27

Chapter 2
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY-SPIVAK

2.0 INTRODUCTION:
Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak was born in Calcutta (India) in 1942 in
a middle class family. She received an undergraduate degree in English at the
University of Calcutta (1959). After this she completed her Masters in English
from Cornell University, and then pursued her Ph. D. while teaching at University
of Iowa. Her dissertation was on W. B. Yeats directed by Paul de Man titled
Myself I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W. B. Yeats. She is a professor of
English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York. She has
also taught at Brown, Texas at Austin, UC Santa Cruze, Universite Paul Valery,
Jawaharlal Nehru University, Stanford, University of British Columbia, Goethe
Universitat in Frankfurt, Riydha University and Emory. Before coming to
Columbia in 1991, she was the Andrew W. Mellon professor of English at the
University of Pittsburgh. She has been a Fellow of the National Humanities
Institute, the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan, the Humanities Research
Center at the Australian National University, the Center for Historical Studies
(Princeton), the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio). She has been a Kent Fellow
and a Guggenheim Fellow. Among her distinguished Faculty Fellowships is the
Tagore Fellowship at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (India). She
has been a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.
Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak is one of the most influential figures in
contemporary critical theory. She is perhaps the best known for her overtly
political use of contemporary cultural and critical theories to challenge the legacy
of colonialism on the way we read and think about literature and culture. She
has challenged disciplinary conventions of literary criticism and academic




28
philosophy by focusing on the cultural texts of those people who are often
marginalized by dominant Western culture: the new immigrant, the working class,
women and postcolonial subject. By championing the voices and texts of such
minority groups, she has also challenged some of the dominant ideas of the
contemporary era. Her lecture in 1992, Davie Memorial Lecture at Cape Town is a
noteworthy one. She is on editorial board of many journals, among them Cultural
Critique, Boundary 2, New Formations, Diaspora, ARIEL, Rethinking Marxism,
Public Culture, Parallax, Interventions. She is active in rural literary teacher
training on the grassroots level in Aboriginal India and Bangladesh. Her name is
primarily associated with the concept of postcolonial Studies and along with
Edward Said and Homi Bhabha. She is regarded to be one of the most important
representatives of this Anglo- American theoretical field.
Gayatri Spivak is a literary critic and theorist. She is best known for
the article, Can the Subaltern Speak? which is considered a founding text of
postcolonialism. She is also known for her translation of Jacques Derridas Of
Grammatology. This translation brought her to prominence. After this she carried
out a series of historical studies and literary critiques of imperialism and feminism.
She has often referred to herself as a Marxist, Feminist and Deconstructionist.
Her ordering ethic- political concern has been the tendency of institutional and
cultural discourses/ practices to exclude and marginalize the subaltern, especially
subaltern women.
I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary but I can break rules.
(Spivak, 1990:27)
Breaking rules of the academy and trespassing disciplinary boundaries have been
central to the intellectual projects of Gayatri Spivak, one of the leading literary
theorist and cultural critic. She is known not only as a scholar of deconstructive
textual analysis of verbal, visual and social texts but also as a global feminist




29
Marxist. She is widely acknowledged as the conscience of the metropolitian
politics of identity. While she is best known as a postcolonial theorist, Gayatri
Spivak describes herself as a Para-disciplinary, ethical philosopher.
My position is generally a reactive one. I am versed by Marxists as too
codec, by feminists as too male-identified, by indigenous theorists as too
committed to Western Theory. I am uneasily pleased about this (1990:67).

Despite her outsider status, Spivak is widely cited in a range of disciplines. Her
work is nearly evenly split between dense theoretical writing peppered with
flashes of compelling insight and published interviews in which she wrestles with
many of the same issues in a more personable and immediate manner. Her literary
analysis and theoretical writings have invariably dealt with the deconstruction of
neocolonial discourses and a feminist-Marxist approach to postcolonialism,
particularly to the schematized forms of representing women in the Third World.
She combines Marxism and deconstruction in the name of postcolonial feminism,
and at the crossroads of literary studies and philosophy.
Known for her ample erudition and opaque theoretical texts, Spivak
combines abstract philosophical speculation and personal reflection, creating a
discourse that is both intimate and obtuse. Far from unconsciously absorbing the
influences of other thinkers, she engages herself in a perpetual dialogue with the
authors that inform her, reflecting on the inner conflicts and paradoxes inherent in
her own theoretical position. Approaching discourses and institutions from the
margins is more than a preference for Spivak, as she is often cast as an outsider or
marginal figure herself. Spivak being an elite intellectual, the "Third-World
woman", a "hyphenated American", and a Bengali exile living in the West,
inhabits an identity that is nothing if not heterogeneous. She brings this personal
eclecticism into her work. Due to drawing from Post-Colonial theory, philosophy,
literary criticism, and economic theory, her texts are intellectual hybrids. The




30
course of a single essay shifts among disparate disciplines, simultaneously playing
texts off of one another and weaving them together. She does not only analyze
Post-Colonial entanglements of discursive power; but her texts exemplify and
enact these same entanglements.
Gayatri Spivaks reputation initially stemmed from her translation of
Jacques Derrida's Deconstructive monograph de la grammatologie". Her
introduction (Translators Preface) for the book enjoys a reputation as one of the
few texts that rivals the opacity of Derrida's own writing. Being highly abstract
and decidedly oblique, she brings an intensely personal, ethical perspective to her
work. She is fascinated by human relations: encounters with otherness, intimacies
created in the midst of differences, the responsibility implicit in every act of
communication. She works to articulate a relation to others that is always singular,
never preceded by socially produced categories. According to Spivak, the ideal
relation to the other is "an embrace, an act of love".
Gayatri Spivak is a leading postcolonial critic who closely follows
the lessons of deconstruction in addition to defiantly unassimilated ethics of
deconstruction; she draws too, on Marxism and Feminism. She sometimes
regarded as the Third-World Woman, convenient marginal or awkward special
guest, the eminent but visiting American professor, the Bengali middle-class
exile, a success story in the star system of American academic life. She can not be
simply singly positioned, or centred, biographically, profession or theoretically
but her thought and writings regarding the process, conditions and her rational
ways could title her as an other. Like Derrida she is interested in how truth is
constructed rather than in exposing error. She confirms: Deconstruction can only
speak in the language of the thing it criticizes. The only things one really
deconstructs are things into which one is intimately mired.This approach makes it
very different from ideology critique. She also states in another occasion as:
deconstructive investigation allows us to look at the ways in which we are




31
complicit with what we are so carefully and cleanly opposing. Postcolonial
criticism draws attention to question of identity in relation to broader national
histories and destinies. Spivaks work is of special interest as she has made the
unsynchronized and contradictory factors of ethnicity, class, and gender that
compose such identities her own subject. She traces this predicament of the
postcolonial intellectual in a neo-colonized world in her own case as well as in
the texts of the Western or Indian traditions she examines.
Her literary and critical contribution can be called as a milestone in
the literary critical tradition of India. Her works include:
1. Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of
Derridas text.)
2. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics
3 Outside the Teaching Machine
4. A critic of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the
Vanishing Present
5. Death of the Discipline
6. Other Asias
Spivaks literary criticism has worked to criticize the ideological
function of English literature in the colonial context. Spivaks intellectual work
has been shaped by the experience of post-colonial migration from India to
U.S.A., where she currently teaches. The intellectual tradition of left-wing, anti-
colonial thought that was prevalent in India since the early twentieth century
continued to tacitly influence Spivaks work. Of Grammatology is a translation
work. It is a translation of the leading French philosopher, Jacques Derridas de la
grammatologie. She ordered Jacques Derridas book out of a catalogue in 1967




