Name:
Makwana Monika
Paper No: 8 The Cultural
studies
Roll no:- 21
Topic: Gayatri Spivak’s
concept of Subaltern Theory
Enrollment No:
206910842020190027
Email I’D: makwanamonika76@gmail.com
Submitted to: SMT. S.B. Gardi
Department of English
Introduction
Gayatri
spivak is best known for her essay “Can the subaltern speak”. It is best
example of subaltern Theory. While, she is best known as a postcolonial
theorist, she describes herself as a ‘Para-disciplinary, ethical philosopher’
and her early career would have included applied deconstruction. Considered one of the most influential
postcolonial intellectual, she is best known for her translation of and
introduction to Jacques Derrida’s De la Grammatology and she also
translated such a work of Mahasweta Devi as Imagery Maps and Breast
stories into English with separate critical appreciation on the text and Devi’s
life writing in general. Her reputation was first made for her translation of
Derrida’s Of Grammatology and she has since applied deconstructive
strategies to various theoretical engagements and textual analysis and
including Feminism, Marxism, literary criticism and post colonialism. She is a
postcolonial theory calls herself a practical Marxist feminist
deconstructionist. Spivak discourage and dismantles western centers and
challenges there over history and prejudice. She considers postmodernism as
politically contradictory and ambivalent. In the essay ‘Can the subaltern
speak’ she tries to overthrow the binary opposition between subject and object,
self and others, occident and Orient, Center and Marginal and the majority and minority.
Subaltern according to spivak is those who belong to the third world countries.
It is impossible for them to speak up as they are divided by gender, class,
caste, religion and other narratives. These divisions do not allow them to
stand up in unity.
Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak…
She is born on 24 February 1942 in
Calcutta, India to Pares Chandra and sivani Chakravorty. She is an Indian
scholar, theorist and Feminist critic. She is professor of the university at
Columbia University, where she is founding member of the institute for
comparative literature and society. In 1961- Spivak
joined the graduate program in English at Cornell University,
traveling on money borrowed on a so-called life mortgage. In 1962,
unable to secure financial aid from the department of English, she transferred
to Comparative Literature, a new program at Cornell, under the guidance of its first Director, Paul de Man, with
insufficient preparation in French and German.
In 1959-upon graduation, she secured employment as an
English tutor for forty hours a week. Her Master of Arts thesis was on the
representation of innocence in Wordsworth with M.H. Abrams. In 1963- she
attended Girton
College, Cambridge, as a research student under the supervision
of Professor T.R. Henn, writing on the representation of the stages of
development of the lyric subject in the poetry of William
Butler Yeats. She presented a course in the summer on "Yeats
and the Theme of Death" at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo,
Ireland.
And apart from Jacques Derrida, Spivak has also
translated the fiction of the Bengali author, Mahasweta Devi-
the poetry of the eighteenth century Bengali poet Ram Prashad
Sen
and the most recently A Season in the Congo by Aimé Césaire,
poet, essayist and statesman from Martinique.
In 1997- Gayatri Spivak received a prize for translation
into English from the Sahitya Akadami
and the National Academy of Literature in India. Her essay, Can the
Subaltern Speak? Published in 1983,
established Spivak
among the ranks of feminists who consider history, geography, and class when
thinking about women. In all her work, her main effort has been to try to find
ways of accessing the subjectivity of those who are being investigated. She is
hailed as a critic who has feminized and globalized the philosophy of
deconstruction, considering the position of the subaltern,
a word used by Antonio Gramsci as describing ungeneralizable fringe groups of
society who lack access to citizenship.
·
Achievements
Gayatri Spivak was awarded the 2012 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 2012After
completing her secondary education at St. John's
Diocesan Girls' Higher Secondary School, Spivak attended Presidency
College, Kolkata under the University of
Calcutta, from which she graduated in 1959.
Academic
·
‘Myself Must I
Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats’ (1974).
