Contents of this Issue

• Spivak and the Subaltern Woman (Manjushree Thapa)

Reviews

• Situation Analysis of Child Labour in Nepal (CWCD)
• Sustainability in Mountain Tourism: Perspectives for the Himalayan Countries (Patricia East, Kurt Luger, Karin Inmann, eds.)
• Starless Starr (Lita T. Cruz)
• Industrial Relations in Nepal: A Book of Readings (Prem R. Pant and Narayan Manandhar)
• Nepal: The Kingdom in the Himalaya (Toni Hagen) (Revised 4th edition with Deepak Thapa)

Manjushree Thapa

The Bengali Marxist-feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1988 article "Can the Subaltern Speak?" remains controversial for her assertion that the subaltern cannot speak. In making her case, Spivak fundamentally disagrees with Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze's suggestion that truly oppressed groups can speak if they are only given a chance to. This, because their narratives become subsumed by more hegemonic ones. She takes the case of sati as an example of this dynamic. In response to colonial British criticism of this practice - and the threat of "white men saving brown women from brown men" - nationalist patriarchs argued variously that the widow actually wanted to die, that she attained a higher freedom (from the cycle of rebirth) through sati, and that she should be admired for the courage of her choice. The widow's own utterance on the matter was always interpreted according to the these two dominant narratives; she was either a victim of barbaric "brown men," or she was anti-national. She (as a subject in possession of her own agency) thus disappeared from public discourse. This disappearance, Spivak argues, is "not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the 'third-world woman' caught between tradition and modernization." ("Can the Subaltern Speak?" p. 306)

Though in later articles and interviews Spivak concedes that women as a whole cannot be defined as subaltern, she remains clear on the matter of women's systematic silencing. While a woman can alwaystalk, Spivak claims, she cannot alwaysspeak insofar as the act of speaking requires a listener, which the female subaltern always lacks. It is in this sense that Spivak declares that the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read.

In making this statement, Spivak defends Marx's claim about the oppressed classes: "They cannot represent themselves." While some have criticized this comment for its elitism, Spivak cites the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (who authored the concept of the subaltern) in defending it. According to Gramsci, subaltern social groups are by definition disorganized, lacking in class consciousness, and entirely excluded from the histories of dominant and hegemonic classes of civil society. Any attempt on their part to become heard brings them into the domain of political and textual representation, which is to say, into civil society. They are then able to speak for themselves in ways that (as I will elaborate upon next) Spivak still finds partial. But there remain other groups who never move into the realm of representation, and these groups remain subaltern.

Spivak's argument with representation derives from her observation that there is a common misunderstanding of its function: as in political (parliamentary) representation, textual representation is not a matter of simplyspeaking for others, but ofworking for them ("Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors," p.296). Those who seek to work for the subaltern should not merely write or speak about them, or depict them in images; they must abolish the subaltern space by bringing those who live there into the sphere of representation.

Spivak's debt to Marxism is clear in such positions. Yet her readings of Marx are marked by her deconstructivist method, and as such contribute to current rereadings of Marxism. Her article "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value," for example, argues that the indeterminacy of the term "use value" opens up for question Marx's sealed-off chain of Labor -> Value -> Money -> Capital. The semiotic indeterminacy of use value (defined as the value generated when a person immediately uses the product of her own labor, which still leaves open the question of what exactly it amounts to) is something that Spivak claims materialist and idealist philosophers alike ignore in order to serve their own interests. Echoing Jacques Derrida, she then insists upon a "scrupulous declaration of interest in the text of the production of value," and she is always ready to declare her own interest in wresting Marx free from those who claim to have the final word on him.

Marx aside, Spivak's debt is also to Paul de Man, who articulated the deconstructivist position that all readings are necessarily misreadings. Spivak was de Man's student, and her work pays the kind of close attention to language that he called for. Derrida, who to his own chagrin is called the "father" of deconstruction, is also a major influence, and Spivak is the English translator of his early bookOn Grammatology.

Deconstruction is fundamentally concerned with dismantling structures (of any particular logic) along their own fault lines. Primarily aimed at rereading texts and narratives, it is as much a strategy as a philosophy. For this reason, though some feminists find the deconstructivist focus on rereading to be too removed from the "real" (political) concerns of women, Spivak argues that it can be used towards feminism's political ends. For rereading is an activity fraught with subversive potential, and feminism must concern itself with constantly subverting the narratives that write, and thus regulate, women.

One of Spivak's most ethical gestures in this regard is to constantly point out the silencing of women's own narratives. In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" she writes about the 1926 suicide of a young Bengali woman, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri. Bhaduri had been unable to carry out the political assassination assigned to her by the pro-independence group she was secretly part of; she hoped to demonstrate her political loyalty by killing herself instead. Unable to reveal her political motives, and unwilling to let society interpret her death as proof of illicit love (for why else would a young woman commit suicide), she waited till the onset of menstruation to hang herself. Because of this decision, her death could fit neither into popular narratives about women's love tragedies, nor into independence activists' hegemonic narratives about women as Durga, and thus became insignificant. The subaltern woman is always forced into this kind of silence.

Spivak's commitment to bringing the subaltern woman into the sphere of representation is not limited to her work as a literary critic. She is the English translator ofImaginary Maps, a collection of Mahasweta Devi's stories of tribal women in their capacities as workers, bonded kamiya slaves, mothers, lovers, Naxalite insurgents and organic intellectuals. Just as Devi "works for" tribal women through her writing, Spivak works for women both within and without civil society by taking up the task of translation. She thus exemplifies the engaged intellectual committed not just to cultural criticism, but also to cultural activism.

(M Thapa is writing her first novel)