32
and began working on the translation some time after that. This book is a detailed
discussion of the evolution of Derridas ideas concerning language. There are
seven major topics in this book divided into two parts. The first part includes three
and the second four topics respectively. Her translators introduction to Derridas
Of Grammatology has been variously described as setting a new standard for self-
reflexivity in prefaces. Her introduction helped readers to make Derrida much
more enjoyable. Here Spivak seems to be highly abstract and decidedly oblique as
she brings an intensely personal, ethical perspective to her work. Spivak is
fascinated by human relations. She works to articulate a relation to others that is
always singular, never preceded by socially produced categories. Here she
strongly states that the ideal relation to the other is an embrace, an act of love.
Spivaks In other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics is a collection
of essays on various topics. It consists with fourteen essays divided into three
parts. The first part entitled as Literature includes five essays. The second part
entitled as Into the World includes next five essays. The final part, Entering the
Third World includes four essays. This book proved her to be the leading literary
theorist and cultural critic. This book indicates her interest in finding new ways to
Marxism and Feminism to literary texts. Her essays focus on the growing need for
academic departments to become increasingly integrated in order to better
understand the worlds political, social and economic issues that hegemonically
maintain the cultural and economic hierarchy. Spivak, coming from a Feminist,
Marxist and Deconstructionist framework, shows how categories can help to place
people, but should not be used as absolute boundaries of discourse. This book
takes us to the very heart of Feminist Deconstructionist epistemology. Here she
analyzed the relationship between language, women and culture in both Western
and non-Western context. In Other Worlds has proved to be an invaluable tool for
studying culture both our own and other. As per National Review, In Other
Worlds is admirably intellectually honest. The New York Times states Spivak, a




33
celebrity in academia, creates a stir wherever she goes. The Journal of Modern
Literature asserts that always challenged and brilliantly argued these essays
deserve careful thought. Here she highlights the urgent increased need of a
deconstructionist theory of discourse for all texts. In conclusion, this text is an
important collection of essays to widen our thinking and appreciation quality.
Outside the Teaching Machine is a very good book that deals with
the Feminist literary criticism. Here she addresses the issues of multiculturalism,
international feminism and postcolonial criticism. This book proved to be an
exciting new collection of these issues. The contents of this book include six
important topics- Interview, More on Power Knowledge, Marginality in the
Teaching Machine, Woman in Difference, Limits and Openings of Marx in
Derrida and Negotiations. In this book Spivak defines deconstruction as the act of
critiquing a conceptual structure that one cannot inhabit.
Spivak expresses her views about imperialism and orientalism in her
book Outside the Teaching Machine as: postcoloniality- the heritage of
imperialism in the rest of the globe- is a deconstructive case. Those of us from
formerly colonized countries are able to communicate with each other and with the
metropolis, to exchange and establish socially and transnationality, because we
have had access to the culture of imperialism.
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the
Vanishing Present is neatly divided into four topics. It also includes one short but
brilliant appendix on deconstruction. The topics are titled as Philosophy,
Literature, History and Culture. The most of the different sections of the chapters
were published in piece work. She has reedited all topics in terms of the general
argument of the book as a continuous thread of analysis. She has provided the
longer and narrative footnotes which get progressively pushing into the text. The
four chapters seem to bleed into one another. Philosophy and Culture open on to




34
Literature and History without clear disciplinary limitations. Spivak has followed
the impossible model as like Derrida and Bennington that puts in play a
structure of invagination between footnote and text which threatens the stability of
both. Spivak proved her ability in charting the foreclosure of the native informant
in works of Kant and Hegel. She marks the limitations of native informant in
literary representation. Her famous article Can the Subaltern Speak? opens the
text-tile of history and considers the possibility of a haunting that enables her to
tell the epistemic story of imperialism as one of a series of interruptions, a
repeated tearing of time that cannot be sutured. Finally reweaving the social text of
globalization as our Vanishing Present she graphs the violence that link the
contemporary high fashion textile industry to the exploitation of child labour in the
South. This book is significant for many reasons, as it contains a revised version of
Can the Subaltern Speak? an ingenious reading of the German philosophers-
Kant, Hegel and Marx and a sustained critique of the cultural and economic effects
of globalization.
The post-colonial Critic brings together a selection of interviews and
discussions in which she has taken part over the past five years; together they
articulate some of the most compelling politico-theoretical issues of the present. In
all her works, the students of Spivak will identify her unmistakable voice as she
speaks on questions of representation, the politicization of deconstruction, the
situations of post-colonial critics, pedagogical responsibility and political
strategies. In this book, she identifies herself as a postcolonial intellectual caught
between the socialist ideals of the national independence movement in India and
the legacy of a colonial edification system.
Spivaks Death of a Discipline is the collection of her remarkable
series of lectures on the topic Comparative Literature as a Discipline. The contents
include three important chapters: Crossing Borders, Collectivities and Planetarity.
This book does not tell us that comparative literature is at an end but it charts a




35
demanding and urgent future for the field. Here Spivak strongly opposes the
migrant intellectual approach to the study of alterity. She maps a new way of
reading not only the future of literary studies but its past as well. This book is not a
lament but a promise. In this remarkable series of lectures Spivak outlines the
genealogy of comparative literature as a discipline, its successive intellectual
affiliations and the potentialities that an association with area and cultural studies
opens. In this work, she traces the outlines of a fascinating intellectual project
grounded in a planetary vision as opposed to globalization. This visionary work
rflects the possibility of a reformed discipline that opens itself to learning from
many quarters and also identifies emergent collectivities. This text disorients and
reconstellates dynamic, lucid and brilliant in its scope and vision.
For almost three decades, Spivak has been ignoring the standardized
rules of the academy and trespassing across disciplinary boundaries. In Death of
the Discipline, she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and
sounds an urgent call for a new comparative literature in which the discipline is
given a new life, one that is not appropriated and determined by the market.
Other Asias is an eloquent plea for pedagogy of continental scope
that does not evade or erode the singular, 'textured' life, thought and work of
geographical regions and political minorities. The exemplary courage and
extraordinary imagination that have distinguished Spivak's work are now engaged
in rich reflections on the political art of humanistic education. There is a collection
of nine essays in this book. The essays include: Writing Wrongs-2002: Accessing
Democracy among the Aborigionals, Responsibility-1992: Testing Theory in the
Plains-1994: Will Postcolonilism Travel?-1996: Foucault and Najibullah,
Megacity-1997: Testing Theories in Cities, Moving Devi-1997: The Non-Resident
and the Expatriate, Our Asias-2001: How to Be a Continentalist, and Position
Without Identity-2004: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak by Yan
Hairong.




36
This deeply passionate, ethical, and political book tells us that we
must pluralize Asia because it is only in a pluralized world that we can imagine a
more just one. Spivak's postcolonial perspective here offers an incomparable
understanding of Asia in its multiplicity of differences, a tour-de-force from one of
our era's the most brilliant critical thinkers.
Her critical theories are divided as:
i) Deconstruction Theory
ii) Marxism.
iii) Feminism.
iv) Subaltern Theory
Spivaks chief concern can be summarized as a wariness of the
limitations of cultural studies. Her critical work indicates the thought that
postcolonial predicament is the uneasy marriage of Marxism, Feminism and
Deconstruction.

2.1 DECONSTRUCTION THEORY:
According to deconstruction, no work of literature, whatsoever, has
been able to express exactly what it wanted to say and thus the critics business is
to deconstruct and recreate them, taking their words as not the outward form of
their meaning but only the trace of a quest. At the outset deconstruction is a
departure from structuralism, more precisely the oppositional logic of
structuralism. The deconstructionists have made a division of criticism into two
types: Metaphysical and Deconstructive. The metaphysical criticism
presupposes that the text has a fixed meaning which the critic is supposed to
explain, whereas the deconstructive criticism believes in the determinacy of




