Revisiting the subaltern in the new empire

Abstract

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ was published in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture in 1988. With the female subaltern as its principle concern, the essay moves between the seemingly disparate realms of intellectual production, institutional spaces, colonial archives, Hindu scripture and economic infrastructures (among others) to pose a central problematic in relation to voice, subjectivity, representation and the practice of writing history. In the intervening years since its publication, Spivak’s framing of this problematic – which foregrounds the discontinuities between these concepts in scholarship – has been hotly debated in terms of its implications for intellectual work and activism alike. In the move from Bhubaneswari to her great grandniece, Spivak’s own revision of this essay in her recent book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason draws our attention to the emerging subaltern of the New Empire: once caught and silenced in the relay between colonialism and national liberation struggles, she now disappears in the ‘violent shuttling’ between multinational capital and culturalism. This paper on Spivak’s work responds to what we see as its continued challenge to humanities scholars and activists to fashion an ethics of alterity that is not reducible to identity politics where the gendered subaltern occupies a particularly telling place as part of a comprehensive critique of globalization.