·
‘Of Grammatology’
translation, with a critical introduction, of Derrida's text(1976)
·
‘In Other Worlds:
Essays in Cultural Politics’ (1987).
·
‘Spivak, Gayatri
Chakravorty (1988). Can the subaltern speak? Basingstoke: Macmillan...
·
The Post-Colonial
Critic – Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990)
·
Outside in the
Teaching Machine (1993).
·
The Spivak Reader
(1995).
·
A Critique of
Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999).
·
Other Asias
(2008).
·
An Aesthetic
Education in the Era of Globalization (2012).
·
Readings (2014)
Literary
·
Imaginary Maps
(translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi)
(1994)
·
Breast Stories
(translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi)
(1997)
·
‘Old Women’ translation
with critical introduction of two stories by Mahasweta Devi (1999)
·
‘Song for Kali: A
Cycle’- translation with introduction of story by Ramproshad Sen.(2000)
·
Chotti Munda and
His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of the novel by Mahasweta
Devi (2002)
Definition of Subaltern
“A subaltern is someone
with a low ranking in a social, political, or other hierarchy. It can also mean
someone who has been marginalized or oppressed.’’
From the Latin roots sub- and alternus, subaltern
is used to describe someone of a low rank or class.
Subalterns occupy entry-level jobs or occupy a
lower rung of the ‘corporate ladder.’ But the term is also used to describe
someone who has no political or economic power, such as a poor person living
under a dictatorship.
·
What is Subaltern?
In critical theory and post-colonialism, the term
subaltern designates the populations which were socially, politically, and
geographically outside of the hegemonic power structure of the colony and of
the colonial homeland.
In describing history told from below, subaltern was coined by Antonio Gramsci, notably through his work on cultural hegemony, which identified the groups that are excluded from a society's established institutions and thus denied the means by which people have a voice in their society.
In postcolonial theory, the term subaltern describes the lower classes and the social groups who were at the margins of a society: a subaltern is a person rendered without agency by social status. Nonetheless, the literary critic Gayatri Spivak spoke against an overly broad application of the term in 1992.
‘Subaltern is not just a classy word for "oppressed", for other, for somebody who's not getting a piece of the pie.... In post-colonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference. Now, who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's not subaltern... Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus; they don't need the word 'subaltern'.... They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They're within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call them Subaltern.’
In describing history told from below, subaltern was coined by Antonio Gramsci, notably through his work on cultural hegemony, which identified the groups that are excluded from a society's established institutions and thus denied the means by which people have a voice in their society.
In postcolonial theory, the term subaltern describes the lower classes and the social groups who were at the margins of a society: a subaltern is a person rendered without agency by social status. Nonetheless, the literary critic Gayatri Spivak spoke against an overly broad application of the term in 1992.
‘Subaltern is not just a classy word for "oppressed", for other, for somebody who's not getting a piece of the pie.... In post-colonial terms, everything that has limited or no access to the cultural imperialism is subaltern—a space of difference. Now, who would say that's just the oppressed? The working class is oppressed. It's not subaltern... Many people want to claim subalternity. They are the least interesting and the most dangerous. I mean, just by being a discriminated-against minority on the university campus; they don't need the word 'subaltern'.... They should see what the mechanics of the discrimination are. They're within the hegemonic discourse, wanting a piece of the pie, and not being allowed, so let them speak, use the hegemonic discourse. They should not call them Subaltern.’
Concept of subaltern
‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ critically deals with
an array of western writers starting from Marx to Foucault, Deleuze and
Derrida. The basic claim and opening statement of "Can the Subaltern
Speak?" Was that western academic
thinking is produced in order to support western economical interests. Spivak holds that
knowledge is never innocent and that it expresses the interests of its producers.
For Spivak knowledge was like any other commodity that is exported from the
west to the third world for financial and other types of gain.