37
meaning. Deconstruction presumes that an author at once affirms and unaffirms,
says and unsays his meaning. Thus the business of deconstructionist is not to
deconstruct the text but to show how the text has deconstructed itself. According
to Rajnath:
one can safely argue that deconstruction is a dismantling of the
structure of a text. (1984:17-18)
Deconstruction is not a method in the sense of a systematic pursuit of the text,
but a vigilant practice to explore a textual division. Gayatri Spivak outlines the
meaning and method of Deconstruction in her translators introduction to Of
Grammatology in the following words:
Deconstruction seems to offer a way out the closure of knowledge by
inaugurating the open-ended indefiniteness of texuality thus placing it in
the abyss. It shows us the allure of the abyss as freedom. The fall into the
abyss of deconstruction inspires us with as much pleasure as fear. We are
intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom. (1976:IXXXVI)
Deconstruction rejects all earlier methods of criticism and supplies no single
method. However, it helped us to see the critic not as a mere interpreter of the text
but as a co-creator. When stretched too far, it enables the critic to overtake the
author. That is what makes it controversial.
De Mans deconstructive criticism has certainly influenced Spivaks
early readings of British colonial archives and official Indian historiography. She
has increasingly sought to challenge the dominant ideas (like, circulation of
people, money and information.) about contemporary globalization. She states that
the idea that the new speed and flexibility of technology enables the effective
transnational circulation of people, money and information is profitably regulated
by rich, industrial the First World nations , while the vast majority of the worlds
population are living in a state of poverty and repression. By highlighting the




38
political and economic interests which are served by the economic text of
globalization, Spivak exposes how the world is represented from the dominant
perspective and geopolitical location of the First World to the exclusion of other
disenfranchised groups. Such a radical challenge to the truth claims of Western
democracy and globalization has expanded the focus of deconstruction from
textual analysis of literature or philosophy to include the contemporary economic
and political text.
Spivaks translation of and preface to Derridas book, de la
grammatologie has certainly played a vital role in presenting his thought to an
English-speaking audience. Here she expands Derridas deconstructive thinking
beyond the framework of Western philosophy, and sets it to work in diverse fields
ranging from Third World womens political movements to postcolonial literary
studies and development studies. Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak became a well-
known figure in the academy after translating Jacques Derridas de la
grammatologie (1967) into English which helped to cast a limelight on
deconstructionist theory in the American Academy. Of Grammatology was
published in 1976. She is a scholar of deconstructive approaches to verbal, visual
and social texts. Her translation of Jacques Derrida initiated a debate on
deconstruction in the Anglo-American Academy.
Derridas deconstructive strategies have been particularly generative
for postcolonial intellectuals such as Homi Bhabha, Robert Young and Gayatri
Spivak because they provide a theoretical vocabulary and conceptual framework
to question the very philosophical tradition that has also explained and justified the
subjection, depression and exploitation of non-Western societies. Spivak has
stressed the potential usefulness of Derridas thought for making effective critical
interventions in the discourse of colonialism, the contemporary global economy,
and the international division of labour between the First World and the Third
World.




39
Deconstruction, a critical practice introduced by French philosopher
and critic Jacques Derrida, strongly serves to introduce the assumption of Western
thought by reversing or displacing the hierarchical binary oppositions that
provide its foundation. She challenges the metaphysical premises that shape
Western science and philosophy. She argues that the structure determining these
discourses always presuppose a centre that ensures a point of origin, meaning,
being or presence. According to her, the centre (unique) constituted that very thing
within a structure which while governing the structure, escapes structurally.
Logocentrism, she says, establishes the metaphysical imperatives of truth,
consciousness and essences that underwrite Western literature, theology and
science. As per her views, any attempt to interrogate or to destroy the centre
invariably causes the production of another centre. In other words, the entire
history of the concept of structure must be thought of as a series of substitutions of
centre for centre, as a linked chain of determinations of the centre.
Gayatri Spivaks Translators Preface to Of Grammatology was
written at a time when Jacques Derridas work was not widely known or
understood, in the English-speaking world of philosophy and literary criticism.
Here she offers a comprehensive account of the key philosophical debates that
influenced Derridas early work as well as providing an intellectual context for
Derridas deconstructive philosophy. Here she challenges the conventions and
expectations of a Translators Preface to produce a scholarly and critical
introduction to Derridas deconstructive philosophy that is equal to many of the
subsequent philosophical commentaries that have been published about Derridas
thought. Spivak has mobilized Derridas deconstruction of Western philosophy to
expand and develop debates among the Third World intellectuals about the
cultural legacy of colonialism, the ability of Western Marxism to describe the
continued exploitation of the Third World workers by the First World
multinational corporations; and the question of whether Western feminism is




40
appropriate to describe the histories, lives and struggles of women in the Third
World.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak uses deconstruction to problematize the
privileged academic postcolonial critics unknown participation in the exploitation
of the Third World. She points towards deconstructions limitations in
conceptualizing and sustaining an engagement of hierarchical binary oppositions,
the postcolonial critic aiming at substantive social transformation or revolution
finds herself with inadequate power to revise dominant power structures. Spivak
has persistently and persuasively demonstrated that deconstruction is a powerful
political and theoretical tool. To plead the political value of deconstruction, she
focused on the rhetorical blind spots or grounding mistakes which stabilize
conventional notions of truth and reality. She has foregrounded the textual
elements that shape our understanding of the social world, and thereby questioned
the binary opposition between philosophical or literary texts and the so-called real
world. According to Spivak, deconstruction in the narrow sense domesticates
deconstruction in the general sense. She states further as:
Deconstruction in the general sense, seeing in the self perhaps only a
(dis)figuring effect of a radical heterogeneity, puts into question the
grounds of the critics power. Deconstruction in the narrow sense, no more
than a chosen literary-critical methodology, locates this signifying or
figuring effect in the texts performance and allows the critic authority to
disclose the economy of figure and performance. (1998:22)

The above opinion indicates that there are two meanings of the Deconstruction:
meaning with narrow sense and with the general sense. It challenges the critics
power and can be called as a literary-critical methodology. She used the concept
deconstruction with a specific intellectual and political purpose to focus the
reality of the dominant culture and to escape its stereotyped identifications.




41
Deconstruction came simply to name the last privileged defense of the canon
being reduced to a powerful method which would reveal the sameness and the
greatness of the major literary texts.
Spivaks interest in Derridas intellectual project is not merely
philosophical, but is also partly motivated by a desire to dismantle the very
tradition of Western thought that had provided the justification for European
Colonialism. Her refusal to simply represent non-Western subjects comes from a
profound recognition of how the lives of many disempowered groups have already
been damaged by dominant systems of knowledge and representation. The
deconstruction provides her to articulate this recognition with a critical strategy.
According to Spivak, deconstructive reading practice guards against the universal
claims of Marxism, national liberation movements or Western feminism, means to
all the oppressed. She pointed out that the language of universal political have
injurious and harmful effects on disempowered groups such as: the colonized,
women or the workers. Spivak states that the binary opposition is problematic
because it presents deconstruction as abstract philosophical method which is
divorced from the material conditions of concrete political events. Spivak
appreciates the greatest gift of deconstruction that questions the authenticity of the
investigating subject without paralyzing the asker.
The concept, deconstruction, for Spivak, is neither a conservative
aesthetic nor a radical politics but an intellectual ethic which enjoins a constant
attention to the multiplicity of determination. She is absolutely committed to
pinpointing and arresting that multiplicity at the moment in which an enabling
analysis becomes possible. The difference between Spivak and Derrida is seen in
their respective attitudes toward the pathos of deconstruction. Derrida writes: the
enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work.
According to Spivak, the abiding question is a limit which cannot obscure the
value, however provisional, of the rigorous analyses that deconstruction enables.




