Ethico-politics and the Subaltern
The subaltern might be summarized as spaces cut off from the
lines of social mobility, or as women and men outside the lines of
socio-economic class mobility, particularly rural illiterate women and men of
the global south. Those active in such spaces are illegible to those who occupy
the space produced by complicity with the patriarchal state and the secular
liberal European imaginary, so communication from and with the subaltern is
troubled by foundational problems of the politics of knowledge and action.
The term as classically defined in the writings of Antonio Gramsci
(on southern peasants) has meant a worker outside of systems of industrial
production, something like a subproletariat, generally small-scale agrarian
workers characterized by weak socio-political consciousness. The term was adapted from Gramsci by the
Subaltern Studies group in India of historians and critics to emphasize rural
resistance to British colonial rule in India, associating the term subaltern
with armed anticolonial insurgencies. Gayatri Spivak intervened in this
approach by recognizing that the subaltern was gendered and not easy to
understand or even name. And the term has spread to use in understanding rural
and urban areas in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, Africa, and other
regions.
Demographically subalterns might be understood in Spivak’s
writings to mean something like peasants and fisherfolk of the global south
(Responsibility 88, 93). Readings or locations to start to understand the
historical conditions of the subaltern might include Samir Amin’s Unequal
Development or, for works more centered on women’s labor, Noeleen Heyzer’s Daughters
in Industry, Dignity and Daily
Bread by Swasti Mitter and Shiela Rowbotham, or Allen and Wolkowitz’s Homeworking.
(Subaltern Talk 294)
Examples of the subaltern include the illiterate rural women
of the global south that Spivak emphasizes in her work, including children in
two aboriginal pockets of western West Bengal, India, and in southern Yunnan,
China, where she has constructed schools to work with subalterns. Other
examples from fiction of subalterns include several figures found in the
stories of Mahasweta Devi, such as the pterodactyl in her story of that name
and a number of women characters (e.g., Jashoda, in the story “Stanyadini”
translated by Spivak as “Breast-Giver”). Insurgents who might be considered
subaltern include Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, about whom Spivak wrote her initial
article on the subaltern, and several figures prominent in the fictional works
of Mahasweta Devi (Draupadi; “The Hunt”). Spivak has also written about Assia
Djebar, who includes Lla Zohra and other figures among the Algerian mujahidat or women freedom-fighters that
she mentions in her autobiographical work, Fantasia.
Spivak notes that gender is important in considering the
subaltern (“Subaltern Studies” 226-32), so she has at times emphasized rural,
illiterate women of the global south, as in the Sahel, West Bengal, Bangladesh,
southern Yunnan China, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Yet subalterns are also
found in urban settings, as in the low-income housing tracts of Wahrān,
Algeria, where Spivak worked in the early 1990s, or urban homeless and school
dropout populations. Urban subalterns might be compared usefully to what Fanon and
some Marxists call the lumpenproletariat, a population of often illiterate unemployed
and underemployed urban underclass. Spivak has also worked with examples of
middle class women in developing her notion of the subaltern, as in her
references to the suicide of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri in her foundational article
on whether the Subaltern can speak and in her deployment of the fiction of
Mahasweta Devi, a journalist and teacher.
However Spivak and others warn against considering the
subaltern in demographic terms, however, given the association of demography
with the pervasive surveillance and the biopower of the state. She suggests instead thinking of the
subaltern as a space obstructed from class mobility or from structures and
institutions that would allow the grievances and other speech of the subaltern to
be recognizable and gain traction. (“In Response” 228, 233-34) This space is
cut off from what is sometimes called the public sphere (“Resistance” 72-3) or
what Spivak variously calls the “the space produced by patriarchal complicity,
namely the state” or the space of those trained in “the liberal European
secular imaginary” (Not Virgin 175), making the speech and writing of the
subaltern illegible to those who occupy these other spaces. In other words, the silence of the subaltern
is not literal silence, but more of a blockage or aporia caused by the
assumptions of Eurocentric, liberal Enlightenment humanism. ("Can the Subaltern
Speak” 306).
