto United Nations Women's Conferences. I'm quite sure that there arethings that get done there that are good things. My problem is that theyare so wasteful, since they are unenforceable.

JS: Wasteful?GS:In terms of resources. A huge wanton expenditure of resources formonths and yearsin order to produce declarationsthat areunenforceable.And really the enthusiasm that is generated is in a class that is not reallythe class that we are thinking about. I was speaking to a wonderful youngwoman in Hong Kong, involved in various projects, one of which isschoolchildren teaching computers to older folks. So I said: "Well,how'sit going?" And she said something to me that was so wise. She said: "It'sgoing wonderfully well for the schoolchildren." Wow! I knew this onehad her head set right on her shoulders. People don't realize that even ifthe euphoria and enthusiasm generated in the self-styledactivists,the oneswho are organizing, can be shown in the subalternwomen who have beencollected for the occasion, it does not mean what the more fortunatewomen think it means. The euphoria belongs to the occasion ratherthanto long-term consequences.

JS: Can you give an example of the kind of activist work you arecriticizing?GS:Well, I'm actually inishinga piece of writing for an OxfordAmnestycollection where I talk about a case. When there are human rights inter-ventions on the lowest social stratum,the poorest of the ruralpoor, there'snot much-and this is my basic critique in terms of all the questions youhave asked-there is not much trouble taken to actually engage with the"structuresof feeling" of the groups who are supposedly being helped. Itis good to dismiss the concern to exhibit them-or to forget the needs ofthe urbansubproletariat-as a "politicsof virtue,"as Deborah Mindrydoesin the Signsissue on globalization (2001). But for me the point has been,what do we do with the ruralpoor, then?-with, not for. Since no efforthas been made to rearrange he mental theater of the ones who have beenhelped for a new production, the consequences of being helped out of aviolent situation do not last. They remain perennially in a place wherewrongs proliferateand have to be righted periodically.We who thought offeminism as a movement that deals with awarenessand gender sensitivity

8/8/2019 3175806

8/17


as well as material solutions find these solutions hardly feminist, exceptinsofar as they involve people who can be physically diagnosed as female.There is a difference between the two things: between woman-centeredphilanthropyand democraticpedagogic involvement. That'swhat I'm talk-ing about.

JS: So, what you're talking about is a real need for infrastructuralchanges, for instance? Or something that is more than simply the quickfix?

GS:Yes, involvement with broader infrastructuralchanges. You and Iboth teach in the humanities. If one thinks about humanities educationas a sustained, uncoercive rearrangement of desires with no guarantees,that is what I'm talkingabout. If we reallyfeel that we are in our professionbecause we want to do what we're doing, then our engagement with theworld's disenfranchisedwomen has to be as thick as the engagement withour students.JS:You have said on severaloccasions thatyou are "only a literarycritic"and are very clear about intellectualwork not being the same as politicalactivism. Yetyou seem to be describinga kind of political activismthat hasa paucity of imagination. Would you say that there is a need for work tobe done not only on the political front but also on the imagination?GS:One not without the other. My friend gave me a name, which is"Miss Supplementarity."And this is quite appropriate! I truly feel themoment one emphasizes the one over the other, it is a bad scene. And Ithink one of the problems with Marxism was that quite often one would,in a kind of doctrinaire way, emphasize or dismiss anything that seemednot to be amenable to that adjective. Let me give you an example thatrelates to pharmaceuticaldumping. When one is speaking to a group of

grassroots farmers,one finds oneself using a very bad concept metaphorthat has been thoroughly criticized by bourgeois feminism. This is themetaphor of the land or the soil asmother, which is an extremelypowerfuland strategic instrument if it works completely through the imagination.On the one side are the seed and fertilizercompanies with their ferociouspush upon the ruralpoor. And on the other side is a metaphor that says,if you buy this fertilizer and put it in the soil, next year you cannot raiseanything in the soil if you don't use it again. The soil is our mother, yourmother and mine. We are making our mother addicted. This metaphoris used in an area where, by drinking urea-contaminated cheap liquor,people die quite often. And urea is a big ingredient in chemical fertilizers.JS: This metaphor is used by?GS: I use it! I've never heard anyone else use it! For ecological agri-culture, you know. What am I doing there?I'm being disingenuous, using