42
So, to grasp the interest of Spivaks work necessitates going beyond the binary
opposition between the First World intellectual production and the Third World
physical exploitation.
Applying the strategies of Deconstruction to post-colonialism,
Gayatri Spivak seeks to undermine the power of centralized discourses in the
interest of cleaning a space for marginalized voices. For her, Deconstruction is not
simply the practice of breaking things down. She states that it (Deconstruction) is
not the exposure of error but constantly and persistently looking into how truths
are produced. It means that Spivak does not challenge truths head on, but descends
to the level of the cultural and political formations that produce them. From the
margins of central discourses, she interrogates the operations that engender them
and hold them in place.
Spivak applies the concept Deconstruction to analyze the public-
private hierarchy. She tries to explain it in relation with feminist activity. In the
interest of the effectiveness of the womens movement, emphasis is placed upon a
reversal of the public-private hierarchy. Here she states:
Because in ordinary sexist households, educational institutions or
workplaces, the sustaining explanation still remains that the public sector is
more important, at once more rational and mysterious, and, generally, more
masculine, that the private, the feminist, reversing this hierarchy, must
insist that sexuality and the emotions are, in fact, so much more important
and threatening that a masculinist sexual politics is obliged, repressively to
sustain all public activity. (1998:140)
The above discussion highlights the sex discrimination tradition. Here she applies
the term deconstruction to wipe out this fixed construction or structure and bring
forth the women to acquire the public sector reversing them. As per above
thinking, Spivak seems to be feminist-deconstructionist. The opposition is thus not




43
merely reversed; it is displaced. So she states further that this practical structure of
deconstruction of the opposition between private and the public is implicit in all,
and explicit in some, feminist activity. And then feminist activity would articulate
or strive toward that fulfilled displacement of public (male) and private (female):
an ideal society and a sex-transcendent society. It means that deconstruction
teaches one to question all transcendental idealisms.
To sum up, Spivaks thought has been greatly shaped by Derridas
critical strategies of deconstruction. Her use of deconstruction has often been
invoked to demonstrate a perceived contradiction between Spivaks materialist
commitment to engage with disempowered subaltern groups in the Third World
and the difficult theoretical language and methodologies she employs to achieve
this goal. We can easily observe the influence of Derridas deconstruction of
Western philosophical truth and the Western humanist subject as her postcolonial
thought.

2.2 MARXISM:
German philosopher, Karl Marxs (1818-83) Das Capital (1867) laid
foundation of Marxist theory. The German Marxist critic, Gyorgy Lukacs
expressed his conception of totality in art. He lays emphasis on realism. Other
Marxist critics like Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin contest
Lukacs anti-modernism because they feel that a truly revolutionary art must
radically break with traditional forms. Gradually, Marxist criticism moved away
from Marxism as a system and became interdisciplinary in 1960s. Raymond
Williams (1921-88) is a significant Marxist critic who relates literature to the lives
of people. Williams felt that the Marxist critics unduly separated economics from
culture and overlooked individualism. So he moved away from them by preferring
culture to ideology. Terry Eagleton asserts that literary text is the production of an




44
ideology but not an expression of it. He argues that the relation of the literary text
to ideology should be viewed in terms of overdetermination.
Marxist critics have criticized deconstruction for ignoring the social
and historical dimension of texts. Apart from deconstruction, Marxism is also
linked with post-colonialism. Aijaz Ahmads In Theory (1992) is a systematic
study of post-colonialism from Marxists perspective. Marxist criticism is an
international discipline further cut into other schools of criticism such as:
deconstruction, cultural studies and post-colonialism. The early Marxist critics
were appealed by ideology whereas neo-Marxist by cultural materialism. The
Anglo-American Marxist critics have studied Marxist criticism from the angle of
deconstruction and cultural studies. Marxist criticism has now adopted an
interdisciplinary approach to literary studies.
Marxism is an urgent concern as it is crucially grounded in the Third
World experience and concentrates on imperialism and exploitation. In the
developed world today, the recent Marxist cultural criticism has revised the crude
economistic models of base and superstructure. It has also forgotten the necessity
of locating those cultural analyses within the organization of production and its
appropriation of surplus. Marxism today, means nothing more than a commitment
to a radical or socialist politics and the adoption of the classic mode of production
narrative: the transitions from slave to feudal, to capitalist orders. The
contemporary developed countries are difficult to be analyzed in the terms of
elaborated in capital: the problems posed by the analysis of the enormous middle
class; the decline in factory production; and, the growth of computerized
production in the last ten years. In this context, it becomes plausible that only
labour power cannot be the major productive element within the developed
economies.




45
After the collapse of Soviet Communist bloc, the writing of Karl
Marx has been widely perceived as irrelevant and outmoded by many political
thinkers and economic theorists because Marxs ideas no longer seem to have any
obvious direct relationship to contemporary social and economic life in the
Western world. Many contemporary intellectuals including Gayatri Spivak
revisited Marxs key ideas in the 21
st
century. Observing the brutal labour
conditions under which many women workers and child labourers are employed in
the postcolonial world stand as painful, they proved that Marxs critique of
capitalism is relevant to the contemporary economic world. Karl Marx restricted
his thought to analyze the capitalism of Europe only. In spite of this, he has
provided a central intellectual and political framework for many postcolonial
theorists and the Third World activists to negotiate and define particular forms of
domination and resistance in the postcolonial world (Morton, 2003:93).
In the essay, Scattered Speculations on the Theory of Value,
Spivak argues thoroughly focusing Marxs account of exploitation grounded in the
theory of surplus value. She expects the understanding of the labour theory of
value to understand the theory of surplus value that Marx had adopted from
classical economics. She plainly denies the labour theory of value that represents
or transforms the labour to value to money to capital. According to her, we have to
understand Marxs account of value not as indicating the possibility of labour
representing itself in value but as an analysis of the ability of capital to consume
the use value of labour power. She breaks the chain of value-determinations,
highlighting the general account of value particularly around feminism which
makes labour endlessly variable both in relation to technological change and to
political struggle. While arguing the concept value in literary criticism she states:
I will set forth a practical deconstructive-feminist-Marxist positon on the
question of value in a narrow disciplinary context. The issue of value
surfaces in literary criticism with reference to canon-formation. From this




46
narrowed perspective, the first move is a counter question: Why a canon?
What is the ethico-politico agenda that operates the canon? (1998:213).
Here she denies the canon-formation idea that is based on narrowed perspective.
This pattern of canon-formation indicates the concept of domination of Western
on the Third World countries or of upper class on lower class, male on female. So
she suggests the decentering the desire for the canon. But here she also accepts
that a desire for alternative canon-formations also work with varieties of and
variations upon the old standards. Spivak accepts Marxs scheme of value and tells
further that use-value is in play when a human being produces and uses up the
product (or uses up the unproduced) immediately. Exchange-value emerges when
one thing is substituted for another. Surplus-value is created when some value is
produced for nothing. In other words value is the representation of objectified
labour.
Being aware of the problem of Euro-centrism in Marxs thought,
Spivak criticizes Marxs writing on India for trying to insert non-Europe into a
Eurocentric normative narrative. (1999:72) She returns to Marxs later writing
on value and political economy in order to demonstrate the continuing importance
of Marxs thought to discussions of contemporary culture, politics and economics
in a postcolonial world. Spivak approaches Marxs writing through the lens of
Jacques Derridas deconstructive philosophy. Spivak states that to go via Derrida
toward Marx can be called a Literary or Rhetorical reading of a Philosophical
text. (1998:30) Spivaks engagement with Marx after Derrida can be read as
challenging Marxs early thought on philosophical and ethical grounds: on
philosophical ground because the early humanist Marx suggested that the
working-class struggle for economic equality and political emancipation in the 19
th

century Europe represented the political interests of all humanity, in all places, and
at all times; on ethical grounds because the universal claims that were made in
name of the industrial working class in Europe , excluded other disempowered




47
groups, including women, the colonized and the subaltern. So spivaks rethinking
of Marxs later writing may seem to contribute to an ongoing theatrical debate
about the politics of deconstruction, or the relationship between Marxism and
deconstruction. Her rereading of Marxs later economic writing is also importantly
grounded in the concrete gesture to the contemporary exploitation of womens
(re)production bodies in the Third-World. In short, Spivaks rethinking of
Marxist thought is precisely a response to the changing gendered and geographical
dynamics of contemporary capitalism itself.
Spivak also points out how global capitalism operates by employing
working class women in developing postcolonial countries. It is not only as these
women workers have no effective union representation, or protection against
economic exploitation, but their gendered bodies are also disciplined in and
through patriarchal social relations. According to Spivak, geographical dispersed
conditions of contemporary capitalism are responsible for this situation. Spivak
attracts our attention by emphasizing the thought how womens productive bodies
are site of exploitation under contemporary transnational capitalism.
Spivak, referring to Marxs concept of value, states that the worker
produces capital, because the worker, the container of labour power, is the source
of value. She proceeds ahead and points out that by the same token it is possible
to suggest to the so-called the Third-World that it produces the wealth and the
possibility of the cultural self-representation of the First-World. (1990:96) She
also insists to apply Marxs labour theory of value to contemporary readings of
culture and politics. Spivak reasserts the importance of the economical in critical
and cultural theory by emphasizing how the exploitation of women workers in the
Third-World provides the wealth and resources for intellectual culture in the
First-World. Spivak further points out that the working-class women in the
Third-World are the worst victims of the international division of labour.
(1998:167)