Once the blockage between subaltern spaces and the space of
the modern liberal state becomes legible, Spivak urges a politics of
decolonization of the mind and behavior through negotiation with the often
unrecognized founding violences of modern language and agency (“The Politics of
Translation” 181-3; “Ethics and Politics” n. 3, p. 18). Such an approach to the
subaltern makes possible a refusal of the appropriations through modern logic
and reason of disruptions in “normal” modern language, history, and liberal
presumptions to agency that otherwise would be carried out on the assumption of
the knowability, solidarity, and similitude with the subaltern Other. (“French
Feminism Revisited” 170, 183; “Ethics and Politics” 22) Rather than
minimalizing these disruptions, considering the subaltern may refuse to be
articulated and appropriated under the “normal” of modern history, reason, and
language.
This refusal allows for knowledge and action that gesture
towards that which is outside the historical limits language imposes on reason
and for contesting neocolonial knowledge practices and the modern liberal
family and nation-state. (“Ethics and Politics” 17-21, 23-26) Concrete examples
of that which is outside the historical limits modern language imposes on
reason are scattered through Spivak’s writings, but might include the ways that
an activist’s speech to the World Bank is staged (“Responsibility” 91-2), the
erasure of possible women’s solidarity through the translation of descriptions
of gendered violence (Death 61-4), or how English translations of Marx obliterate
the specific task of collective, class consciousness (“Subaltern Studies”
214-6).
Spivak’s early article on the difficulties of hearing the
subaltern speak concluded with a brief discussion of the suicide of a young
woman who had not been able to be heard even when she made the effort to the
death to speak. (Subaltern Talk 292) This notion of speaking is based on the
linguistic theory of J.L. Austin, who argued that for the speech act to be
complete requires someone who can hear the speech effectively, together with a
careful reading of Marx on how workers can establish ways to make class
resistance gain traction and a foothold in society. (“In Response” 233) In the
case of Bhaduri’s suicide, the difficulties in hearing the speech of the
subaltern were not because of any lack of effort of subalterns to represent the
self or their collective resistance. The difficulty that those educated in
modern societies have in hearing and understanding the subaltern is due to a
combination of the lack of appropriate infrastructure as well as a failure of
responsibility in those addressed by the subaltern (“Responsibility” 93). Subalterns work to represent themselves
outside of the lines of representation laid down by official institutions of
representation, so their speech does not have a structure or institution where
it can count, so it ultimately does not catch or hold. (“Subaltern Talk” 306 ;
“In Response” 233)
One goal of work to hear and understand the subaltern is to
find ethical ways to enter into relations of responsibility for those of us who
are not subalterns (Death 69; 101-2), to build structures that facilitate
accountability to those who generally go unrecognized and unheard. This may
take the form of a kind of haunting by the subaltern, understood as a persistent
effort to recognize the limits of generalizations and identifications as they
persistently erase their inevitable exclusions, their subalterns (Death 52-3). This
notion of the subaltern challenges activists and critics to rethink the limits
of recognizability for activism and revolutionary struggle. More precisely,
this challenge invites us to work to build institutions and organizations that
would be able to respond to the subaltern when they carry out resistance that
erases the axioms and assumptions that undergird modern and/or colonizing
notions of justice, democracy, gender, or class. (“In Response” 228;
“Resistance”)
Other goals for subaltern work are seen where Spivak has
worked in sites where the impossibility of social mobility is accepted as
normality, what might be referred to as the underside of poverty in West
Bengal, India, southern Yunnan, China, and elsewhere. (“In Response” 229) Her work consistently intervenes in this
normality to carry out what she terms “the uncoercive rearrangement of desires,
the nurturing of the intuition of the public sphere.” This work is to be
contrasted with the modernist projects of bettering the world through poverty
or disease eradication, exporting democracy forcefully, or exporting
information and communications technology. (“In Response” 230) The ultimate
goal of this work is “in the possibility of creating an infrastructure here as
well as there which would make the subaltern not accept subalternity as
normality.” (“In Response 235) Such an infrastructure is grounded in the
refusal of the situational imperatives and codings of their historical
conditions, as Bhaduri did, to animate alternative subjects to challenge the
broader scenario of Realpolitik.
