Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak”
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In this episode, I turn my attention to Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak," a seminal text in the field of post-colonial studies. Spivak argues that between patriarchal and imperial forces, subaltern people--women, specifically--are denied the capacity to speak.
this has been very useful, I've been struggling with bits of the text until I found your video
I am very glad to find your channel, and by the way the comments are very helpful too. Thank you guys
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I had to present on this essay and had so much trouble reading and analysing the test. This video really helped!
Thanks! It was really helpful to grasp the essence of the text!
This is a brilliant explanation and analysis of this work. Well done
This essay is so dense. Thank you for this
Excellent presentation! Your pronunciation of 'Indian' words is immaculate. One correction: Bengal is in the eastern part of India, not in north India.
This is great! Helps me understand this essay a lot!
Thank you so much! Super helpful and you explain it wonderfully
Thank you! This was extremely helpful.
Really great video, it helped me a lot to understand the nuances of Spivaks text. One thing I still find hard to follow is the jump from the deconstruction of the subject / object split to the proposal of 'handing out subjectivity' to those earlier considered objects. It is just establishing that there is no Subject without and Object to oppose it to, so 'gifting' someone else Subjectivity can't function without others either still staying as Objects, or someone else becoming the 'Other', the Objects. What I mean is, I think, how did anyone come to the conclusion, that this could be a possible solution, or even the logical next step?
Anyways, love the video, subscribed and will definitely spend some time browsing through your catalogue.
What a good question! (I wish I had an answer)
If i understand your question correctly, and my analysis is also from understanding Spivak from her different talks, what she is saying is that we cannot have 1 conclusion or 1 end or 1 side of the story. There can never be 1 established angle to anything. If someone else were to become the object 'alone' (that your question posses) my understanding is Spivak will be uncomfortable with that too. But because 'a woman performing sati' was ignored in the 'prevailing' narrative; instead focus was on a white man saving a brown woman from brown man; the narrative makes white man the hero of the act reducing the woman (who is performing sati) to an abstraction; what Derrida calls phallogocentrism. So I feel because the existing narrative went in the direction of a man she is objecting it and noticing the 'nuanced' approach of any narrative. If the subject or object were to be reversed or go on someone else all together (like your question asks), she would have objected that too. I think she is a perfect example of what a Post-structuralist is; which is not believing in the reality as we know but rather question everything that we know. Does it answer your question in any way?
Oh and to address the second part of your question as to how one could come to a solution or even the next logical step, Spivak in her thinking does not agree that there is 'A' solution or even 'A' next logical step. And she is also not looking for it. I am quoting her directly here, she says, "the point is not to produce an analysis that you will make a solution and everything else will be excluded but to forge a practice which takes everything (that is not said) into account." She further adds that because 'that what is not said' is not taken into account while establishing any narrative or any solution or any next logical step, the narratives in itself becomes 'problematic'. And she says and I quote, "those are the moments of doubt that a post-structuralist reader (like herself) finds as moments of enablement. Since we are not looking for a perfect analysis (or solution or next logical step) but we are looking for the mark of vulnerability which makes a great text not an authority generating a perfect narrative but our own companion as it were. So that we can share our own vulnerabilities with these texts and move forward." I hope this answers your second question? and I know it raises another question as to why then take such a position that is not generating solution and what does taking such a position actually achieve or what is this position asking from us? ( i will try to answer it in my next comment again in her words)
What is this position asking from us is and I quote Spivak agian, "It really asks for 'a transformation of consciousness' - a change in mindset (of how people view any narrative)" She further adds that, "in that sense it is an ideological project". And I guess in her saying that she understands that it will not break well into social consciousness but that not breaking well in itself does not limit the existance of her position. It exists. I personally feel that in next 100-200 years we will be able to actually grasp every point she was making because by that time we will not be viewing reality the way we view it now.
I hope all this gives you some understanding of what she is trying to say? Sorry if I have bored you or confused you more with my entire analysis of her position.
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Very meticulous work, David! Spivak’s seminal work constitutes one of the most important South Asian texts on Post-colonialism.
However, I beg to differ on very many occasions with Spivak.
Particularly, her take on Sati, wherein she says that the British, behind the veneer of dismembering the socio-cultural fabric of India, abolished the practice which Spivak believes to have been an act embodying the will and thus abolishing Sati meant taking away the brown woman’s voice along with a rupture of the cultural fabric.
It is important to acknowledge that India is /was a society of brutal public scrutiny and what appears to be a ‘choice’ is well dictated and even imposed. Even if the act of immolating oneself appears ‘voluntary’, it also happens because of the ‘social expectation’ and the consequent stigmatisation of the woman who denies performing the ritual. There has always been a fear lurking behind doing this act...the fear of being outcast...although ironically, even if a widow were alive, she was treated as an outcast (the traces of which last till date) . What I mean is it is always the patriarch who has been insidiously imposing his will through what appears to be a ‘voluntary choice of the woman’. Also, I dont understand why Spivak broaches this up in a post colonial study because there are better examples to understand the colonising mechanism in India. Like the heightened connectivity through railways, was essentially a British ploy to make the country more accessible for their own interests and even that disturbs the socio-cultural fabric of the landscape because indigenous families were displaced and uprooted to give this mega project shape. I think her argument with regard to Sati is a kind of an unnecessary intellectualisation of something that ideally should have been done away with. And I give no credit to the British, the apparent benefactors for that.
