[n.....z]

Nivedita Majumda — Silencing the Subaltern

Among critical and progressive academics today, the influence of postcolonial theory is unmistakable. Though born in the narrow confines of literature departments in the wake of Asian and African decolonization, its intellectual apparatus has increasingly become associated with more directly political commitments. Postcolonial theory today is viewed as an indispensable framework for understanding how power works in modern social formations and, in particular, how the West exercises its dominance over the Global South. Even more, it is lauded for its attentiveness to the marginal, the oppressed — those groups that have been relegated to obscurity even by political traditions ostensibly committed to social justice. On elite university campuses, the concepts associated with this theoretical stream have increasingly displaced the more traditional vocabulary of the Left, particularly among younger academics and students. Indeed, the two most influential political frameworks of the past century on the Left, Marxism and progressive liberalism, are often described not just as being inadequate as sources of critique, but as tools of social control.

The extraordinary success of postcolonial theory has not precluded some important and highly charged debates about its implications, most recently revived by the publication of Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital. Chibber focuses on the work of theorists associated with the influential Subaltern Studies project, using them as exemplars of the wider approach. Regardless of what one makes of his arguments, it remains the case that in confining his attention to the Subaltern Studies school, he fails to address the work of some of the most important developers of the wider tradition — most notably Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak and Homi Bhabha. A reckoning with these theorists’ work is indispensable because they are making theoretical contributions that are distinct from those of the Subaltern Studies school, and hence are not necessarily undermined by Chibber’s critique.

This essay proposes to take up an issue which is at the very heart of postcolonial theory — the relationship between social domination and resistance and, specifically, how gender is conceptualized as a site of struggle within this framework. It does so via an examination of several of the classic, agenda-setting essays in the field: by Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Ranajit Guha. Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak”1 and her commentary on Mahashweta Devi’s “Draupadi,”2 Guha’s germinal foray into gender history in “Chandra’s Death,”3 and Bhabha’s influential “The Commitment to Theory,”4 which seeks to reinstate gender into a reading of the British miners’ strike of 1984 and 1985, thus comprise my focus.

#lewackikacikczytelniczy