Gayatri Chakravatory Spivak

1. Gayatri Chakravatory Spivak • Gayatri Chakravatory Spivak is an unsetting voice in literary theory and, especially, postcolonial studies. She had described herself as a “practical deconstructionist feminist Marxist” and as a “gadfly.” (2193) • Spivak was born in Calcutta, India, and received her B.A. from the University of Calcutta. She came to the United States and completed her M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature at Cornell University, (2193) • Her earliest important work was her introduction to and translation of JACQUES DERRIDA’S Of Grammatology (1977), the first of his major book to be rendered in full into English. (2193)

2. Can the Subaltern Speak? • In the face of the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the self’s shadow, (2197) • Until very recently, the clearest available example of such epistemic violence was the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.(2197) • It is well known that Foucault locates one case of epistemic violence, a complete overhaul of the episteme, in the redefinition of madness at the end of the European eighteenth century. (2197)

3. Consider the often-quoted programmatic lines from Macaulay’s infamous “Minute on Indian Education”: We must at present do our best to from a class who may be interpreters between us and the million whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, (2198) • Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silence center) of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry, Aboriginals, and the low strata of the urban subproletarait. (2199)

4. Perhaps because Gramsci criticizes the vanguardistic position of the Leninist intellectual, he is concerned with the intellectual’s rôle in the subaltern’s cultural and political movement into hegemony. (2199) • This is indeed the problem of “the permission to narrate” discussed by Said. As the Ranajit Guha, the founding editor of the the collective argues, The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism— colonist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism… (2200)

5. For the (gender-unspecified) “true” subaltern group, whose identity is its difference, there is no unrepresentable subaltern subjects that can know and speak itself; (2202) • It is, rather, that both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant. (2203) • If, in the contest of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female even more deeply in shadow. (2203)

6. In the first part of this chapter we mediate upon an elusive female figure called into the service of colonialism. (2203) • Can the subaltern speak? and Can the subaltern (as woman) speak? our efforts to give the subaltern a voice in history will be doubly open to the dangerous run by Freud’s discourse. It is in acknowledgement of these dangers rather than a solution to a problem that I put together the sentence “White men are saving brown women from brown men,”(2204)

7. Just as Freud’s insistence on making the woman the scapegoat in “A child is being beaten” and elsewhere discloses his political interests, (2205) • A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, hanged herself in her father’s modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926. (2205) • While waiting, Bhubaneswari, the brahmacārini who was no doubt looking forward to good wifehood, perhaps rewrote the social of sati-suicide in an interventionist way. (2205)

8. She generalized the sanctioned motive for female suicide by taking immense trouble to displace (not to deny), in the physiological inscription of her body, its imprisonment within legitimate passion by a single male. (2205) • I was so unnerved by this failure of communication that, in the first version of this text, I wrote, in the accent of passionate lament: the subaltern cannot speak! It was an inadvisable remark. (2206) • Gulari cannot speak to us because indigenous patriarchal “history” would only keep a record of her funeral and colonial history only needed her as an incidental instrument. (2206)

9. Our work cannot succeed if we always have a scapegoat. The postcolonial migrant investigator is touched by the colonial social formations. (2207) • And finally, the third group: Bhubaneswari’s elder sister’s eldest daughter’s eldest daughter is a new U.S. immigrant and was recently promoted to an executive position in a U.S.-based transnational. (2208) • Today’s program of global financialization carries on that relay. Bhubaneswari had fought for national liberation. Her great-grandniece works for the New Empire. This too is a historical silencing of the subaltern. (2208)