Subalternity and Agency

1. Basic Biography about Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born in Calcutta, West Bengal, 24 February 1942 to “solidly metropolitan middle class” parents (PCC). She thus belonged to the “first generation of Indian intellectuals after independence,” a more interesting perspective she claims, than that of the Midnight Children, who were “born free by chronological accident” (Arteaga interview). She did her undergraduate work in English at the University of Calcutta (1959), graduating with first class honours. She borrowed money to go to the US in the early 1960s to do graduate work at Cornell, which she chose because she “knew the names of Harvard, Yale and Cornell, and thought half of them were too good for me. (I’m intellectually a very insecure person … to an extent I still feel that way)” (de Kock interview 33). She “fell into comparative literature” because it was the only department that offered her money (Ibid.). She received her MA in English from Cornell and taught at the University of Iowa while working on her Ph.D. Her dissertation was on Yeats (published as Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats [1974)]) and was directed by Paul de Man. Of her work with de Man she says, “I wasn’t groomed for anything. I learnt from him. I took good notes and slowly sort of understood” (de Kock interview). “When I was de Man’s student,” she adds, “he had not read Derrida yet.  I went to teach at Iowa in 1965 and did not know about the famous Hopkins conference on the Structuralists Controversy in 1966″ (E-mail communication).  She ordered _de la grammatologie_ out of a catalogue in 1967 and began working on the translation some time after that (E-mail communication).  During this time she married and divorced an American, Talbot Spivak. Her translator’s introduction to Derrida’s Of Grammatology has been variously described as “setting a new standard for self-reflexivity in prefaces” (editor’s introduction to The Spivak Reader) and “absolutely unreadable, its only virtue being that it makes Derrida that much more enjoyable.” Her subsequent work consists in post-structuralist literary criticism, deconstructivist readings of Marxism, Feminism and Postcolonialism (including work with the Subaltern Studies group and a critical reading of American cultural studies in Outside in the Teaching Machine [1993]), and translations of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi. She is currently a University Professor at Columbia.

2. Key Terms: hegemony, subaltern, revisionist history, traditional vs modern model of subjectivity, representation

Preliminary Concepts Needed to Understand Spivak:

1. Hegemony: the political, institutional, ideological root of power
(Status Quo)

2. Subaltern: (for Spivak) relates to limited or inaccessibility to hegemonic power.

3. Subject/Subjectivity:
a. Traditional Model: Subject is “undivided” i.e., desire and
interests are untied [general description].

i. Desire may be a facet of the unconscious and thus the
subject is said to arise from “parasubjective culture”

b. Marxist Subjectivity: Subject is profoundly divided, and this division is the condition for subjectivity.

c. Class Consciousness → Subjectivity (For Marx)
d. Class Consciousness:
i. Political Identity 
ii. Not a consequence of familial collectivity

4. Two forms of Representation:

a. Representation: as Vertreten: as in political representation,  e.g., representational democracy.

b. Representation: as Darstellen: as in re-presentation is  economic value.

i. The role of aesthetics / philosophy

ii. E.g., Aristotle’s form/function and the table/sled example. [Re-presentation]. 

iii. Re-presentation is thus technically functional transformation.

3. Motivation behind her writing of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

“The British Codification of Hindu Law”:
1. Wishes to discuss British epistemic violence in the codification of
Hindu Law.
2. Colonial British Masters sought to:
“Form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions
whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but
English in taste, in opinion, in morals, and in intellect. To that class
we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country to
enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the
Western nomenclature, and to render them by degree fit vehicles
for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.”
3. Spivak argues that for Foucault and Deleuze the subproletariat (the lowest “class”) “can speak and know their condition” .
4. Spivak disagrees with this contention.
5. Spivak explores the consciousness (subjectivity) of
woman as subaltern.
6. Widow sacrifice: sati

7. “White men are saving brown women from brown men” (p. 92). The problem of consciousness in woman as subaltern is encapsulated in this sentence.
8. This sentence, however, is contrasted from the Indian nativist argument: “The women actually wanted
to die”

Conclusion:
The Subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with ‘woman’ as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish. (p. 104).

Source: Gayatri Sivak essay: "Can the Subaltern Speak?"