8/8/2019 3175806

9/17


this powerful politically incorrect metaphor. I'm not someone who be-lieves in the sanctity of truth. For me, an appeal to the imagination ismaterialpractice. I knowingly use a metaphor completely disapproved ofby mainstream feminism. I knowingly use some kind of attitude fromtemperance movements. I knowingly use the notion of family valuesamong the ruralpoor; you know the notion of sin against the mother, etcetera. I knowingly use these strategically.This is the kind of thing wherebyrather than use fear of punishment, you use a certain kind of imaginativeterrorin terms of the consequences of putting foreign seeds and fertilizersin the soil. I also detail exactly what happens: the hardening of the soil,the dying of the insects, the dying of all the things that actuallyhelp keepthe soil alive, the loss of taste, the poisoning of products, the fact that wein the affluent countries now choose to buy organic materials, et cetera.I mean you can give them a lot of hard information but to make the verypoor turn away from high-yield grain, you have to use a certain kind ofimaginative discourse. I don't want people to think that when I use theword imagination, I mean some kind of incredibly pure, holier-than-thoueffort. No, I'm not Martha Nussbaum. I'm not reading Dickens withthem.

JS:Youruse of imaginativediscourse is especiallycontaminated becauseyou say you knowingly use a metaphor that is disapproved of by main-streamfeminism. That statement shows a disjuncturebetween knowledgeand strategy. It would be interesting to place your deployment of a con-taminated metaphor alongside a gender trainingthat is intended to rendersuch metaphors useless.GS:I am an education person, you know; I'm a teacher. Just as sittinghere in the Signs office at UCLA I've been talking about hiring, aboutdepartmental styles and teaching, when you sit among farmers,you talkabout agriculture. And so, one year, when it became clear to some ofthese farming friends of mine that I knew something about the other sideof ecological agriculture,I was asked to addressa largergroup of farmers.I was very nervous at first,thinking I'm not reallyan ecological agricultureactivist.But then I thought that if askedone should speak,because nobodycomes to these areas. I should make clear that among my audience arewomen. I shouldn't reallyeven say "audience";I should say interlocutorsbecause they do speak themselves about farming practices. So, it's not asthough I'm addressinga group of men with this contaminated metaphor.What I'm trying to say is that the association of certain kinds of tenorsand certain kinds of vehicles-we are literary folks and so refer to thetextbook definition of tenor and vehicle, "underlying idea" or "principalsubject," and the "figure,"which is the way metaphors seem to work-is

