Professor Oscar Guardiola Rivera who teaches Law at Birkbeck, writes
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born on 24th of February 1942 in Ballygunge, Calcutta. Her parents, Pares Chandra Chakravorty and Sivani Chakravorty were simple-living, high-thinking nationalist intellectuals.
No. They were upper middle class professionals. Her father and grandfather had gained medical qualifications in England and had lucrative medical practices. Her mother came from a well established landowning family and had an MA in literature. They were devout Hindus but not particularly 'nationalist' for the simple reason that the departure of the Brits would leave them at the mercy of the Muslim majority.
They were also anti-castists and anti-communists.
Communism was late in gaining a foothold in West Bengal. Why? Because of the Muslim threat. They were only 'anti-casteist' in the sense that all theistic Hindus are anti-casteist.
As a result, out of many lullabies that Spivak and her elder brother slept to, one went on roughly like this:
This is not a lullaby. It is a hymn.
“all bodies are made of bone, flesh, lard, and blood, the same soul finds its dwelling there…How can you tell a Hindu from a Muslim?”
You can tell a Muslim from his beard, cap, circumcision scar, dress and the fact that he will tell you he is Muslim. The meaning of the verse is that there is only one Soul which pervades the entire Universe. It is delusive to believe you have a soul separate from the 'Param-atma'- i.e. supreme soul.
While reading Gayatri Spivak we must keep in mind that she has been familiar with conflictual coexistence and diversity since her very formative years.
Nonsense! The Brits had fucked off as had a lot of Muslims. There was hardly any conflict while she was growing up because Congress ruled the State and killed or incarcerated Commie nutters. Muslims had already been ethnically cleansed save if they were poor and did the shitty jobs.
She was born in 1942, which was just a year before the Great Bengal Famine,
where excess mortality was caused by a corrupt Muslim League Government which diverted food for the public distribution system to the black market
and her early childhood days witnessed the Indian Independence as well as the Partition.
She was five years old back then. She didn't witness shit.
Spivak completed her schooling from St. John’s Diocesan School for Girls and her intermediate from Lady Brabourne.
Two of the best schools in Calcutta. This was because she was from an upper middle class family which was well connected.
Most of Spivak’s teachers were converted christians who had been oppressed under the Hindu caste system.
No. Most of them were Brahmin or Kayastha converts. There were also some 'tribal' people who had embraced the Gospel thanks to devout Missionaries but they were never oppressed by the Hindu caste system precisely because they kicked ass- i.e. they could kill those who tried to fuck with them.
They came from a section where the people were treated like animals by higher castes
Only if they had to migrate and work as agricultural labourers. But only guys who can kill you can treat you like animals. People of Spivak's caste weren't killers and tended to be very polite unless backed up by hefty musclemen.
and were not even allowed to be near Sanskrit.
Nobody wanted to be 'near Sanskrit'. It is a dead language. Indians were perfectly happy to leave it to German pedants. They wanted English education and the still want English education. Not education in English literature- because that is shit. They just want 'Globish' English so as to do well in the Professions or in Commerce.
Teachers like Miss Charubala Das (principal at Diocesan),
who was a high caste Christian from a prosperous family
Miss Nilima Pyne who taught Sanskrit (teacher-in-charge at Diocesan),
she gained that appointment in 1983. Since she did not know Sanskrit, she couldn't have taught it particularly well. Nobody cared. You go to 'Convent School' to get 'pukka' English accent only.
and Sukumari Bhattacharji who taught English (at Lady Brabourne
She studied Sanskrit after being appointed an English teacher and left so as to teach it at Jadavpur when Spivak was about 12. She became a Marxist and published silly books after doing a post-Doc at Cambridge. Teaching English is no fun. Even Sanskrit is less boring.
are the ones who laid the foundation of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as the academic giant who we know today.
Sadly, her English was poor. Her school had had an Indian headmistress since 1944. Standards had fallen. Still, at least she wasn't forced to learn Sanskrit or Mathematics or anything else that might be academically taxing.
In 1959, Spivak graduated from Presidency College as a gold medalist in both English and Bengali literature.
In other words, she was a parrot.
