History and the critique of postcolonial reason limits, secret, value

Abstract

This essay explores the challenges of radical history writing by elaborating three themes in the chapter on history in Spivak's A Critique of Postcolonial Reason : limits, the open secret, and value/transvaluation. Questions about the limits of history writing have been posed from within the discipline, particularly by scholars engaged with the dilemmas of writing postcolonial histories. Spivak's text is placed within this historiography and alongside the critique of 'foundationalist' history. Here, an analysis of Joan Scott's inter-disciplinary critique of the category of 'experience' opens into a discussion of the supplementary relationship of literature and history presented in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason . I then elaborate how, drawing out questions from within the discipline of history, Spivak attempts to think outside narratives grounded in causality/chronology, essentialized identity, 'experience' and the ascription of intention and blame. This gesture seeks to circumvent the production of a homogeneous colonial author and a universalized colonial/postcolonial victim, while at the same time not forgetting colonialism. In this project, Spivak theorizes processes of transvaluation and the discontinuity of subjectivity and agency, underlining that the production of Europe as Subject and sovereign agent of history coincides with the production of the colonial subject, an agent as instrument. Charting this discontinuity through the double meaning of representation deployed by Spivak, as staging and as proxy, this essay points to two kinds of overlapping limits. The limit of history as staging - as a coding of the world - here overlaps with the limit or open secret of history as proxy, or the selective production of the archive. To think history as critique, this double sense of history's limits - as both inside and outside - is then explored through the question of female subject formation and subalternity.