(Foucault and Najibullah 149)
By refusing class apartheid and supplementing internal class
relations and hegemonic institutions, this work can reject the emergence into
class mobility in terms only of reproducing what Paulo Freiere called
“sub-oppressors” (Foucault and Najibullah 149). Instead, subaltern work may
learn how to instead practice justice that responds to the subaltern and animates
alternatives as part of the wars of maneuver signaled by Gramsci. (“In
Response” 232) In this conception, emerging out of the subaltern spaces blocked
from access to mobility by hegemonic institutions does not mean emerging into
the working class or the middle class under capitalist exploitation, as seen in
sweatshops or urban prostitution. Rather this emergence is the constructive
crisis of the subaltern, where former subalterns instead come into full
citizenship in democratic nations that have heretofore denied them institutional
rights and secular freedoms. (“More on Power/Knoweldge 45)
In this line of thinking the possibility of the subaltern operates
more as a reminder or a warning when we may think we have solved a
socio-political or intellectual problem, rather than as a placeholder for a particular
class or group. This warning unravels the
possibility of any universalizable generalization, operating as a sort of space
of difference which challenges us to enter into a relation or structure of
ethics and responsibility. (“Subaltern Talk” 293) Such an ethical structure
allows responses to flow both ways in the relationship, where learning may take
place without presumptions about doing good from a space of cultural or
material supremacy. (“Subaltern Talk”
293)
In concrete political and ethical terms this means that activists,
public critics, and researchers may pursue many different projects. Among the many examples of such projects that
Spivak has highlighted include the “persistent short-term initiatives of local
self-management…against the financialization of the globe” that brings subalternity
to [constructive] crisis. (“1996: Foucault and Najibullah” 156 & n. 65).
Other such projects might include “developing subsistence and small- and large-market
farming… for the constitution of the subject for…democratic freedom.” (“1996:
Foucault and Najibullah” 157) They may also include reading and teaching in the
ways Spivak has elaborated in her writing on comparative literature (Death)
and pedagogy. (“Outside in the Teaching Machine”; “How to Teach”;
“Explanation”)
The fruitful and constructive aspect of Spivak’s notion of
the subaltern is that it directs us to give attention to the distant but
necessary horizon of the end of exploitation (“Subaltern Studies” 214-5). This moment might be variously conceived as
the time when all subalterns have been brought into the circuit of
parliamentary democracy (“Subaltern Talk” 307), the moment when subaltern space
is undone and is no longer be inhabited demographically. This moment might also
be understood as a time when customary practices have become vehicles for
change (rather than markers of backwardness under capitalism), and the boundaries
of class, gender, and other difference are no longer meaningful materially or
intellectually. (“Subaltern Talk” 308, 295-96) Or it might be a time in the
future beyond the reversals of capital logic advocated by left labor organizing
or of the colonized-decolonized divide where decolonization is recognized as a
misleading term. (“More on Power/Knowledge” 164) Working towards these ends
make not only ethics and responsibility possible, but also a justice outside
the pale of modern legal notions of the law and justice. It is this move beyond
the limits of modern language and notions of the “real,” outside the travesties
of modern institutions such as the state and juridical apparatuses, and
dislodging Enlightenment assumptions and practices that considerations of the
subaltern invites.
General Readings:
Chaturvedi, Vinayak, Mapping Subaltern Studies and the
Postcolonial, Verso, 2000.
Cherniavsky, Eve, “Subaltern Studies in a United States
Frame,” boundary 2, 23.2 (1996): 85-110.
Cooper, Frederick, “Conflict and Connection: Rethinking
African History,” American Historical Review, 99.5 (1994): 1516-45.
Guha, Ranajit, A Subaltern Studies Reader: 1986-1995,
Univ. Minnesota Press, 1997.
Guha, Ranajit and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed., Selected
Subaltern Studies, Oxford Univ. Pr., 1988.