About her days at Presidency College, Spivak tells Swapan Chakravorty–
“I feel that I was made by Presidency in a certain way. My teachers Tarak Nath Sen,
very good on Yeats- on whom Spivak wrote her dissertation. He was rather a blunt man who told his MA English students that the academic credential they would receive wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. The English and the Americans might care about English literature. Indians didn't.
Subodh Chandra Sengupta,
a sound enough Shakespeare scholar
Amal Bhattacharjee,
husband of Sukumari, the virulent Marxist
Tarapada Mukherjee
who taught at SOAS and is fondly remembered
–these four I think were the ones who actually taught me how to read.
They failed.
Tarak-babu, in fact, the way he taught us to read, a sort of an inspired and dogged literalism – its the way I still read.”
No. What he did was to ask for 'apoorvata'- i.e. finding something new rather just repeating what previous commentators had said. That was a generation which saw with dismay that, in independent India, the Humanities were turning into sub-Humanities.
Did you know? – Spivak initially wanted to become a physicist but couldn't because she was unable to clear the Maths entrance test.
She was stupid. We know that. Still, she was a good enough parrot.
For her it was Presidency or nothing, and that is why she eventually took up English at the University.
If you are stupid, you may as well teach stupid shit. The trick is not to read the stuff you are supposed to teach. That's where Derrida comes in useful. You can say the same thing about Jane Austen as you say about P.G Woodhouse- viz. it's totes unfair they were White. Whitey be debil.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak recalls that she had left India because she
didn't want to teach English to girls of her own class.
was critical of Presidency University and had even jeopardized her first rank due to this. In 1959, Spivak borrowed $5200 and went to the U.S. to pursue her Masters’ degree at Cornell University.
Kamala Harris's mum was doing the same thing. Had either got into Medical Skool, they wouldn't have done so.
After completing her Masters’, she completed a fellowship at Girton College in Cambridge, England, after which she worked as an instructor at the University of Iowa. While serving as an instructor, Spivak continued her doctoral dissertation at Cornell University, on W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) titled - ‘Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry’ under the literary critic Paul de Man.
Who had faked his academic credentials.
About working with Paul de Man Spivak recalls:
“I have lived long enough and been on enough sexual harassment cases and I’ve seen how the academy takes care of senior men. The more I look back, the more astounded I am at how impeccable he was in his attitude towards me.
Because you were ugly. I faced the same problem.
There weren't many foreign students in English at US universities then… I was a young good-looking person, clearly smart but nonetheless very exotic. It would have been easy for De Man not to have taken me seriously intellectually.
But he wasn't actually an intellectual. He was a fraud though at a later point he did manage to get a PhD in America.
So it wasn’t so much that he didn’t think me exotic but that he placed me in the cleanliness of intellectual recognition.
One charlatan recognized another.
I really was extremely fortunate in this.”
Spivak's own entrepreneurial elan- her taking on the job of translating Derrida's nonsense- was the foundation of her good fortune. She is an immigrant who made good by faking it till she made it after which she played the Race and Gender card and secured intellectual affirmative action.
Intrestingly, Gayatri Spivak remembers the prevalance of harmful gendering that led her to feel that people found her to be brilliantly intellectual because she was beautiful, resulting in intellectual insecurity.
I had the same problem. Indeed, I had to quit Accountancy because the photocopier kept undressing me with its eyes.
Paul de Man was an exception in this case.
He had his own problems with the threat of deportation as a bigamist, a Nazi collaborator, and financial fraudster hanging over him.
In the year 1977, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for the English translation of Mahasweta Devi's short stories titled 'Imaginary Maps'.
It was published in 1995. Devi did get a prize in 1979 for a different novel. Spivak got the translation prize in 1997.
The majority of the Indian population consists of working-class poor people. During the struggle for Indian independence, rural peasants and women were led by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and significantly contributed to the passive resistance against the British.
Such people supported the British, as police men, soldiers, jailors etc., if paid to do so
There was significant subaltern resistance against colonial rule during the 18th century.
Which is why the Brits became paramount.
However, their sacrifices and struggles have remained undocumented in official historic records.
Nonsense! The Brits documented revolts by tribals, Muslim tenants etc. They quickly redressed their grievances which is why upper class Hindus came to hate the Brits.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak highlights and questions why nationalism has been unable to represent the majority of the Indian population -- the working-class peasants and women.
