Gayatri Spivakb. 1942

Biography and Works Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born on February 24, 1942

in Calcutta.

Received a B.A. from the University of Calcutta and her Ph.D. in literature at Cornell University. Wrote her dissertation on William Butler Yeats.

Currently serves as a University Professor at Columbia University.

One of her first pivotal works was an introduction/translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology in 1977.

Has written over 200 articles, but is most well known for her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak,” which became a part of her book Critique of Postcolonial Reason in 1999.

Marked by a continual questioning of assumptions, often revising her very own works.

Influences

Derrida’s Deconstruction and French theory

Marxism

Feminism

Postcolonialism

Freudian analysis

Essentialism (to a degree)

Literature

“Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Spivak’s initial answer: No

Subaltern = often impossible to define. Those resting outside of political, social and economic power. A “general nonspecialist, nonacademic population,” including “illiterate peasantry, Aboriginals, and the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat” (2116).

“Possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self’s shadow” (2114).

Even well-meaning intellectuals and other elites can reinforce current power structures. For example, leftists often “romanticize” the oppressed, which only helps support the colonial practices they claim to oppose.

Dominant discourse = the intellectual. “Subaltern is not similarly privileged, and does not speak in a vocabulary that will get a hearing in institutional locations of power” (2125).

“Can the Subaltern Speak?” Continued…

ALL discourses exclude something or someone by virtue. We can only hope for an “attunement to the unheard” which Spivak terms moral love.

Criticizes Antonio Gramsci’s more inclusive definition of the “subaltern classes” for likening subaltern to the proletariat. Subaltern is much lower than this. “Simply by being postcolonial or the member of an ethnic minority, we are not ‘subaltern’” (2125).

Sides with Ranajit Guha, member of the Subaltern Studies group, that much discourse is shaped by Indian elitists, who often narrate the subaltern’s stories.

Michel Foucault’s epistemic violence – or the forcible replacement of one structure of beliefs for another. Seen with the “Other” or subaltern of colonialism.

British Imperialismand the Colonial Savior Narrative

Subaltern =

subordinate officer in the British

army

Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s

burden”

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

(1899)

Thomas Macaulay’s “Minute on

Indian Education”

(1835)

Feminism and the Subaltern

“If, in the contest of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and can’t speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (2120).

“White men are saving brown women from brown men” (2112).

The “masculine-imperialist ideological formation” constructs “the monolithic ‘third-world woman’” (2122).

Although essentialism was criticized among feminists for its generalities, strategic essentialism argues to temporarily accept an essentialist position while still remaining aware of the differences among groups of women.

Feminism = “how society is not nice to women and queers”

Bhubaneswari Bhaduri and Sati Part of the British sati ban’s failure in India was due to a lack

of “subject involvement.”

Bhaduri hanged herself in North Calcutta in 1926 after failing to carry out a political assassination discharge. Purposefully planned it while menstruating.

“She generalized the sanctioned motive for female suicide by taking immense trouble to displace (not merely deny), in the physiological inscription of her body, its imprisonment within legitimate passion by a single male” (2123).

This could be viewed as a “subaltern rewriting of the social text of sati-suicide” (2123). An attempt to turn the body into a text.

Yet, this act of communication was still falsely interpreted by her family and friends. Why?

Further complication: she was not a “true” subaltern with her middle class background.

Subaltern Examples Gone with the Wind (1936) – Southern white narrative of the Civil War

and slavery

The Wind Done Gone (2001) – “unauthorized parody” of the classic novel written by Alice Randall and told from the perspective of an illegitimate slave on Tara Plantation.

Is this a case of the subaltern?

Subaltern Examples

12 Years a Slave (2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSMFQ1lTzog

Subaltern Examples“Jamaica Language”

Louise Bennett The basic thing is the language, which we have been talking for three hundred years. Yes, my dear. And my Auntie Roachy say she no like nobody fi seh a no language at all at all, she vex, you know, about the whole rhythm of the language, mi child, you see. It's because all this folklore, and this culture that we have, come from all the different people who have lived in the country. And we just use it, and now we have our real West Indian, a real Jamaican culture. For my Auntie Roachy, she say, 'When the Asian culture and the European culture buck up on African culture in the Caribbean people:We stir them up and blend them to we flavour,We shake them up and move them to we beat,We wheel them and we turn themAnd we rock them and we sound them,And we temper them and lawks the rhythm's sweet!'Yes, mi dear, so then we don't need to shame of the things we have at all, at all. Like my Auntie Roachy say she vex any time she hearing the people a come style fi we Jamaica language as 'corruption of the English Language'. You ever hear anything go so? Aunt Roachy she say she no know why mek dem no call the English language corruption of the Norman French and the Greek and the Latin where they say English is derived from. Oonu hear the word: English 'derive' but Jamaica 'corrupt'. No, massa, nothing no go so. We not corrupt and them derive. We derive, too. Jamaica derive!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZjPeMGiOpk

“Can the Subaltern Vote?”

Article written by Leerom Medovoi, Shankar Raman and Benjamin Robinson that profiles the Nicaraguan elections of Feb 25, 1990.

Ronald Reagan had proclaimed that the "people have spoken.” The election would "appear at first glance to have created the conditions by which a third world people were enabled to make a political speech to the entire globe.”

But the article argues the opposite. "This electoral utterance is formed by systems of representation that deny the subalternity of the Nicaraguan people in relation to the United States, thereby producing a voice whose meanings emphatically 'unspoke' neocolonial power imbalances."

The mainstream media had "homogenized" all the different subaltern Nicaraguan identities into one broad and unified "electorate.” The country became a pawn for the U.S. to advance capitalism under the guise of democracy.

Current Criticism Spivak has been active in the education of young Indian

girls. She also has been an outspoken critic of the microfinance policies of third-world countries.

“NGO’s, Neoliberalism, and Women in Bangladesh” by Lamia Karim (2012-2013) Article shows how “the poor constitute a viable market for

commercial banks.” These poor are overwhelmingly women without sound business knowledge and little means to repay their small business loans.

In almost 90% of microfinance cases, men control the use of the loans.

Women thus are used for the benefit of capitalist enterprises under the guise of their betterment.

http://sfonline.barnard.edu/gender-justice-and-neoliberal-transformations/ngos-neoliberalism-and-women-in-bangladesh/

Works CitedBajanbloom Bloom. “Miss Lou (Part 3): Jamaica Language.” Online video clip. YouTube. 13 Jan. 2011. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZjPeMGiOpk

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print.

FoxSearchlight. “12 Years a Slave: ‘Where You From, Platt?’” Online video clip. YouTube. 11 Oct. 2013. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSMFQ1lTzog

Karim, Lamia. “NGOs, Neoliberalism, and Women in Bangladesh.” The Scholar & Feminist Online. 11.1-11.2. (2012-2013). n. pag. Web. Nov. 2014.

Medovoi, Leerom; Raman, Shankar; and Robinson, Benjamin. “Can the Subaltern Vote?” Socialist Review. 20.3. (1990): 132-149. Web. Nov. 2014.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 2110-2126. Print.

University of California Television. “Gayatri Spivak: The Trajectory of the Subaltern in My Work.” Online video clip. YouTube. 7 Feb. 2008. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZHH4ALRFHw

UC Berkeley Events. “BBRG Presents: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Situating Feminism.” Online video clip. YouTube. 1 Apr. 2010. Web. 11 Nov. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=garPdV7U3fQ