48
Gayatri Spivak portrays imperialism as a worlding process that
attempts to disguise its own workings so as to naturalize and legitimate Western
dominance. According to her, 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. It 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. 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.
Spivak points out Marxs Marxism which cannot account for the
social injustices of capitalism in the terms of its own philosophical system. She
traces incalculable moments in Marxs discussion of value which are the
conditions of possibility for a future social justice and political transformation. By
emphasizing how socialism cannot manage without the capital relation, Spivak
deconstructs the binary opposition between capitalism and socialism, which has
traditionally grounded classic Marxist theories of emancipation. She also points
out that the political independence has not led to the economic independence of
many Third-World countries due the huge national debt repayments to the First-
World banks and the gendered international division of labour. In Conclusion,
Spivaks persistent attempt to deconstruct capitalist system of value
determinations is not simply a corrective theoretical reading of Marx, but an
urgent call to articulate the cultural, political and economic conditions which
silence the Third-World woman in the hope that those oppressive conditions will
eventually change.







49
2.3 FEMINISM:
Feminist literary criticism primarily responds to the way woman is
presented in literature. It has two basic premises: one, woman presented in
literature by male writers from their viewpoint and two, woman presented in the
writings of female writers from their point of view. The first Premise gives rise to
Phallocentrism criticism and the second leads us to Gynocentrism. Theoretical
foundations of feminist criticism is said to be laid by Simone de Beauvoirs book
titled, The Second Sex. Three important books: i) Katherine M. Rogers The
Troublesome Helpmate (1966), ii) Mary Ellmanns Thinking about Women (1968),
and iii) Kate Milletts Sexual Politics (1969) gave this movement a turning point
and also popularized this movement.
The feminist literary criticism has two dimensions: i) Woman as
Reader and ii) Woman as Writer. The feminists believe that in order to understand
womans position in the world, one has to understand the system of Patriarchy.
Feminism is an ideology which seeks not only to understand the world but to
change it to the advantage of women. The biological distinction between man and
woman is an accepted fact, but the notion that woman is inferior to man is no
longer acceptable to women in general and feminists in particular. The feminist
movement aims at overthrowing social practices that lead to the oppression and
victimization of women. Their quest is for self-knowledge and self-realization
which can in turn lead to relationships based on mutual understanding and respect.
Feminist is generally thought of as a phenomenon of the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries.
The most Anglo-American studies of womens movement acknowledge some
forerunners in the English and French Revolutions. Spivak, the literary critic, does
not accept the necessarily revolutionary potential of the avant-garde, literary or
philosophical. She finds that, even if one knows how to undo identities, one does
not necessarily escape the historical determinations of sexism.




50
Feminist writers refuse to accept the images of women as
portrayed by male writers as they lack in authenticity. Feminists literary critics
argue that if one studies stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics, and the
limited roles women play in literary history one would not learn what women have
felt and experienced but what men have thought women ought to be. Gynocritics
seek to formulate a female framework for the analysis of womens literature to
develop new models based on the study of female experience rather than to adopt
male models and theories. They take into account the feminist research done in the
field of anthropology, history, psychology and sociology to formulate their critical
principles. Women writers by way of challenging and recasting the male gaze in
literature, rewrite and recreate the male created text from the feminist perspective.
Liberal and Marxist feminisms postulate an identity for women in relationship to
men that assumes a humanists essence for womanhood.
There are different types of feminist critics such as liberal, humanists
and deconstructionists. Feminist literary criticism has given an opportunity to look
at women in literature from womens point of view. In short, the feminist
criticism is concerned with women as the producer of textual meanings with the
history, themes, genres and structures of literature by women.
Spivaks feminism may well seem as initially unreadable as her
deconstruction. This stems from her conjunction of any essentialism with an
emphasis on the crucial importance of examining and reappropriating the
experience of the female body. Here Spivak speaks about what she can do within
literary criticism as a woman. She strongly denies the common definition of
woman which rests on the word man. She tries to provide a definition of
woman with a deconstructive perspective. She also pleads the necessity of
definition which allows to them going and take a stand. She refers Marx and Freud
while formulating her assumptions regarding feminism. She opposes these two as
they argue in terms of a mode of evidence and demonstration. According to her,




51
they seem to bring forth evidence from the world of man or mans self. Here she
comments that there is the idea of alienation in Marx and the idea of normality and
health in Freud. She also refers the concepts of use-value, exchange-value and
surplus-value of Marx for analyzing the woman. She strongly opposes the concept
of wages (formed by men) only a mark of value-producing work. She also
rejects the deliberation of men for tactfully rejecting women entry into the
capitalist economy. Spivak argues the importance of womans product as:
In terms of the physical, emotional, legal, custodial and sentimental
situation of the womans product, the child, this picture of the human
relationship to production, labour and property is incomplete. The
possession of a tangible place of production in the womb situates the
woman as an agent in any theory of production. (1998:106)
According to Spivak, the idea of the womb as a place of production is avoided
both in Marx and in Freud. She states that if this is taken into consideration, the
notion of penis-envy will be replaced by womb-envy to challenge the male
dominancy. She gives the reference of the present situation where womans entry
into the age of computers and the modernization of women in development
imposes us to confront the discontinuities and contradictions in our assumptions
about womens freedom to work outside the house and the sustaining virtues of
the working class. Spivak refers the remark of Christine Delphy to focus the
concept of the new feminism as:
The new feminism is currently developing the thesis that no society,
socialist or capitalist is capable of favorably responding to the aspirations
of women If we direct against men the action necessary
for womens progress, we condemn the great hopes of women to a dead
end. (Amherst, 1980:128)




52
According to Spivak, here the lesson of a double approach---against sexism and
for feminism --is suppressed.
Spivak has questioned the universal claims of some Western
feminists to speak for all women regardless of cultural differences. She tells us her
personal experience that situates her criticism of Western feminism in relation to
the historical experiences and everyday life of disempowered women in the Third
World. She highlights the limitations of Western feminism towards the Third
World women. Spivak states that the academic feminism must learn to learn from
them rather than simply correcting the historical experiences of disempowered
women with our superior theory and enlightened compulsion. Thus Spivak
cautions against the universal claims of Western feminism, and emphasizes
instead how the specific maternal conditions, histories and struggles of the Third
World women are often overlooked by Western feminism. According to Spivak,
the institutional changes against sexism (in U.S.A.) or in France may mean
nothing or indirectly, further harm for women in the Third World (1998:150).
Spivak expressed her views on the geography of female sexuality. In
the essay, French Feminism in an International Frame, Spivak questions
whether the valorization of womens non-productive sexual pleasure in French
feminist thought is an effective political goal for the Third World women. We
observe the same in her reading of Devis short story, Breast-giver. Spivak states
that in the 19
th
century, the practice of childbearing is framed within a domestic
ideology that places women in a socially and economically disempowered
position. This definition of woman as an object of private property was legitimated
in the terms of English common law, as well as Hindu Law. Jane represents the
women who struggle against this domestic ideology to determine her reproductive
body. So Spivaks reading of Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontes) locates the narrative
of feminist individualism in the age of Imperialism. (1985:244)