Spivak is a fool. The fact is, the President of India is a tribal woman who once worked as a school teacher before joining politics. She belongs to the nationalistic ruling party in India. Incidentally, not only did India have a female Prime Minister, the current Chief Minister of Bengal is a woman.
She is part of the Subaltern Studies group that was initiated by Ranajit Guha (1923-2023).
Like Guha she knows nothing about Indian or any other type of history.
The Subaltern Studies attempts to re-write history that is inclusive of the experiences of subalterns who have been neglected on the basis of their ethnicity, class, gender, religion or sexual orientation.
Then they realized that the 'subalterns' were becoming Chief Ministers of States. Thankfully, most were able to emigrate to the West where nobody knew or cared about Ind's revolting masses.
In order to perpetuate and strengthen their dominance and for administrative convenience, the British educated upper-middle class Indians in English.
No. They promoted vernacular languages. Only after the Brits slyly fucked off did you have a generation of people who could not read any Indian language. Rajiv Gandhi had his speeches in Hindi written out for him in Roman script.
This eventually created a distinct class of English educated Indians that was considered as superior to the rest of the population.
No. The Princes and big landlords were considered superior. Even the 'country bottled' (i.e. Indian born and bred) Englishman was second class. Princes had sovereign immunity. No White person or Cambridge educated tycoon or barrister had anything similar. Nehru did not become PM because his English was good. It was because his mother tongue was the kadi boli or Mughal era Delhi.
The national independence movement of India, although successful in gaining freedom from British rule, maintained the class system of colonial rule.
No. Indira Gandhi got rid of the Princes. Most big landlords had either lost their land or were only retaining it fraudulently. The decline in the status of the English speaking professional class was steep. The new bosses wore dhoti, spoke rustic dialects, and spat paan-juice all over the place. You had to be very obsequious to them.
Even till today, a relatively small group of middle-class men, educated in English hold majority of political and economic power.
No. Those who hold power do so because they speak Marwari or Gujarati or whatever. Middle class men may do well if they are educated in computer languages. Shashi Tharoor's English is very good but it is his command of Malayalam and Hindi which kept him in Parliament. Sadly, his excellent English also meant he couldn't be President of Congress. At the very least he should have spat a lot of paan-juice all over the place.
The larger section of the Indian population still has little or no access to the benefits of Indian independence.
Unless they got elected or got a government job under 'affirmative action' and could loot the country more effectively than any Pindari or Thug.
This is persistently highlighted by Spivak.
Maybe to stupid White peeps. She doesn't say in Bengali that Mamta actually has a PhD from 'East Georgia' and speaks the Queen's English to her chums.
Additionally, Spivak states that the Western Marxist employed by the historians of the Subaltern Studies Group does not do justice to the more complicated and dense histories of subaltern resistance that they aim to recover.
When Guha, who had become a British citizen a dozen years previously, briefly returned to India, he became fascinated with the 'Naxals' (Maoists) and thus thought that 'tribals' would overthrow the Indian State. Sadly, tribals preferred to put their own people in power and the BJP carved out States which they could dominate for them. I suppose President Murmu will ensure that her people get their own state by carving a chunk out of Orissa and some contiguous districts. That way, the Oriya people can concentrate on developing their littoral. It is a win win.
She challenges the notion that the Western theories of political resistance and social change are universal and all inclusive.
But she knows shit about Political Science.
She emphasizes that the history of India is different and complex and the Western theoretical models cannot represent it adequately.
If the Brits could rule it for a long time, then, clearly, their 'model' was more than adequate.
We cannot depend on them. Moreover, daily lives of Indian women
like Mamta and President Murmu
are so haphazard and unsystematic that the technical vocabulary of the Western critical theory fails to represent them.
But 'critical theory' just means illiterate, imbecilic, shite. Nobody gives a fart about it save peeps who don't want to have to teach Yeats or Shakespeare.
This is a crisis in knowledge.
Ignorance. The crisis is that if you have to teach nonsense to imbeciles, you go potty.
The crisis in knowledge indicates the presence of ethical risks when privileged intellectuals make political claims on behalf of the oppressed or marginalized people.