8/8/2019 3175806

10/17


not transcendental; it is historical. That's something that has to be un-derstood. The particular ine from specific tenor to specific vehicle is notcommon to all cultural production, so one has to be able to distinguishbetween things that have been coded one way for us and another way forthem. But for this you have to be patient. I think that's the universalizationthat is reallynot much use in gender training. There is also an assumptionof bureaucraticegalitarianism-the assumption that people are units thataremechanicallyequal. This is not a bad thing, but in a culturallydifferentfield it is counterproductive if not supplemented by other kinds of efforts.Cultural difference is spoken of but, by enthusiasm or convenience, acommon human essence is assumed which denies the procedural impor-tance of the difference. There is a related assumption: that the history ofa sharing of the public and the private is the same among all groups ofmen and women as the one that follows through in terms of northwesternEurope or sometimes even Britain. This is the problem it seems to me.It's not so much a universalizationas seeing one history as the inevitabletelos as well as the inevitable origin and past of all men and womeneverywhere.That's the problem. Incidentally,I went to a Peoples' Allianceoffice in Kolkata (Calcutta) before going, to get some tips, since theyhave internationalpublicitywith ecological agriculture,and they too usedmetaphors, but metaphors that would ring no bell with the farmers,suchas "naturalbalance," et cetera, in the most ornate Bengali prose. I leftthem feeling altogether cheered up!JS: But the assertion of things being coded one way for us and anotherway for them risksreifyingculturaldifference. I am thinkingabout "culturaldefense" as a legal strategy for defending immigrant Asian men living inthe United States against charges of gender violence. This is an attentionto differencethat insidiouslyreinscribesan oldercolonial model ofothering.GS:Of course it does. And the question that reallycomes up is:differentfrom what? I would say that the culture of the rich and the culture of thepoor in these countries are marked by a cultural difference that is largerthan the culturaldifference we self-consciously invoke when we diasporicsspeak to the metropolitan white folks. The question of culturaldifferencefor some years now has become exacerbated in other ways, by the dif-ference between intellectual labor and manual labor. There is an extremedifference in educational techniques used for the poor and the middleclass. And I'm now able to convince the ones who suffer from the con-solidation of very bad educational techniques by using another metaphor,which is a metaphor of class apartheid. That is to say, the ones who aregoing to work their heads (in Bengali there is an expression) are taughtin one way, and the ones who are going to work their bodies are taught

8/8/2019 3175806

11/17


in another way. Metaphorically,this "cultural"difference, the cultures ofclass, is much more significant than cultures identified by crudely definednational difference. That's what the cultural difference question means tome now, not just the heritage of colonialism.JS: So in fact the national cultural difference is .GS:Intra-national!JS: Yes, there is a kind of ideological work being done by the conceptof cultural difference, one of eliding class.GS: Intranationalcultural difference, for me, is now as significant andas important, as it works in the interest of internationalculturaldifference.And of course to make the big difficult statement, the international civil

society crosses borders in the name of woman. And this difference is nowfleshed out mostly in terms of violence against women, women's rights,all that kind of stuff. That's how I understand it today. I'm much morefixated, fixed on intranationalcultural difference of class as it is at workfor and with the international cultural differences. There is an internalline of cultural difference within the "sameculture," apartfrom the usualmechanisms of class formation. It is related to the formation of the newglobal culture of management and finance and the families attached to it.It marks access to the Internet. It also marks the new culture of inter-national nongovernmental organizations, involved in development andhuman rights, as they work upon the lowest strata n the developing world.Before the advent of modernity, the country-to-town movement, the field-to-court movement, the movement along the great trade routes operatedto create the kind of internal split of cultural difference within the sameculture that may be the realmotor of culturalchange. Across the spectrumof change, it is the negotiation of sexual difference and the relationshipbetween the sacred and the profane that spell out the rhythms of culture,rhythms that are always a step ahead of its definitions and descriptions.

JS: You have told the story of the only female member of the Lodhatribe who managed to make it to university and who hanged herself forreasons unknown. There were rumors of her involvement in illicit loveaffairs.This story is clearly intended to resonate (and it does) with theone you tell about BhuvaneswariBhaduri in "Can the Subaltern Speak?"She hanged herself because she had been unable to carry out a politicalassassinationon behalf of the armed struggle for Indian independence.The suicide was a mystery because people presumed that the reason wasan illicit pregnancy, but she was menstruating at the time. I found theresemblance between the two scenes of female suicides separatedby class,caste, temporality,and space to be, and I use the Freudianterm, uncanny.Is there a story to be told in that resemblance?