Spivak was wondering how the third world subject can be studied without cooperation with the colonial project. Spivak 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". 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.
This limitation, Spivak holds, is sue to the fact
that critical thinking about the "other" tends to articulate its
relation to the other with the hegemonic vocabulary. This is similar to
feminist writers which abide by the patriarchic rules for academic writing.
In the following parts of "Can the Subaltern
speak?" Spivak was criticizing different critical writers and then moves
on to the example of the Indian "Sati" practice.
The
people or the subaltern is a group defined by its difference from the elite. If
in the context of colonial production, the subaltern female is even more deeply
in shadow.
Spivak
examines the position of Indian women through an analysis of a particular case
and concludes with the declaration that the subaltern cannot speak.
Spivak target is the concept of an unproblematic ally constituted subaltern identity, Rather than the subaltern subject ability to give voice to political concerns.
Representation of the Subalterns in Indian English Literature...
Novels: Anand’s "Untouchable" and Mistry’s "A Fine Balance".....
Among the Indian English writers, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan played a crucial role to bring India’s controversial inner issues in front of the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Those issues can be considered local issues of the Indian sub-continent but those have a universal appeal. We also observe that the other Indian writers from the present time have continued the trend of representing the struggle of the subalterns at various phases of life.
Among those writers of the present time, Arundhuti Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Kiran Desai and Rohinton Misty are remarkable writers for their creative and in-depth perspectives.
Mulk Raj Anand’s "Untouchable" and Rohinton Mistry’s "A Fine Balance" concentrate on the miserable life of untouchable characters who try to
change their living condition by entering the centre from the periphery, but their attempt falls apart when it comes into conflict with reality. The portrayal of the subalterns in the two novels is
the crucial subject to be analyzed critically because of their authenticity to represent the subaltern.
The
most vital part of these two novels is their self-analytical approach. Both the
stories are presented to readers from the subaltern perspective which is
unacceptable to the society.
Although there is more than fifty years’ gap between the two novels, the essence of the stories echoes in both the novels. Anand’s "Untouchable" is published in 1935 and Mistry’s "A Fine Balance" is in 1996.
"Untouchable" focuses on Bakha; an eighteen years old sweeper in colonial
India. It also scrutinizes the depression of untouchables or lower class people and their rage against the upper caste. It gives a glimpse of a story of a day’s rural experience. The story displays the critical and tense relations among untouchable subalterns, upper caste Hindus, Muslims and Christian British colonizers.
On
the Other hand, Mistry’s A Fine Balance looks at the curse of untouchability
and poverty of the lower class village and city people in the colonial and
Independent India. The novel shows several generations but Ishvar, Om Dina and
Maneck are the protagonists presenting different backgrounds with various
realities. Ishvar and Om come from the village to the city to find a job. They
get a job in Dina’s house as tailors. Dina is a widow living in a rented house
and earns her livelihood by delivering the readymade clothes to the shops. With
Dina, Maneck lives as a paying guest. Maneck is a college student. Her mother
is Dina’s school friend. At the end of the novel, Maneck comes back to India
from abroad and discovers the changes of the society, the shut down of Dina’s
business
along with her, the rented house and the alteration of both Ishvar and Om into street beggars.
along with her, the rented house and the alteration of both Ishvar and Om into street beggars.
The story goes through various flashes-backs. It helps to denote the uncertain individual lives in turbulent India. It reflects the subalterns falling into the cyclic trap of poverty.
When the two novels are compared, it is visible that Untouchable (Anand, 2001) can be one of the stories of A Fine Balance. Untouchable (Anand, 2001) revolutionizes the traditional portrayal of India and Indian literature by challenging India with a new vision of literature....
Conclusion:-
In Spivak's essay, "can Subaltern speak?" Challenges the idea of colonial ‘subject’ and offers an example of the boundaries of the capability of western discourse, to interrelate with incongruent cultures. This essay is marked a paradigm shift in post-colonial studies
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