Privileged intellectuals are as rich as Elon Musk. People who teach shite to shitheads aren't privileged. They are glorified child-minders.
This leads to the silencing of their voices and omission of their lived experiences.
By whom? Professors of stupid shit? In India, the poor have votes. They can vote for their own people who don't speak English and have never heard of 'critical theory'.
Additionally, it also implies that the lives and struggles of these women will only continue to be misunderstood and misrepresented with respect to the western critical theory.
Who cares what stupid nonentities understand or fail to understand? All we ask is that they don't masturbate in public.
While Spivak highlights the inadequacies of Western critical theories, she does not abandon them.
You can't abandon stuff you never had in the first place.
According to the postcolonial literary critic Bart Moore Gilbert, she, along with Homi Bhabha and Edward Said, is among the first to accept and use ideas from Western critical theory in postcolonial studies.
Said had some political importance back when Arafat's star was rising. Bhabha is a Parsi from Bombay whom no other Parsi reads or rates. Spivak, as a Bengali, can rely on upper-caste Buddhijivi boosterism.
This, however is not always well received by all theorists. For instance, Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dirlik criticise the use of western theory in the field of post-colonial studies because this inclusion indicates a new kind of intellectual colonialism complicit with global capitalism.
In other words, they are saying 'why let White peeps teach worthless shite? Give us their jobs. We are even more worthless and stupid but, at least, we are dark skinned'.
What is Literary Theory?
Literary theory refers to the various schools of thoughts that shape and affect our interpretations of a literary work.
That is literary criticism- i.e. guys giving likes or 5 stars to a new book. Literary theory was a way not to read books but to gas on as if you were a cross between Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Greta Thurnberg.
It is literary theory that facilitates impactful and effective criticism of literature.
Name one book of undoubted literary value which 'literary theory' has promoted or helped create a market for. I can only think of the Nouveau Roman fad of the 1960s, featuring Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. Apart from Marguerite Duras, they were more talked about than read. Meanwhile the Great, and greatly turgid, American Novel continued to rise and rise.
If we go by the dictionary, the term ‘Subaltern’ is a junior ranking officer in the British Army.
In Italy, it means an NCO.
However, the intellectual source for Spivak’s meaning of Subaltern comes from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. Gramsci used the term ‘subaltern’ to represent to unorganised groups or rural peasants.
i.e. not the industrial proletariat of conventional Marxism.
These peasants had no social or political consiciousness as a group. This made it easier for the ruling classes to lead and exploit them.
Mussolini, a Socialist, did get to lead them. Gramsci failed. Why? Workers don't want to control the factories where they work. This is because, if they do, they won't get paid. Everything will be stolen.
Gramsci’s use and idea of the ‘subalterns’ was further developed by the Subaltern Studies Collective.
Who emigrated to the West if the opportunity presented itself.
The Subaltern Study Group or SSG was initiated by Ranajit Guha, and consists of South Asian scholars such as Shahid Amin
a Muslim. He didn't understand that being a Marxist is only cool if you can get to sleep with hot grad students on an Ivy League campus.
, David Arnold, Partha Chatterjee, David Hardiman, and Gyanendra Pandey, who aimed to trace the histories and experiences of marginal social groups and individuals who were excluded in Indian history.
They did this in America because, obviously, there are plenty of starving Dalits and Adivasis to be found there.
According to Guha, subalterns referred to peasants who were ignored in the dominant post-independent historical narratives.
Nobody gave a shit about 'historical narratives'. The fact is farmer's leaders like Charan Singh, Kamraj etc. were becoming Chief Ministers by the late Fifties and Sixties. Tikait organized a big rally of peasant farmers in the late Eighties. His son helped organize the recent rally which gained international attention. Power had shifted from 'Educationally Forward Castes' to 'Backward Castes' from the Sixties onward.
It is true that India attained political freedom from the British colonial rule.
The British were committed to 'responsible' and then 'representative' government from 1917 onward. The age of multi-ethnic Empires was coming to a close.
However, this freedom did not correspond with the promised social revolution in the class system.
Which was occurring from the Thirties onward though Brits had been constantly making concessions to peasants from the 1860s onward. In Bengal, the leader of the Peasant's Party, Fazl ul Haq, became premier of autonomous, undivided, Bengal in 1937- i.e. 5 years before Spivak was born.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak agrees that the peasants, untouchables, and the working class have been excluded from history.