53
According to Spivak, the discontinuity, heterogeneity and typology
used for a sex analysis fails to obliterate the problems of race and class. It will not
necessarily escape the inbuilt colonialism of the First World feminism toward the
Third. The definition of woman, legal object as subject of reproduction, would
persistently seek to de-normalize uterine social organization. Spivak wills to
participate in feminist debate and avoids the sterile debates of deconstruction or
comments on them only obliquely. According to Spivak, many feminists have
wished to stress an essential feminine, an area repressed by male domination but
within which it is possible to find the methods and values to build a different and
better society. Spivaks opposition to essentialism is deconstructive rather than
psychoanalytical. Woman, like any other term, can only find its meaning in a
complex series of differentiations, of which the most important, or at least the
most immediate is man.
Gayatri Spivak points out the significance of the female body
pointing two radical different directions: one is she wishes to stress the clitoris as
the site of a radical excess to the cycle of reproduction of production and two is to
emphasize that the reproductive power of the womb is absent in any account of
production in classical Marxist. Spivak tries to differentiate psychoanalytical
feminism from Marxist feminism and states that:
With psychoanalytic feminism, then an invocation of history and politics
leads us back to the place of psychoanalysis in colonialism with Marxist
feminism, an invocation of the economic text foregrounds the operations of
the New Imperialism. (1998:112)
Here Spivak points out that psychoanalytical feminism reminds history and
politics whereas Marxist feminism economics. Gayatri Spivak reminds to the
positivist feminist colleagues that are in charge of creating the discipline of
womens studies and anxious students that essentialism is a trap. It seems more




54
important to learn to understand that the worlds women do not all relate to the
privileging of essence, especially through fiction or literature. The work written
under the sign of woman generally becomes solipsistic and marginal as it is
experienced by Derrida.
Spivak points out that the formation of gendered identity in the 19
th

century is re-worked by colonial discourse so that the white European female
individual is defined as socially and culturally superior to the non-Western
woman. In her two essays: French Feminism in an International Frame and
Three Womens Text and a Critique of Imperialism, Spivak argues that the
history of Western feminism is implicated in the larger history of European
colonialism. Spivaks argument, that Western feminism has been historically
complicit in the project of imperialist expansion, is one of the most difficult and
troubling aspect of Spivaks contribution to feminist thought. Spivak emphasizes
some important points to lead her thought. They are: the important political and
intellectual transformations that Western feminism has achieved, the need to
challenge the Western feminist thought that all womens lives and histories are the
same, the need of considering different non-Western womens lives and histories
to form universal feminist thought, the importance of a global political awareness
of the local economic, political, social and cultural conditions that structure
womens oppression in different parts of the world. (Morton, 2003:90)

2.4 SUBALTERN THEORY:
The Subaltern study is one of the branches of postcolonial criticism.
In India, Subaltern Studies is a new movement in political and cultural
historiography. It is launched by a group of scholars of which the most of them
were of Bangla. They collectively have produced a series of volumes entitled
Subaltern Studies during the 1980s. In the last two decades of the 20
th
century,




55
Subaltern studies, post-colonial theory and criticism gained momentum due to the
effects of globalization on the Third World Countries. Subaltern studies derive its
force from Marxism, post-structuralism and becomes a part of post-colonial
criticism. The term subaltern owes its origin to Antonio Gramscis writings and
underlines a subordinate place in terms of class, gender, caste, race and culture.
The ideology of subaltern historiography is derived from Gramsci, who thinks of
history in terms of multiple elements of conscious leadership. (Gramsci,
1973:27)
Antonio Gramscis account of the subaltern provides a key
theoretical resource for understanding the conditions of poor, the lower class and
peasantry in India. Spivak proposes the more nuanced, flexible, post-Marxist
definition of the subaltern, informed by deconstruction, which takes womens lives
and histories into account. In the 19
th
century, Karl Marx proclaimed the situation
of the industrial working class compared with other people. Arnold Gramsci
focused the situation of the rural peasantry that lacks coherence with Marxs
traditional perception of the subaltern. Spivak goes one step ahead and discusses
the situation of women as subaltern in the post-colonial world.
Spivak points out the historical shift from feudalism to capitalism in
India which offers a historical account of middle-class colonized subjects as
national subjects after colonialism. She asserts that the same account does not
include the lives and struggles of other disempowered groups, including peasants,
women and indigenous groups. So, she expected a shift from Indias national
liberation movement to social movements of disempowered, subaltern group.
Spivak objects Ranjit Guhas a pure subaltern consciousness equal to Marxs
notion of class consciousness which may not have correct coherence with much
more complex and differentiated struggle of particular subaltern groups. Spivak
prefers Derridas methodology of deconstruction for subaltern studies. Her
methodology also faced an opposition stating that Spivak is seen to impose yet




56
another elite Western academic on to the subaltern history. Spivak strongly oppose
the idea that the subaltern is a sovereign political subject in control of her own
destiny, on the grounds that the sovereign subaltern subject is an effect of the
dominant discourse of the elite. She further states that the political will of the
subaltern is constructed by the dominant discourse as an after effect of elite
nationalism. She says that this discourse contains the subaltern within the grand
narrative of bourgeois national liberation and totally ignores the different, local
jute workers, Awadh peasant rebellion etc.
The term subaltern is a creation of the British Colonial contact with
India. In other words, subaltern means Subordinate or inferior. It is by
implication inferior modes of knowledge. The subaltern historiography seeks to
establish the balance of knowledge by demonstrating that the inferior is made so
through discourses of power and politics. Spivak preferred to use the subaltern to
encompass a range of different subject positions which are not predefined by
dominant political discourses. She states that this term suits as it can accommodate
social identities and struggles of women and colonized. According to her, the
flexibility of this term is very important as it can include all types of subjects
especially of neglected group to bring them into the main stream.
Spivak accepted the subaltern movement because she herself is
committed to articulating the lives and histories of such groups in an appropriate
and non-exploitive way. She observed the social and political oppressions in
postcolonial societies that got place in her writings. Her writings, including
translations and textual commentaries provide a powerful counterpoint to the
erasure of women, peasants and tribals from the dominant historical and political
discourses in India.




57
In her theoretical comments, Gayatri Spivak presented a systematic
statement regarding the aims and the methods of the subaltern historiography.
Here she states:
The work of the Subaltern Studies group offers a theory of change. The
theory of change relates to the functional changes in systems of social
signs within the broader text of history. However, the change has to be
defined in terms of a previously existent manner of perception of signs.
Hence, Subaltern Studies perceive their task as making a theory of
consciousness or culture rather than specifically a theory of change. (1985:
330)
The implication here is that subaltern historiography views history as a continuous
chain of changing signs. This historiography differs from elite historiography, and
from the bourgeois nationalist perspective, in that the parameter for the change for
the subaltern historiography is the consciousness of relatively small groups having
marginal social importance. The studies published by collective of scholars show
an obsessive interest in the colonial period, giving the concept of subaltern a
specific historic grounding. Responding to the subaltern studies Gayatri Spivak
States:
I am progressively inclined, then, to read the retrieval of subaltern
consciousness as the charting of what in post-structuralist language would
be called the subaltern subject-effect. A subject-effect can be briefly plotted
as follows: that which seems to operate as a subject may be part of an
immense discontinuous network of strands of that may be termed politics,
ideology, economics, history, sexuality, language, and so on. (Each of these
strands, if they are isolated, can also be seen as woven of many strands.)
Different knottings and configurations of these strands, dependent upon




58
myriad circumstances, produce the effect of an operating subject.
(1998:341)
Now it seems to be clear that the subaltern historiography fights the tendency to
essentialize India. In the subaltern system, India is a changing concept. It signifies
the variety of social formations, power structures, linguistic histories to a variety
of social and cultural groupings of consciousness. Commenting on this changed
picture of Indian literary history Ganesh Devy states:
When extended to cover literary history, the subaltern strategy tends to
deny a common identity, and a continuous diachronic self-cognition of all
literatures in India, which then can be collapsed into the larger category of
Indian literature. In fact, the subaltern perspective likes to look at all
literature as parastical. (1998:118)
The term, Subaltern was popularized by Spivaks essay entitled,
Can the Subaltern Speak? (1985) where she says:
The Subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundrylists with
woman as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The
female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must
not disown with a flourish. (Nelson and Grossberg, 1988:308)
The subaltern studies collective thus announced a new approach to
restore history to the subordinated in order to rectify the elitist bias characteristic
of much academic work in South Asian (countries) studies. The subalterns agency
was restored by theorizing that the elite in India played a dominant role and not
simply hegemoneous one. The subalterns in the colonial era have become
intellectuals in the postcolonial period. Both the colonized and women have now
spoken and the credit of it goes to the new writers who write in English today.
These writers have also gained recognition and acceptance among the Anglo-
American intellectuals today. It is in this sense subaltern studies have acquired a