Kapoor, Ilan, “Hyper-self-reflexive Development? Spivak on
Representing the Third World ‘Other’,” Third World Quarterly, 25.4
(2004): 627-47.
Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, “Founding
Statement,” boundary 2, 20.3 (1993): 110-21.
Pandey, Gyanendra, ed., Subaltern Citizens and their
Histories: Investigations from India and the U.S., Routledge, 2010. JQ220
M5 S83 2010
Poitevin, Guy, The Voice and the Will: Subaltern Agency,
2002.
Rodriguez, Ileana, ed., The Latin American Subaltern
Studies Reader, Duke Univ. Pr., 2001.
Verdisio, Gustavo, “Latin American Subaltern Studies
Revisited,” Dispositio/n, 25
(2005): 5-42.
Winant, Howard, “Gayatri Spivak on the Politics of the
Subaltern,” Socialist Review 20.3 (1990): 81-97.
Gayatri Spivak on the
Subaltern:
A.
Spivak Articles for
general audiences:
“In Response,” Can the Subaltern Speak: Reflections on
the History of an Idea, New York: Columbia Univ. Pr., 2010, 227-36.
"Looking Back, Looking Forward," in R. Morris, ed.
Can the Subaltern Speak: Reflections on the History of an Idea (2010)
“Not Really a Properly Intellectual Response,” in Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, 87-135.
“Not Virgin Enough to Say that (S)he Occupies the Place of
the Other,” Outside in the Teaching Machine, 173-78.
“Resistance that Cannot be Recognized as Such,” in Conversations
with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 57-86.
“Subaltern Talk” interview 1996 (in The Spivak Reader),
287-308.
B.
Spivak Technical
articles:
“Can Subaltern Speak?” (first given as 1983 talk without
reference to Bhaduri; pub. in Wedge; then revised version pub. In Carey
& Nelson, ed., Marxsm and the Interpretation of Culture—Carey &
Nelson vol. version became standard; revised again in Critique of
Postcolonial Reason) (repr. in Can the Subaltern Speak: The
History of an Idea)
“Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes
of Teaching,” diacritics, 32.2-4 (fall-winter 2002): 17-31.
“Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” (in The
Spivak Reader).
Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 1999: Revised “Can
Subaltern Speak” found in “History” chapter, esp. 269-311 (repr. in Can the
Subaltern Speak: The History of an Idea)
"Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the
Popular," _Postcolonial Studies_ (2005 (1987))
“Response to Schmitt and Poststructuralism,” Cardozo Law
Review, 2001.
Death of a Discipline, Columbia Univ. Pr., 2003.
“The Politics of Translation”, Outside in theTeaching
Machine, 179-200 (orig. 1992).
“Righting Wrongs” (repr. In Other Asias, 2008), esp.
43-57.
“Responsibility – 1992: Testing Theory in the Plains” (repr.
In Other Asias, 2008), esp. 88-96.
"Discussion: An Afterword on the New Subaltern,"
in Partha Chatterjee and Pradeep Jeganathan, eds., Community, Gender, and
Violence: Subaltern Studies XI (2000)
Other authors useful
for understanding Spivak on the subaltern:
Devi, Mahasweta, Chotti Munda and His Arrow, Trans.
and Intro., Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak, Blackwell, 2003 (1980).
---.“Draupadi by Mahasveta Devi,” Trans. and Foreword,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Critical Inquiry, 8.2 (1981): 381-402.
---.“The Hunt,” and
“Pterodactyl,” in Imaginary Maps;
s.a. Spivak preface and interviews.
---. “Stanyadini.”
(trans. Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s
Text from the Third World,” in Spivak, In Other Worlds, p. 241-6)
Djebar, Assia, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Heinemann,
1993 (1985).
---. Far from Medina, Quartet, 1994.
Rosalind Morris, ed., Can the Subaltern Speak: The
History of an Idea (essay collection).
Stephen Morton, “Subaltern Studies,” Gayatri Spivak,
95-123.
Mark Sanders, “Translating Devi,” Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory, 38-48.
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