She is ignorant. Charan Singh was a peasant. He became Prime Minister in 1979. But Indira could have made a Dalit the Premier in 1974.
However, she also points out that the Subaltern Study Group (SSG) privileges male subaltern subjects, ignoring the marginalized women.
many of whom have to sit down to pee. How is that fair? Incidentally, did you know Shakespeare had a penis? Yet the University demands we teach Omelette, Prince of Dutcthmark! That's totes fucked up!
She provides a post-marxist definition of subalterns
those excluded from the narratives of stupid shitheads.
that is more flexible, informed by deconstruction, and accommodates the histories, lives, and experiences of women.
Spivak thinks that women are utterly shit.
Spivak’s deconstructive reading of the works of Subaltern Studies Group is criticised on the grounds of employing a western elite academic language to the history of subaltern revolutions.
The Marxists criticize her because she isn't a Marxist. The proper position for women in the revolutionary struggle is 'prone'- i.e. flat on their backs with their legs in the air.
There are individuals and social groups who are perpetually and historically ignored and exploited by colonialism.
You aren't ignored if you are being exploited. It is only when you have nothing of value- not even labour power- that people ignore you.
These people are further disempowered and misrepresented by master words like ‘the woman’, the worker’, the colonized’, used in the context of political struggles of Indian independence.
What's more people are beaten, sodomized, and subjected to fellatio, cunnilingus, slut shaming, decapitation and having their tits shat upon by 'master words' like 'silly moo' and 'dumb bint.'
One of the most significant contributions by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is her attempt to find a critical vocabulary that is appropriate to represent, and effectively describes the lived experiences and histories of misrepresented, ignored and oppressed social groups and individuals.
Because what poor peeps really want is a 'critical vocabulary' developed by cretins teaching useless shit.
In an interview published in Polygraph, Spivak explains:
“I like the word ‘subaltern’ for one reason.
Churchill was a subaltern in India.
It is truly situational.
Just like 'Colonel'.
‘Subaltern’ began as a description of a certain rank in the military.
No. It was the name of people holding a particular rank.
The word was used under censorship by Gramsci: he called Marxism ‘monism,’ and was obliged to call the proletarian ‘subaltern.’ That word, used under duress, has been transformed into the description of everything that doesn’t fall under strict class analysis.
by high caste Hindu men who were looking for a way to emigrate from India without actually having to clean toilets in the West.
I like that, because it has no theoretical rigor.”
West Bengal was ruled by Communists for thirty years. They did lots of class analysis- some of which paid off. Spivak doesn't know Marxist theory or 'praxis' because she wasn't a Marxist. She was getting by on affirmative action due to her by reason of being a darkie and lacking a dick.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a public intellectual for whom the overlooked exploitation and oppression of the subalterns in the postcolonial world is not only an ethical dilemma,
should I send some of my pay packet to poor women in shithole countries? Fuck that!
but also a methodological challenge.
To a professor of literature. How do I give a lecture on Virginia Woolf without having read her dreary shite? I know, I will point out she was white. White women are the worst. Fuck you Karen! Fuck you very much!
In the Indian postcolonial society, political and social oppression is prevalent throughout class, religion, language, ethnicity, religion, generation, citizenship, and gender.
I suppose this nutter is referring to the fact that Mamta's goons will beat the shit out of you if you support the BJP. Still, the whole point about nutters like Spivak is that they reckon the US is even worse. White and Black peeps must evacuate 'Turtle Island'.
Thus, oppression is different in different cases. Hence, the moment educated and metropolitan intellectuals begin to make theoretical claims on behalf of the subalterns,
they are laughed at, more particularly if they are living in New York
they tend to overlook significant social differences among the subaltern groups.
Which Indian politicians don't if they want to get elected.
Additionally, in Western academia, there always exists a possibility that Spivak will be recognized as an intellectual who is speaking on behalf of the subalterns.
Nonsense! She was clearly an ignorant nutter. We were pleased that some rich white kids were being brainwashed by a Bengali cretin.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak strongly criticizes any attempt by privileged intellectuals to explain or claim to know the experiences of the subalterns.