59
new dimension. The subaltern can speak more effectively in his/her vernacular
than in English. According to Bijay Kumar Das, Subaltern study is not a valid
critical approach to the study of literary texts. It is more relevant to the studies of
social sciences. Literature is not the branch of social sciences and therefore, cannot
be evaluated according to the methods adopted by subaltern studies. (2002:352)
Spivak expands the original definition of subaltern developed by
Ranjit Guha and asks to include the struggles and experiences of women from the
Third World. The emphasis on the gendered location of subaltern women
expands and complicates the established concept of the subaltern. Spivak objects
Western female dominancy as like male dominancy in the social activities. Asking
the question, Can the Subaltern Speak?, Spivak Challenges the gender blindness
of earlier postcolonial theories from a feminist standpoint. It also demonstrates
how Spivak expanded the definition of the term- Subaltern to include women
(avoiding narrow class based definition). Spivak argues that there is no space from
which the sexed subaltern can speak. She concludes further stating that the
subaltern can not speak because the voice and the agency of subaltern women are
so embedded in Hindu Patriarchal codes of moral conduct and the British Colonial
representation of subaltern women as victims of a barbaric Hindu culture that they
are impossible to recover. Spivak also states that subaltern as female cannot be
heard or read in the male-centred terms of the national independence struggle.
According to her, the subaltern cannot speak means that even when the subaltern
makes an effort to the death to speak, she is not able to be heard. In other words,
their speech acts are not heard or recognized within dominant political systems of
representation. Here Spivak would not want to deny the social agency and lived
existence of disempowered subaltern women that receive their political and
discursive identities within historically determinate systems of political and
economic representation (Morton, 2003:67).




60
Subaltern means the colonized/oppressed subject whose voice has
been silenced. According to Spivak, it is possible for us to recover the voice of the
subaltern and to establish her view point. She speaks of widow immolation in
India on the plea of performing sati at the pyre of the husband. Colonialism and
patriarchy both oppressed women and it is difficult for the subaltern to articulate
her point of view and there is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject
can speak. Spivak laid stress on gendered subaltern those women, who are
doubly oppressed both by colonialism and patriarchy in the Third World countries.
She argues that there are contexts, wherein contesting representational systems
violently displace/silence the figure of gendered subaltern. Here she writes:
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-
formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine
nothingness, but a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the
third-world women caught between tradition and modernization.
(1998:306)
Spivaks silencing of the subaltern refers to all women in India but
we know that women in colonial India cannot be put in one category. Benita Parry
criticizes Spivaks notion of silent subaltern as:
Since the native woman is constructed within multiple social relationships,
and positions as the product of different class, caste and culture and
testimony of womens voice on those sites where women inscribed
themselves as healers, ascetics, singers of sacred songs, artisans and artists,
and by this to modify Spivaks model of the silent subaltern. (1998:35)
Parry goes along with Homi K. Bhabha in asserting that the
colonists text contains a native voice though an ambivalent one. The colonial
texts hybridity in the words of Bhabha means that the subaltern has spoken. The
Work of the subaltern group offers a theory of change. The insertion of India into




61
colonialism is generally defined as a change from semi-feudalism into capitalist
subjection. According to Spivak, subaltern group proposes two things: 1) the
moment(s) of change be pluralized and plotted as confrontations rather than
transition, 2) such changes are signaled or marked by a functional change in sign
systems. And the most significant outcome of this revision or shift in perspective
is that the agency of change is located in the subaltern. Spivak points out that the
deconstruction perspective offered us a gift that makes us able to ask the authority
of the investigating subject without paralyzing him (gender-specific),
persistently transforming conditions of impossibility into possibility. She states the
importance of subaltern consciousness in following words:
To investigate, discover and establish a subaltern or peasant consciousness
seems at first to be a positivistic project a project which assumes that if
properly prosecuted, it will lead to firm ground, to some thing that can be
disclosed. This is all the more significant in the case of recovering a
consciousness. (1998:278)
Here Spivak points out that subaltern consciousness recovers our own
consciousness that can make us able to stand firmly and evaluate ourselves as well
as others.
Spivak stresses the equal space for the histories of subaltern women
in a literary representation of the subaltern and in the social text of postcolonial
India. Her essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? published first in Wedge (1985) and
reprinted in Marxism and Interpretation of Culture (essays, 1988) reveals the
historical and structural conditions of political representation, do not guarantee
that the interests of particular subaltern groups will be recognized or that their
voices will be heard. So, Spivak states that European theories have limitations in
applying them as representation to the lives and histories of disempowered women
in the Third World. According to her, unless the Western intellectuals begin to




62
take the aesthetic dimension of political representation into account, they will
continue to silence the voice of subaltern women. This essay combines her
political reformulation of Western poststructuralist methodologies with a rereading
of the 19
th
century colonial archives in India. Here she focuses the historical
experiences of subaltern women, whose voices and social locations have generally
been ignored by the Subaltern Studies Collective as well as by colonial and
historical scholarship.
Spivak highlights the importance of subaltern because it provides the
model for a general theory of consciousness. With her, Can the Subaltern Speak?
Spivak contributes to politicize Derridean deconstruction in order to elaborate a
method for emacipatory readings and cultural interventions. She defines her work
as a project having following aims:
i) Problematize the Western subject and see how it is still operational in
poststructuralist theory.
ii) Re-read Marx to find a more radical decentring of the subject that also
more leaves room for the formation of class identifications that are non-
essentialist.
iii) Argue that Western intellectual production reinforces the logic of
Western economic expansion.
iv) Perform a close reading of Sati to analyze the discourses of the West
and the possibilities for speech that the subaltern woman has within that
framework.
Spivak says that coming to an understanding of subalternity is for
the production of knowledge; this is the very Western rationalist position to take;
one in which the oppressed are doing their oppressors a favour rather than
challenging or dismantling their power. She also says that the subaltern cant




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speak because by having a single voice you are being essentialist, reductionist,
bipolar and not looking at class. Spivaks essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? 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 this essay, Spivak uncourageous but
also criticizes the efforts of the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranjit
Guha that has reappropriated Gramscis term subaltern (the economically
dispossessed) in order to locate and reestablish a voice or collective locus of
agency in postcolonial India. (Guha: 1988) Spivak again argues that by speaking
out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe
their subordinate position in society.
The question of Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak? is ambiguous.
That is because; we dont know who asks this question, the subaltern or the
superior imperialist. Subaltern has not lost her voice for ever she has spoken.
According to Benita Parry, Spivaks use of poststructuralist methodologies to
describe the historical and political oppression of disempowered women has
further contributed to their silencing. (1998:39) Responding to Spivaks work,
Bart Moore-Gilbert states that there are clear historical examples where the
resistance of subaltern women to the colonial world is recorded in dominant
colonial discourse. (1997:107) In their article, Can the Subaltern Vote?,
Medevoi, Shankar Raman and Benjamin Comment that Spivak does not offer any
perfect political solutions or theoretical formulas for emancipating subaltern
women, but rather exposes the limited and potentially harmful effects of speaking
for such disempowered groups (Medevoi et. al, 1990:133). while locating Spivaks
historical investigating of Sati in relation to Jacques Derridas subsequent work on
the archive in Archive Fever, Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy state
that Derridas concept of the archive is crucial for a more sympathetic
understanding of Spivaks new notorious silencing of subaltern women. (Shetty




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and Bellamy, 2000:25) Publishing an article entitled Can the Subaltern Hear?
Colin Wright provoked angry response to Spivaks question, Can the Subaltern
Speak? (Eagleton (ed), 2000:34) In conclusion, Spivaks theory of the subaltern is
a part of a longer history of left-wing anti-colonial thought that was concerned to
challenge the class-caste system in India. Spivak could produce a better reading
strategy that responds to the voices and unwritten histories of subaltern women,
without speaking for them.

