Imaginary Maps, Gayatri Spivak: Marxist-feminist approach to post-coloniality

[Mine Aysen Doyran]

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Imaginary Maps: Three Stories of Mahasweta
Dewi

"Imaginary Maps includes a translator's preface, appendix, and
interview with the author by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Spivak
explodes  the scope and impact of these stories, conncecing the
necessary "power lines"  not only between local and international
structures of power (patriarchy,  nationalism, late capitalism), but
tracing  them to the very door of the university"

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the
Humanities at Columbia University. She is the author of Outside in
the Teaching Machine, In Other Worlds and The Post-Colonial
Critic, a collection of her interviews.

"Can the Subaltern Speak?"

http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/poldiscourse/spivak/spivak2.html

Benjamin Graves '98, Brown University

Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"--originally published in Cary
Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg's Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture (1988)--perhaps best demonstrates her concern for the processes
whereby postcolonial studies
ironically reinscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of
political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure. In
other words, is the post-colonial critic unknowingly complicit in the
task of imperialism? Is "post-colonialism" a specifically first-world,
male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse that classifies
and surveys the East in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial
dominance it seeks to dismantle? According to Spivak, postcolonial
studies must encourage that "postcolonial intellectuals learn that their
privilege is their loss" (Ashcroft. et al 28). In "Can the Subaltern
Speak?", Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the
subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has
reappropriated Gramsci's term "subaltern" (the economically dispossesed)
in order to locate and re-establish a "voice" or collective locus of
agency in postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the
"epistemic violence" done upon Indian
subalterns, she suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate
their condition by granting them collective speech invariably will
encounter the following problems: 1) a logocentric assumption of
cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous
people, and 2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to "speak for"
the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to speak for
themselves. As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a
collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact
re-inscribe their subordinate position in society. The academic
assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an ethnocentric
extension of Western logos--a totalizing, essentialist "mythology" as
Derrida might describe it--that doesn't account
for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic.


Spivak: Marxist, Feminist, Deconstructionist

Benjamin Graves '98, Brown University

If Spivak's chief concern can be summarized as a wariness of the
limitations of cultural studies, what's particularly interesting about
her engagement of the postcolonial predicament is the uneasy marriage of
marxism, feminism, and deconstruction that
underlies her critical work. "Three WomenÕs Texts and a Critique of
Imperialism," an analysis of Emily Bronte's Jane Eyre, Jean Rhys' Wide
Sargasso Sea, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, portrays the complicated
interface of competing critical
practices. According to Spivak, Bronte's novel may well uphold its
protagonist as a new feminist ideal, but it does so at the expense of
Bertha, Rochester's creole bride who functions as a colonial subject of
"other" to legitimate Jane's simultaneous
ascent to domestic authority. In other words, a feminist approach to
theory perhaps precludes an understanding of the novel's depiction of
the "epistemic violence" (and in the case of Bertha, physical
containment and pathologization) done upon imperial
subjects. In the following passage, Spivak portrays such imperialism as
a "worlding" process that attempts to disguise its own workings so as to
naturalize and legitimate Western dominance:

 If these 'facts' were remembered, not only in the study of British
literature but in the study of the literatures of the European
colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we would produce a
narrative in literary history, of  the 'worlding' of what is now called
'the Third World.' To consider the Third World as distant cultures,
exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be
recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation
fosters the emergence of 'the Third World' as a signifier that allows us
to forget that 'worlding,' even as it expands
the empire of the literary discipline (269).

Spivak's description of the Third World becoming a "signifier that
allows us to forget that 'worlding'" resembles in many ways Marx's
notion of the commodity fetish that he describes in volume one of
Kapital. In "The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret," Marx
suggests that commodity products become part of an obfuscating network
of signs that obscure the history of labour that went into their
production. Spivak suggests that the Third World, like the commodity
fetish, becomes a sign that obscures its mode of production, thus making
Western dominance appear somehow given or natural.



--

Mine Aysen Doyran
PhD Student
Department of Political Science
SUNY at Albany
Nelson A. Rockefeller College
135 Western Ave.; Milne 102
Albany, NY 12222