8/8/2019 3175806

12/17


GS: I think it's the other side of the heterosexual reproductive normas family values, which is about as close as one comes to a universal.Although it is not a universalbecause of what I have talked about in boththese situations. I saw BhuvaneswariBhaduri as a subaltern, and indeedshe was a subaltern, but if one is being very strict about the term, thenshe was a lower-middle-class urban person, and therefore she was not"really"subaltern. And as for Chuni Kotal, the woman from the Lodhatribe, by going to university, she had become sort of upwardly mobile,and therefore strictlyspeakingshe too was not a subaltern.But one notices,in many subalternized female societies, a certain phenomenon that I havedescribed as originary queerness, which is a thing different from the het-erosexist reproductive norm. It may be that from which sexual differencediffers. It will not be disclosed in a subject elaboration that I know totheorize. But when the heterosexist reproductive norm works, then it isright from the positive articulation of familyvalues. Now this should notmake us argue that therefore it's all right for international feminism togo and interfere, because what we just talked about is the heterosexistreproductive norm, not an entire culturalfabric. I've discussed in a recentpiece the way in which destitute widows in Vrindavanare terribly ironicagainst the institution of marriage. So, while we are pointing at the op-eration of a heterosexual reproductive norm, we can also locate criticalmoments. A dominant that operatesacrossdivides does not sanction unex-amined cultural interference in the name of international feminism.

JS: You said that neither of these women were subalternin a strict useof the term. But if we are talkingof the subalternin the strict sense, then,what kinds of narrativescan we rely on? Or are we alreadybringing theminto aparticularkindoflogic? Does subalternityhave to remainunnameable?GS: When one thinks about subalternity in the sense of no lines ofmobility into upwardsocial movement, it's stillnot unnameable.We must,however, take a moratorium on naming too soon, if we manage to pen-etrate there. There is no other way for you and me to penetrate there.Whatever the hell else we are doing, we have to be earning trust. Un-fortunately that's also the model of good fieldwork. That is why I sayfieldworkwithout transcodingto describe this other approach,a fieldworkwhose end is not producing discourse for our equals by bringing back

news. There's nothing particularlygood about penetrating into subal-ternity. I'm not in search of the primitive or anything. But if we are goingto talk about it, then I will say that if one manages to penetrate in there,and it's not easy, then I think what we have to do is take a moratoriumon speakingtoo soon. I used to be againstinformation retrievalyearsago,but now I've thought it through in greater detail. We hear a lot of talk

8/8/2019 3175806

13/17


now-and I'm not particularlyhappy about it-about intellectual capitaland culturalcapital.And it's a nice, trendy, sexy metaphor. If we are goingto use that metaphorology, then I would say that this is like mercantilecapitalism:buying cheap and selling dear because nobody can go there.So that's something one reallymust be careful about. It's not unnameable.In many ways, it's only too easily nameable!JS: Well, I suppose I meant unnameable in the sense of avoiding a

transcoding and a quick conversion into a particularlogic. But I am in-terested in what you say about inevitablyfinding oneself doing fieldwork.GS: There is no other model. You are a person who is clearly not asubaltern person, who has moved into a group which clearly is subalternwith no kind of mobility. And you are earning trust so that you can dowhatever it is that you are there to do. So I'm thinking of the best modelsof fieldwork. One is tempted, when one is not an anthropologist oneself,to equate anthropology with its worst examples. You know what I mean?That patient effort to learnwithout the goal of transmitting that learningto others like me, it seems to me, can be described by others as fieldwork,and I would not have a way of saying no. My goal is not to produce well-written texts about those experiences. If that were so, then I would notbe able to learn because my energies would be focused toward digestingthe material for production. It's as simple as that. There is nothing mys-terious there. If your energies are focused toward that, you are constantlyprocessing, and you are processing it into what you alreadyknow. You'renot learning something. So this is why I say that you should perhaps callit fieldwork, because "learning from below" is too pious sounding. Andtoday, I would accept the word fieldworkbecause it's less self-ennoblingthan "learning from below."