Further, it is important to understand that India is a land with multifarious structures of hegemony which co-opt at different levels to form more oppressive regimes. Caste (the very foundations of Hinduism) is the most oppressive structure, downplayed by Spivak in this text. Caste and religion have been allies for the colonial machinery to sustain itself in India.
Also, even if we take the feminist discourse to study, the lower caste brown woman, in such conditions, becomes the most marginalised. Spivak belongs to an upper caste elitist Indian family and seems to have assumed the representational voice of the subaltern and ironically, this is what privileged people do, in their ‘benevolence’, they take the very spaces , the very voices, that is of the Other.
I think subjectivity is also a privilege for it becomes the site of power and assuming subjectivity is always relational to the hegemonic normative as it is always recognised by this normative. The brown woman, in the pre independent Indian society, was not even marginalised. She was invisible (the brown ‘backward’ Indian woman, still remains invisible to this date) i.e. a site with no potential, no recognition and thus no voice.
P.S. Spivak was also influenced by Mahashweta Devi who has done some exemplary work for the emancipation of the tribal Indian woman. Spivak has translated a couple of her short stories called ‘Breast stories’ and that would present you a better picture of what it is /was being a brown marginalised Indian woman. Give it a read, if you wish to know more.
I think you had tried uploading Spivak’s works earlier as well but deleted it later? Finally, you are here. Congratulations:)
That's super interesting! Why do you think that Spivak chooses to focus on Sati over these other oppressive mechanisms then? Is it because Sati is an 'easy' target given that it is so readily recognizable as a 'backwards' (I don't advocate for this language) cultural practice while the railroads appear to be neutral?
Theory & Philosophy Perhaps, David. And I am myself trying to demystify that
Human sacrifice is a pretext to intrude, invade into Easternghats
Spivak was very clear though that the abolition of widow sacrifice was an unquestionable good. Her reason for bringing it up is because its an example of how the subaltern cannot speak either within Hindu patriarchy, or within British legal frameworks, even when the British are pursuing a clearly progressive policy.
Her suggestion in the text is that the burning of widows came about because grief striken women would be surrounded by male relatives, who would pressure them to prove their love for their dead husbands by killing themselves. Obviously this is bad, and Spivak thinks its bad, but the badness isn't wholly within the act of suicide, but within the act of subject production that creates a suicidal widow. Spivak points out and stresses the fact that Sati translates as "good wife", and the use of the term Sati to denote widow burning is actually the shortening of a longer phrase, translated as "the burning of the good wife".
Spivak then suggests that the fact that the British identified the word "Sati" as the act, rather than the subject of the act, was symbolic of the fact that their criminalisation of the act would fail to address the root problem of the subjugation of Indian women.
The conclusion, I think, is that in traditional Hindu society (in some regions of India), subaltern women could only speak my giving voice to the patriarchal desire for widows to die, and there was no possibility of giving expression to an authentic subaltern voice; the British then did a good thing by banning burnings, but did this by implementing a framework in which the widows are just mute victims of male violence.
She is an American scholar and her riding style is quite unpleasant I must say.
Thanks for this amazing explanation
Hey, you gave a few quotes, and I can't seem to find them in the current spivak essay I have.
Stuff like "subaltern is not similarly privileged, and does not speak in a vocabulary that will get a hearing in institutional locations of power".
Diggin' the new intro theme 😉
Happy to hear it because I've gotten mixed reviews haha
Gracias por este vídeo
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I watched this to prepare my reading.
Is the subaltern are lower section of society ? Are they visit up and down and are to be controlled.
thank you
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Thank YOU!
This extremely educated lady is from Ballygunge Kolkata just opposite of my residence. Her dedication to be able to become the voice of the landless people in Eastern part of India deserves great appreciation. I like her just not because she speaks in Marxian light but because she did great things for many poor people in India. Personally I am not a Marx fan...
Wonderful
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Thanks for this video - very well done. I do have to say that I found the stuff about sati to be pretty noxious. The excruciation and death of those women is real, so playing these sorts of historicist intellectual games with it feels very gross to me.
I mean, might we say that antisemitism is a part of traditional german culture, which the Allies had no right to “erase” by liberating the concentration camps? I think it’s clear that the very question is morally repugnant.
I’m sad to say that the subaltern probably cannot speak if their suffering is reduced to pawns in intellectual chess between Deleuzians and Derrideans.
More of a criticism of Spivak than of you. Thanks again for the video. Will be watching more.
Pray for me, I have to take a single exam in post colonial theories, but this stuff is too hard for my fragile brain. How do y’all understand these things?😰
They have their own way of speaking.
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I think Spivak points out that they have a voice but cannot be heard. So, Third World women aren't completely voiceless.
Race emerges in a proper way in Society must be defended. I don’t know why that text is usually ignored when we discuss race and Foucault. His idea of Race might be limiting in particular ways but it isn’t that hasn’t addressed it.
No she doesn’t let him. So elitist