2.5 COLONIALISM/POSTCOLONIALISM:
Gayatri Spivak has expressed her opinion about
colonialism/postcolonialism in brief. Spivaks literary criticism has greatly
informed and influenced the practice of reading literary texts in relation to the
history of colonialism. She repeatedly emphasizes that the production and
reception of the 19
th
century English Literature was bound up with the history of
imperialism. Spivaks name is associated with post-colonial criticism for she has
demonstrated the rhetorical and political agency of postcolonial literary texts to
question and challenge the authority of colonial master narratives. Spivak tries to
point out the British policy of defining the colonial subject as inhuman, heathen or
primitive and proving their imperialism as a civilizing mission. Spivaks
engagement with postcolonial texts is motivated by a desire to challenge the
totalizing system of colonial discourse by focusing on instances of subaltern
agency or resistance.
Spivak employs the tools of deconstruction and resists the
temptation to represent the fictional subaltern characters in Mahasweta Devis
writing as transparent objects of knowledge for Western trained intellectuals. She
also traces the linguistic and rhetorical nuances in Devis texts where tribal,
subaltern women characters (like Jashoda, Draupadi or Douloti) articulate an




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embodied knowledge that cannot accounted for in the dominant terms of Western
knowledge and representation.

2.6 SUMMING UP:
In Indian critical tradition, Gayatri Spivak proved herself to be a
great scholar and critic. Her vast and wide study reflected in her work. She has
undertaken lot projects to present her position in Indian critical tradition. She is the
best known as a postcolonial theorist. She describes herself as a para-disciplinary,
ethical philosopher. It is observed that Spivak is strongly influenced by the
Western scholars, theorists. Her work reflects the strong impact of French
philosopher, Jacques Derrida. She expressed her views on deconstruction being
impressed by Derrida. She has proved to be a leading postcolonial critic who uses
deconstruction to problematize the privileged, academic postcolonial critics
unknowing participation in the exploitation of the Third World.
Spivaks work reflects the influence of Jacques Derrida, Karl Marx,
and Antonio Gramsci. Spivak plainly confessed that she gave more attention
towards- Immannel Kant, George Wilhelm, Fredrich Hegel and Karl Marx as her
writing was copied from them. Spivak is the best cultural and literary theorist who
addresses a vast range of political questions with both pen and voice. Her texts
lively reflect her unmistakable voice as she speaks on questions of representation
and self-representation, the politicization of deconstruction; the situation of
postcolonial critics; pedagogical responsibility; and political strategies.
Spivaks chief concern can be summarized as the wariness of the
limitations of cultural studies. The most interesting about her engagement of the
postcolonial predicament is the uneasy marriage of Marxism, feminism and
deconstruction that underlies her critical work. Spivak combines Marxism and




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deconstruction in the name of postcolonial feminism. This mixing style of Spivak
seems to be very complicated for a common reader. Due to interlink of different
theories in her critical work, it becomes very difficult to identify where ends one
theory and begins another. This mixture of theories proves her a stalwart in critical
tradition of India.
Her translation of Jacques Derridas de la grammatologie initiated a
debate on deconstruction in the Anglo-American academy. By asking question-
Can the Subaltern Speak? she took issue with Western intellectuals almost
confessional account of their inability to mediate the historical experience of the
working classes and the underprivileged of society. Here it is observed that she
gives special respect for common and ordinary people. She expresses her
sympathy for common working class, females and underprivileged people. She
tries to provide them a kind of courage to challenge and dismantle the dominance
of power (Western). Breaking rules of the academy and trespassing Disciplinary
boundaries was her project.
Gayatri Spivak is not only known as a scholar of deconstructive
textual analysis of verbal, visual and social texts but also as a global feminist
Marxist. She is widely acknowledged as the conscience of the metro-politan
politics of identity. She has often refered to herself as a Marxist-Feminist-
Deconstructionist, seeing each of these fields as necessary but insufficient by
themselves, yet productive together. Spivak coined the term Strategic
essentialism, which refers to a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of
social action. Strategic essentialism is about the need to temporarily accept an
essentialist position in order to be able to act.
Spivak is biographically an Indian woman, living and working in U.
S. and intellectually as a post-Marxist, a feminist and a deconstructionist all at
once. Her catholicity of mind is mirrored by her migratory life. Terry Eagleton




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says that Spivaks dazzling, juggling act, in which three balls of Marxism,
Poststructuralism and feminism are deftly and often productively manipulated- is
at bottom a marketing ploy, nothing but the intellectual entrepreneurs canny
reluctance to be left out of any theoretical game of town. Here Terry Eagletons
cynic attitude is seen, as he does not accept the superiority of Spivak.
Spivaks ambitious project, (Critique of Postcolonial Critic) seems
to involve exactly the opposite movement: a complexification and
problematization of place. Her Theoretical Marxism enables her to remain
sensitive to the stratified spaces of class and economic structuration, the vertical
within the horizontal as it were. She muddies clean distinctions by for example,
acknowledging the role of the Indian elite in shoring up British Imperialism. She
displays a vigilant awareness of the differences between metropolitan politics and
those of the rural provinces. She has demonstrated the structural place of the
concept of the Third World in the discourses of the West. She has articulated the
placing of the subaltern woman both in the masculism of imperialism, and in the
broader phenomena of the advanced capitalism. Moreover, her deconstructive
readings endow her with a more nuanced understanding of the shuttle-effect
between margin and centre. She has a trouble with questions of identity or voice.
She was interested in the questions of space. She says, every human being fights
for identity and voice and try to challenge the space. But at the same time we
cannot clear the space that generates our perspective.
In short, her critical work has contributed much to the study of
literature as a colonial discourse. It also tries to challenge the authority of colonial
master narratives in Classic English Literary Texts. Her translations and
commentaries on Mahasweta Devis work emphasize the importance of Devis
work to articulate the unwritten histories of tribal, subaltern women and to at least
to begin to imagine an alternative to contemporary social, political and economic
oppression. Her relentless ability to revise and rework earlier concepts and debates




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about postcolonialism is her great contribution to contemporary critical theory and
public intellectual culture. Spivaks feminist critique of the links between
socialism and capitalism helped for the intellectual development of African
American women. Her thought has gained a wide international public audience.
The restless process of Self-criticism and revision demonstrates the importance of
Spivaks earlier postcolonial thought and its continued relevance to the
contemporary world.
Spivak has been more vocal in her criticism of global development
policies which focus on women in the Third World. Her criticism of economic
development policies which target women has highlighted the urgent need for a
transnational perspective in feminist thought. Her critical endeavour to situate
womens social location in a transnational framework of political, economic and
social relationships is one of the most important legacies of her thought. She has
persistently challenges the conventions and boundaries of Western critical inquiry.
With Marxist political economics, feminism and postcolonial criticism, European
Literature, philosophy and critical theory, Spivak has questioned the division
between the act of reading literary and cultural texts and economic texts of
imperialism and global capitalism. Spivaks constant rethinking about the
historical exploitation and oppression of the disempowered reminds us that any act
of reading has important social and political consequences.
Spivaks Can the Subaltern Speak? has proved her a great theorist.
It also raised many objections. The Scholars like Benita parry (Problems in
Current Theories of Colonial Discourse), Robert Young (White Mythologies),
Asha Varadharajan (Exotic Parodies), Bart Moore-Gilbert (Postcolonial Theory),
Lisa Lowe (Immigrant Acts), Rey Chow (Writing Diaspora and Ethics After
Idealism), Amitava Kumar (Pasport Photos), Saskia Sassen, Peter Hitchcock
(Oscillate Wildly), Judith Butler (Bodies that Matter), Julia Emberley (Tresholds
of Difference), Laura Donaldson (Decolonizing Feminism), Kamala Visweswaran




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(Fictions of Feminist Ethonography), Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy
(Postcolonilisms Archive Fever) have studied Spivaks work and recorded their
views about it. They admired her contribution in literary, cultural and economic
fields. To counter the global medias destruction of an ethical relation to the Other,
Spivak tried to rethink this geopolitical non-relationship based on the fear and
terror of the Other through a deconstructive discourse of ethics and
responsibility.




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