JS:What about the teaching you have just finished in Hong Kong? Doyou consider that fieldwork?GS: I think in a certain sense, everything, for me now, has becomefieldwork. So the word has lost its interest.JS: Are you a "wild anthropologist"?GS:Well, I have alwaysbeen; we have alwaysbeen. That's how I talkedabout colonial subjects and postcolonial subjects.And today it is very trueof the new immigrant. Very true indeed. We internalize the folkways of

the metropolis without disciplinaryauthorization. Hong Kong for me isa very interesting case. As you know, I'm not really yet fully back. I'vebeen teaching for five months at the Hong Kong University of Scienceand Technology, and I'm just on my way backto New York.This universityis among the top forty in science and technology in the world, and thehumanities component is much more old-fashioned, because it's clearly

8/8/2019 3175806

14/17

S I G N S Winter 2003 1 621

not a radical humanities university.I was askedto teach poststructuralism.When I went there, I saw that in fact-well, the students themselves toldme in apreliminarymeeting-they didn't know the rest of Westernliterarytradition. So, I scrapped my course immediately, and I started teachingfrom Aristotle on down. What I was interested in doing was speaking asan Asian to Asians, because the languages used in Hong Kong are Chineseand English. So, with my miserable classicalGreek, I'm pushing Aristotlein Greek, with my miserable Italian, I'm pushing Dante in Italian. I kepttelling them-"You read the West not becauseeverythingWesternis good,so that you can theoretically apply it to your raw material. Do not readthe West because everything Western is bad, so that you can show howChinese was better. Both are the same thing. Read it because it is thereand, in certain respects, it won. Then you'll see that it's interesting." Andthen, when we began to read all these other languages, and of course,they didn't read these languages at all, I would try extremelyhard to pushthrough. I would say to them, remember, it's not only Chinese that losesby translation; these languages also lose by translation. There was noEnglish when Aristotle wrote. You have to think about that. And withinthat, to always keep my head straight on gender. That was much moredifficult, because in a postgraduate seminar at a science and technologyuniversity,you can't make the usual kinds of gender pronouncements. Soyou have to think through the ways in which you are going to make thisgender analysisnot just relate to U.S. feminism and Hong Kong feminism,or to Asia LaborMonitor. I remember the classwhere we did Hrotswithavon Gandersheim; for me the question is why must we read a piece ofliteratureby a woman in order to get to the beginnings of feminist theory,but the oralpresentationsrelated to a Filipinapointing at how Catholicismoppresses women, and a Hong Kong Chinese woman doing character-ology because her teachers are influenced by mainstreamEuro-U.S. fem-inism. I found, without planning, that I could only undo this by showing,by example, that anAsian could takeEurope as the object of investigation.Is this to be "interpellatedas an Asian?"This was, for me, an incrediblyinteresting learning experience.JS: In saying that you were an Asian teaching Asians about the Westerntradition, are you saying that you didn't teach the course the same wayyou would at Columbia?GS:It's not that I would not teach it differently-because I didn't goin thinking I would teach it anydifferent. But this was an unusualsituationof one kind of Asian teaching another kind of Asian the traditions of theWest, but in the original languages. I did not feel disenfranchised in theway in which . . . It amuses me, I don't really feel disenfranchised at

8/8/2019 3175806

15/17


Columbia, but you know metaphorically,as an Indian woman teachingAristotle to white Americans, there is a certain peculiarity.JS: Although you can do it in the original language . . .GS: But nonetheless! So it isn't that I would have taught the course

