The question of representation
Spivak/Devi
Representation and its meanings
• a) to re-present, as in the work of imagination
that re-presents reality in literature;
• b) to represent, as in to stand in for, to speak
for, to speak as, in the realm of politics.
Gayatri Spivak
• Feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, Subaltern
Studies (radical historiography)
• Translated Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology
Spivak’s approach
• Marxism, feminism, deconstruction
• Translated Jacques Derrida’s Of
Grammatology into English (1967)
• An Aesthetic Education in the Age of
Globalization (2012)
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBzCwzvu
dv0
Key themes
• Authenticity and Identity
• “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
• The gendered subaltern
Subaltern Studies
• a collective of Left-leaning historians of India, formed in the
late 1970s
• From the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, SS historians
took the term subaltern, referring to masses and the
people. Gramsci had used the term to refer to those classes
in society that were left out of the historic transformation
of the Italian state in the 1870s. Subalterns are therefore
not a proper class as such and are marked by
heterogeneity.
• produced a radical rethinking of historical representation
(the limits of the archive; universal history versus local
history), and of the relationship between historical and
literary representation (writing and power)
Elite and subaltern: two domains
• Domain of the elite: privileged by dominant discourse
to deal with the rulers on behalf of all colonized
• Presence of the subaltern domain, left out through
oversight or design; inaccessible to the operations of
the Raj/colonial state
• Similarly, the Indian nationalist movement and the
postcolonial state also tended to ignore this domain
• The failure of the Indian bourgeoisies to speak for the
nation; not representative
• Vast areas of people’s consciousness and life that were
never integrated into bourgeois hegemony
Central thesis
• the actuality of the lives and forms of
consciousness of the disenfranchised masses
of colonial/postcolonial society (whether
peasantry or urban working class) cannot find
adequate representation in elite modes of
representation (textualisation)
Questioning the position of the
investigator
• --Construction of the subaltern—a subject position
indicating powerlessness (tribals; subsistence farmers,
unorganised peasant labour…)
• -- epistemic violence: project to constitute the colonized
subject as other, and by doing so, obliterating her
subjectivity
• --“To confront them is not to represent (vertreten) them
but to learn to represent (darstellen) ourselves” (84)
• --need to question position of investigator (the assumed
subject); FW intellectual valorizing the concrete experience
of the oppressed, but uncritical about their own positions
as intellectuals
Limits of the archive
• knowledge and power: production of history as
narrative of truth
• problem of the archive—police records, east india co.
records
• Subaltern history: fragmented; no records
• Impossibility of historians to get at subaltern
consciousness
• Subaltern history—an impossibility, a theoretical
fiction?—utopian dream
• question of silence: what the text does not say. Cannot
say (peasant insurgency); dismantling the colonial
archive
The work of criticism
• The work of criticism must be to problematize
this and to theorize subaltern consciousness-agency, action, change/event, historical
consciousness as subject of history
• what does this mean?
• --speaking to as opposed to speaking for
• --unlearning of privilege
Gendered subaltern
• Cannot be understood through bourgeois democratic
individualism of mainstream Western feminism
• not a search for origins or purity (essentialism: the
monolithic Third World woman)
• Even in new fields of inquiry: dev studies, women’s
studies, multicultural studies—subaltern woman “mute
as ever”
• native woman caught b/w the imperial project of
progress and social benevolence and native reform and
reaction
• ideological battleground: no countersentence from the
women; impossible to put together a ‘voice”
Mahasweta Devi: storyteller of tribal
life
• Tribals in India: 8-10% of India’s population
• Among the most marginalised, along with lower
castes/previously untouchables
• Long history from the colonial period: both exotic
and savage, unassimilable—British fascination
• Postcolonial India: attempts to assimilate them in
the nation, while prejudices remain
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Tf0oBlmEs
•
Naxalite Movement
Naxalism
• Influenced by Maoism in China
• Peasant/tribal rebellion of the late 1960s and
continuing until now against landlords,
moneylenders, police, state, all exploiters. Seen
to be stemming from the failures of Indian
democracy, of the state’s representation of all
Indians
• Found many sympathisers about urban elites—
students, intellectuals, writers and journalists.
• Movement was crushed brutally, but there has
been a widespread resurgence.
Draupadi/Dopdi
• Draupadi
• Character from the ancient
Indian epic Mahabharata
• Married to the Pandavas (5
brothers) who stake her in a
game of dice and lose her
• The opponents try to
dishonour her by disrobing
her in open court
• Her devotion to Lord
Krishna saves her honour—
it remains intact
• Dopdi
• Modern tribal woman, a
militant
• The postcolonial state
attempts to dishonour
her—she is raped multiple
times by policemen and
state officials
• Dopdi reverses the stakes of
the game—in looking back
at the officer, she redirects
shame in his direction, away
from her mutilated body
The story continues
MOR: Unit Four
• The politics of representation—who represents whom,
from where, and how
• The power of discourse. Language makes meaning,
brings reality into effect
• Identities are historically constituted—their meanings
change over time
• Identities are always relational
• The task of criticism, of literary criticism in particular, is
to a) persistently question the boundaries b/w the
classroom and the real world, b/w scholarship and
power; b) to rigorously investigate our own positions
and assumptions.