Only underprivileged imbeciles should explain or claim to know how poor peeps feel.
This strong criticism stems from her acute awareness of representative errors committed exploitatively against the disempowered groups.
Your MP is your representative. His errors can cause harm to you. But some Professor of a shite subject in some far off campus can neither help nor harm you.
The histories of the rural peasantry and the urban working class has been recorded by privileged social groups.
No. Bureaucrats and Government commissions have kept some records. But privileged social groups focus on living large rather than recording the miserable lives of starving rent-boys.
Initially, history was documented by the British colonial administrators. Eventually, it was re-written by the educated, middle-class elite or the bourgeoisie.
No. Some people paid a little money to teach shite published a book or two. Nobody cared.
It is interesting to note that both the Indian English educated bourgeoisie, as well as the British administrators are the ideological products of British rule.
How is that interesting? Why not say 'German peeps are the product of German rule. French peeps are different. They are the product of the rule of Patagonian penguins'?
Thus, the histories and the experiences of the marginalized working class was narrated and controlled in the interest of the ruling power or the dominant social class even after the Indian independence.
Nonsense! There were plenty of Trade Union leaders, peasant leaders, Dalit leaders etc. who were publishing accounts of the problems of various groups. But the 'dominant social class' didn't give a fuck about such shite.
The task of retrieving and re-writing the histories and experiences of the disenfranchised social groups is extremely challenging.
Only if you are not a historian.
There are no reliable historical sources or documents that narrate the experiences, lives and practices of the subaltern groups in their own terms, and from their perspectives.
There are plenty if you know where to look. Professional historians have this knowledge but so do some lawyers specializing in Trade Union law or Tenancy law or the law re. the rights of forest dwellers.
The subalterns have had no agency and no political voice.
But gained this through the political process from the Twenties onward.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, along with the other historians
she isn't a historian
in the Subaltern Study Group, underlines how the histories of peasant uprisings highlight a significant gap in the historical narrative of Indian Independence.
But those narratives didn't matter in the slightest. Nobody really believed that Gandhi's fasting or Nehru's sulking in jail had any effect whatsoever. Still, at one time, you had to write shite of that sort to pass the Civil Service exam.
In the early 1980s, Spivak was focused on the critique of this privileged historical documentation and representation, and saw it as a political agenda.
Why? The Communists had come to power in her State. They identified a method of getting the share-cropper to support them and thus were able to rule for 30 years. It wasn't a 'privilege' to teach History or Literature. It was a privilege to get to be a Minister or a lawyer gaining victories through Public Interest Litigation.
According to her, if the political voice and agency of the subalterns could be retrieved, it could then gradually and eventually be re-written.
Very true. If only we could figure out what Mamta is saying, we could gradually write her biography. Oh. There are plenty of such biographies because she is the most important person in West Bengal. Also, anyone who knows Bengali can easily find out what she has said in the past.
We must remember that Spivak’s thought about Subalterns is not in a historic or intellectual vacuum.
Ignorance isn't a vacuum. The silly lady thought Professors of History must know some History. But she was a Professor of Literature who knew nothing about Literature.
Marxism had played a crucial role in the development of Indian political thought during the early 20th century.
No. Politicians have played that role. Ideologues or Academics have not.
The works of the Subaltern Study Group employed classic Marxist methodology in their works.
No. It was Hegelian shite. Marxism is an economic theory.
For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, classic Marxism was too rigid to accommodate the diverse and complex social history of India.
Yet Communists ruled her state for 30 years. A theory doesn't have to accommodate shit. If the rulers subscribe to that theory, it has succeeded.
Although Spivak critiques the methodology of the group, she does not reject Marxist thought altogether. Instead, she adapts the methodology beyond the restrictive class politics and includes liberation struggles such as peasant’s struggles, rights of indigenous minorities, and women’s movements.
No. Mamta may do so. President Murmu may do so. A professor of literature in America isn't doing so.
Spivak also criticizes the early research by the Subaltern Studies Group because of their idea that the subalterns are sovereign political subjects who are in control of their destiny.
Nonsense! By definition, subalterns are subject to the authority of the dominant group even if it lacks 'hegemony'.
