Perspective in Theory and Criticism

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Presenters: Shama, Swati and Amar
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a world renowned critical theorist whose work
has been particularly influential to the field of post-colonialism, for which she is
often referred to as having been a pioneer. She was born on February 24, 1942
in Calcutta. Her research interests focus on feminism, Marxism, deconstruction
and globalization. She challenges ideas such as that the West is more
democratic, civilized and so ultimately more developed than the rest of the
world, or that the current post-colonial time is more progressive than earlier
historical periods. She is best known for the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
considered a founding text of postcolonialism; and for her translation of, and
introduction to Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie. In 2012 she was
awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for being "a critical theorist
and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in
relation to the globalized world". She received the Padma Bhushan, the third
highest civilian award given by the Republic of India, in 2013.
She often focuses on the cultural texts of those who are marginalized by
dominant western culture: the new immigrant; the working class; women; and
other positions of the subaltern.
Explaining the term Subaltern:

In critical theory and post-colonialism, subaltern is the social group who is

socially, politically, and geographically outside of the hegemonic power
structure of the colony and of the colonial homeland. In describing history told
from below, the term subaltern derived from the cultural hegemony work of
Antonio Gramsci, which identified the social groups who are excluded from a
societys established structures for political representation, the means by which
people have a voice in their society.
Spivak begins her Essay with the critique of a text by two great practitioners of
Critique: Intelectuals and Power: a conversation between Michael Foucault
and Gilles Deleuze.
She writes that while Foucault and Deleuze were great intellectuals, their
unmediated conversation revealed certain kinds of convictions for instance,

their endering of the third world as transparent. She argues that western
scholars tend to assume that they know and understand the situation the others
are in, and thus can speak for them.
Spivak is hardly impressed with western efforts to speak for the other or try to
present his own voice. She believes that the west is obsessed with preserving
itself as subject, and that any discourse is eventually about the discoursing
agents themselves. Spivak is opposed to the western attempt to situate itself as
investigating subject that is opposed to the investigated non-western object.
Spivak discusses two types of representation by Western intellectuals: 1)
representation as speaking for as a proxy (vertreten), and; representation as
re-presentation (darstellen). Spivak critiques Foucault and Deleuze for their
simplistic compression of these two different terms, which they do in order to
say that beyond both [kinds of representations] is where oppressed subjects
speak, act and know for themselves.
Foucault and Deleuze also ignored the epistemic violence of imperialism and
the international division of labor. This problem can also be seen in nonWestern intellectuals, and Spivak gives as an example the Subaltern Studies
group. Subaltern Studies scholars intend to give voice to the subaltern, yet they
limit the subaltern to the indigenous dominant groups , and eventually tend to
reproduce the Western representation of the Other.

In this essay , spivak talks about how the western cultures investigate the other
cultures. It critically deals with an array of western writers starting from Marx
to Foucoult, Deleuze and Derrida. The basic claim which spivak points to is that
western academic thinking is produced in order to produce western economical
interests. Spivak believes that knowledge is never innocent and that it expresses
the interests of its producers. For Spivak knowledge is like any other
commodity that is exported from the west to the third world for financial and
other types of gain.
Further,Spivak wonders how can the Third World Subject be studied without
cooeperation with the colonial Project. She points to the fact that research is in a
way always colonial, in defining the "other", the "over there" subject as the
object of study and as something that knowledge should be extracted from and
brought back "here". And therefore she remarks that basically we're talking
about white men speaking to white men about colored men/women. When

Spivak examines the validity of the western representation of the other, she
proposes that the discursive institutions which regulate writing about the other
are shut off to postcolonial or feminist scrutiny.
She points to the fact that the west is talking to itself, and in its own language,
about the other. Like other commodities, data or raw material is harvested in the
third world country and taken back to the west, to be produced and sold for the
benefit of the western readers and especially the western writers. To elaborate
her opinion Spivak gives us the example of the banning of the Practice of Sati.
Spicak writes that all we hear about sati are accounts by British colonizers or
Hindu leaders about self-immolation oppressed women, but we never from the
sati-performing women themselves.
She gives another example of Bhuwaneshvari Bahaduri. She was given a task to
assassinate a colonial officer but she was suffering from a dilemma. She did not
want to kill somebody and she was not comfortable with the means of killing
that officer. Because she was not able to solve this dilemma, she committed
suicide. But her death was taken as a suicide, because she was Pregnant and she
could not bear the shame. By this example, Gayatri wants to show how difficult
it is for a subaltern to speak. How difficult it is for a woman to raise her voice in
this world.
This lack of an account leads Spivak to reflect on whether the subaltern can ever
speak? Her answer to Can the subaltern Speak? is No, they cannot, not when
the western academic field is unable to relate to the other with anything other
than its own paradigm.
And the moment a Subaltern starts speaking for or representing himself, he
seizes the value of a Subaltern. He does not stay a Subaltern anymore. The
moment he denies the representation by others , that is the moment when he
loses his status of being a Subaltern. Because , this way he gains the discursive
privilege to represent himself.
She controversially argues that the subaltern cannot speak because of the
Western/colonialist mindset that dominates the subaltern.