differentlyat Columbia, but I found myself really n a fullydifferentteachingsituation. I can say that while teaching at Columbia I have been tryinghardest to emphasize the imaginationas an in-built instrumentof otheringourselves.Because I think the realproblem at Columbia is that the studentis encouraged to think that he or she lives in the capitalof the world. Thestudent is encouraged to think that he or she is there to help the rest ofthe world. And he or she is also encouraged to think that to be from otherpartsof the world is not to be fully global. And New YorkCity can becometransparent.So thereforemy biggest undertaking,my biggest task,is activelyto dramatize the imaginationas an instrument of othering. In other words,to teach how to read in the most robust sense, that is to say, suspendingoneself and entering the text and the other. If indeed we arethinkingaboutothering as a good thing, it is a kind of chosen othering, as it were, thechosen othering through the imagination.Strictlyspeaking,nothing is moreconducive to this than working on a culturalscript that is not supposedlyyours. And that is one of the reasonswhy I admirethe directions in whichyour work has gone. And I've said this to many people. I consider this tobe altogether admirable.JS: I am interested in juxtaposing the different sites of your teachingin order to see how each location transformsyour pedagogical practices.You have already talked about teaching in Hong Kong and New York.Correct me if my information is wrong, but I read somewhere that youorganized a teacher's training course in Bangladesh, and I would like youto talk about this as a third site of your teaching.GS:No, not in Bangladesh. I mean, yes, I did do it in Bangladesh, butmy general focus is in India. I hope in fact in some way to move awayfrom my own cultural inscription. I did try it for a little while in Algeria.I have other plans about which I will say nothing. But the Indian stuff isbecause my mother tongue is Bengali, and if you reallywant to involveyourself with what I called-I've said it once already, but that is myphrase-the largest sector of the electorate in the global South, then youmust know their native language well. I mean, I know Hindi, but not inthe way in which one can actually train extremely ill-trained teachers.

JS: When you say ill-trained, what do you mean?GS:Badly educated, you know. Mostly not high school graduates.JS: They are going to be teaching in rural schools?

8/8/2019 3175806

16/17

S I G N S Winter2003 I 623

GS:They are not going to; they do teach. They teach in these schoolsthat I run. So, yes, I do train them how to teach. What else?JS: Well, can you speak a little bit more about your schools in India,because when you talked about your teaching in Hong Kong, you estab-lished a whole scenario . . .GS:Because the Hong Kong scene can be imagined. But if I talkaboutthese places, first of all, I think I would get the kind of approval fromyour readershipwhich I would much ratherearnbecause of my theoreticalwork. You know, there is a certain kind of benevolent approvalwhich Ireally resist. I'm being as honest as I can be.JS: Well, I was thinking more theoretically, because you are a teacher.GS:These are one-room schools, okay, so they are very different frommy own upbringing. Remember what I was saying about intranationalcultural difference?These people are generally aboriginal, whereas I'm ametropolitan, middle-classcaste Hindu. First of all, it took me the longesttime to learn what the nature of the bad teaching was. Believe me, Jenny,that is a long process, because you cannot undo thousands of years ofoppressing the mind through these nice kinds of Montessori-style exper-iments. So in fact, the real challenge is to be able to produce principlesof change in teaching that can be internalized by this ridiculously feebleteaching corps. I'm not at all sure of anything that's happening or nothappening. When you see these things in picturesandposters and bookletsor television, the protofeudal, downwardlyclassmobile, liberallyoutragedactivists are alwayspresent. I'm sorry that this cynicism has come up inthe last ten or twelve years.The question is how long this education wouldlast if the activists were not at all present? How long? Two years?Twomonths? Three years?Five years?Fifty years?Maybe seventy years, as in

the case of the Soviet Union? History is much longer. So that's the wayin which one learns how to teach with no guarantees.JS: The undoing is the most difficult?GS:Well, not anymore. I used to talk about the undoing before I hadstarted this stuff. If you get into it, it gets undone. You don't even knowhow it's getting undone. You're surprisedby it. You're surprisedby theunexpected, and it affects your other kind of writing. So it's really a lotof fun although it's so uncertain. There are absolutely no guarantees, soone has to remember what that young woman said so correctly-"It'sgood for the schoolchildren." But the moment you feel it's reallyworking,you have to stop and ask yourself, for whom is it working? Give it a try;be absent. See. And you will see within the week . . it's not so easy toundo a thousand years.

8/8/2019 3175806

17/17

3175806

Documents