Spivak completely rejects this idea. She states that the concept of a sovereign subaltern is just a concept in the dominant discourse by the privileged.
Both the Indian and the American constitution state that the people are sovereign.
Gayatri Spivak also asserts that the notion that subalterns possess a political will is constructed by elite nationalism.
Why the fuck would they construct any such thing?
The dominant bourgeoisie narratives completely neglects the individual struggles of the subalterns. For example, the Awadh peasant rebellion of 1920,
which Nehru said was led by a Hindu preacher who wanted to take land from Muslim landlords
the strikes by the Jute workers in Calcutta,
which were about getting higher pay
during the 20th century, and the significant contribution of the muslim weavers of Northern Indian during the 1857 Indian mutiny.
It was so significant that the Brits and their Indian allies put down the mutiny with insulting ease.
Spivak also highlights that during the historical transition in India, from feudalism to capitalism, there was a historical account of how the bourgeoisie colonised subject transitioned into the national subject after independence.
Before independence. Blame a Scotsman named A.O Hume for this horrible outcome. Annie Beasant and Margaret Noble, too, must take some of the blame.
However, there is no reliable historical account of the struggles of disenfranchised groups such as peasants, women, and other indigenous social groups.
There are plenty.
Ranajit Guha in his ‘Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency’ (1983) attempts to recover subaltern subconsciousness according to Marx’s notion of class consciousness.
Thanks to Vietnam, some American military officers knew more about such insurgencies than a stupid Bengali who had emigrated and taken British nationality in 1959.
In this process, Guha also gives a false coherence to the subaltern groups that are much more complex and varied. This puts the Subaltern historian at risk of objectifying the subaltern and eventually controlling them through knowledge.
Voodoo, maybe. You can't control anybody through knowledge.
This is how the methodology falls prey to the dominant structures of knowledge and representation.
The dominant structure of knowledge and representation is empirical and based on scientifically verifiable facts though the underlying Structural Causal Model may have a mathematical representation.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out that this risk is inevitable and at the same time necessary to address the voices and histories of subalterns.
The people addressing those voices and histories are politicians in India, not academics teaching worthless shite in America or Europe.
Spivak recalls Derrida’s statement that ‘the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work’.
It bites and eats itself.
This emphasizes how closely the practice and methodology of Subaltern Studies is associated with deconstruction.
i.e. telling stupid lies.
If you are a reader seeking a clear political solution to the condition of the marginalized and oppressed groups,
listen to President Murmu not some shithead who teaches literature to morons.
Spivak’s readings might frustrate you.
This is also true of her writing about her own subject.
Professor and postcolonial literary critic Niel Lazarus even points out that Spivak is not really concerned about native agency.
'Native' isn't a widely used word nowadays.
She is instead focused on a theory about how the social practices of the oppressed are represented or not represented in privileged academic discourse.
Privileged academics are smart academics. In India, they can end up as President, like Radhakrishnan, or Prime Minister, like Manmohan.
However, Lazarus ignores that Spivak’s focus on the misrepresentation of the subalterns is just an initial step in her deconstructive reading of Indian society.
Since India has a different philosophical tradition to Europe, deconstruction could be of no use there. Did Macron ask Derrida for a deconstructive reading of French Society? No. He wasn't that stupid.
She points out that contradictory to the dominant notion of India as a coherent, unified structure, the Indian society is a network of traces.
Just like America or Russia or China. But, India is more unitary than America which has dual sovereignty.
Trace is a concept from deconstruction in which the meaning of a word or sign also contains concepts that it does not mean or represent. For instance,
trace also means treacle as well as testicle.
the word ‘day’ also evokes the concept of night, the word ‘woman’ might also evoke the concept of man, etc. This deconstructive vocabulary used by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides her with a flexible methodology to most effectively describe and accommodate the varied struggles, experiences, and histories of the disenfranchised groups like tribals, women, and peasants that are left unaccounted for in the classical Marxist methodology employed by the Subaltern Studies Group.
She says she works with Santhali speaking girls in some schools in Birbhum. But she hasn't learned their language.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak demonstrates engagement with Third World subaltern women’s resistance in her dealings with literary texts.
Which is like engaging with the Ukrainian Resistance to Putin by saying 'Tolstoy wrote like shit'.
