- Can the Subaltern Speak? New York, February 2004
As a tribute to the intellectual contribution of their valued employee, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University hosted in February a symposium to mark the twenty-year anniversary of her influential paper 'Can the Subaltern Speak?'. This event, introduced by Rosalind Morris and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, took the pertinent subtitle: 'reflections on the history of an idea'. For 'Can the subaltern speak?' is a rhetorical question if ever there was one; certainly no one at the symposium set out to resolve it. But it has proved a productive idea and one whose purchase is by no means exhausted.
Spivak's paper was written for and delivered at a conference in 1983 on 'Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture'. It quickly established itself as a source of inspiration for feminists and post-colonialists, and became the focus of a heated debate. Spivak's subaltern was different from the usual tradition in English, where a subaltern is privileged but junior: for example a junior officer in the army, or a family tutor in civilian life. In Spivak's paper, the subaltern appears as a woman of some resource, but whose specific situation in British-colonized India results in her being, in some ways, silenced.
After many reprintings, the author became increasingly concerned about the way 'Can the subaltern speak?' was being read and used. A complex analysis of power, desire and interest (the original title of the paper) was in danger of being constructed as yet another recycling of the dreary myth of a passive Asian femininity. Spivak expanded and revised it to form a substantial section of her recent book, Towards a Critique of Post-colonial Reason. In both versions the critical question is 'can the hegemonic ear hear anything?' rather than the literal one of 'can the subaltern speak?'.
Spivak's essay tackles the complex politics of widow self-immolation (sati) and the less familiar suicide in 1926, for political reasons, of the young woman Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri (revealed at this event as a member of her own family). Some of the speakers at the symposium took up the issue of death directly, others addressed more general issues of indigenous political movements, and the current state of 'post-colonial theory'. I came away from the event with some very useful responses to my 'subalterns at war' talk, on the Indian Army and the First World War. More generally, the day articulated Gayatri Spivak's characteristic combination of hard intellectual work with a sense of real political direction, and an unscheduled appearance by Toni Morrison was much appreciated.
The day was framed by benign collegial endorsements from Partha Chatterjee and Homi Bhabha, while speakers such as Jean Franco, Abdul JanMohamed and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan elaborated regional political issues in detail. Other contributors included Ritu Birla, Pheng Cheah and Drucilla Cornell, and the papers are to be published by Columbia. The mileage of the term 'post-colonial' was a feature of the discussion, perhaps not surprisingly as Spivak herself had to be restrained from entitling her recent work on this topic 'Don't Call Me Post-colonial!'