In her ‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern’, she proposes that literary texts can be effective rhetorical sites for articulating the complex, and varied histories and narratives of subaltern women.
e.g. saying 'Jane Austen was very evil. Did you know that in 'Pride & Prejudice' she totally failed to condemn penises?'
Spivak emphasizes how fiction by Mahasweta Devi is based on 20th century Indian history. For example, Devi’s Draupadi narrates the struggles, capture, and brutal rape of a female revolutionary called Dopdi Mejhen.
Droupadi Murmu is now the President of India. The plain fact is plenty of Devi's own people had been raped and killed in her ancestral East Bengal. This did not happen to tribal women because their people had martial qualities.
Dopti was captured because of her involvement in the Naxalite rebellion against the bourgeois, the landowners, and the nationalist government during the 1960s and 1970s.
She didn't exist. Devi made her up so as to pretend the vast majority of rape victims at that time weren't Bengali speakers like herself. The Pakistan Army was very insistent on this point.
Gayatri Spivak’s analysis of Dropdi Mejhen (a subaltern character), is an antithesis to the erasure of women in the dominant British colonial archives,
when Kipling writes of a tribal woman, he shows her as smart, courageous and good at kicking ass. But that was also the ancient Sanskrit literary tradition. Stupid Bengali women like Spivak and Devi pretended that tribal women, not their own kith and kin, were being raped and ethnically cleansed.
as well as in the historical documentation by the privileged middle-class nationalists.
So privileged they wanted to run away to Amrika/US so as teach morons while earning less than a good plumber.
Official historic discourse has been known to focus on men as the main driving force of revolutionary politics in India.
Because men were the main driving force. My own deconstruction of Indian historiography focuses on the vanguard role played by pussy cats. I like pussy cats. They are so nice.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is extremely significant because she points out that literature can provide a space to effectively demonstrate subaltern women’s revolutions in postcolonial India.
Whereas Mathematics refuses to provide such a space. Fuck you Mathematics! Fuck you very much!
Spivak resists the desire to articulate a subaltern consciousness in a definite, pure and positive state.
So does Donald Trump. Macron asked him to stop resisting this but Trump hinted that Macron's wife was an elderly man. Macron cried and cried.
As discussed earlier, such a construct, although prevalent in the Marxist vocabulary, ends up objectifying the subalterns and controls them through knowledge.
Voodoo.
At the same time, Spivak does not overlook the fact that this attempt to retrieve subaltern consciousness restores causality and self-determination to them.
Fuck that! Becoming Chief Minister or Governor or President of the Republic is what they increasingly aim for.
Among the most popular, significant and equally controversial works of Spivak is her essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ In this seminal essay, Spivak reveals that historic conditions of political representation cannot and do not guarantee that the interests of disempowered subaltern groups will be recognized, or that their voices will be heard.
This was not the case in India. Subaltern groups gained increasing representation including reserved seats, from the Nineteen Twenties onward.
This essay is extremely important because it is here that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak further develops her own position as a postcolonial intellectual who is determined to retrieve the neglected and silenced voices in the past from the political context of the present.
This had already been done by people from 'neglected' communities who had risen to Ministerial rank.
In ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Spivak politically re-formulates and alters the conventional western poststructuralist methodologies through the careful re-reading of the 19th century Indian colonial archives.
No. She had no access to or interest in any such thing though she did pretend to have researched a particular Queen- the Guleri Rani. But that lady's history was already documented- e.g. in the Golden Book of the Indian Princely Houses.
The essay also marks Gayatri Spivak’s departure from the work of the Subaltern Studies Group, and her focus on the historical experiences and struggles of the subaltern women- a social group that is not only neglected by the dominant elite academia, but also by the Subaltern Studies.
This is nonsense. First she gassed on about what Foucault said to Deleuze and then she told a fairy story about some Great Aunt of hers who had hanged herself while on the rag (in the Hindu context, this is a reproach to the father for not having arranged the girl's marriage when she arrived at puberty). Spivak pretends this poor woman was actually a secret assassin or Revolutionary.
Spivak asserts that the history of anti-British-colonial revolution in India excludes the involvement and contribution of women from the official historic narrative of national independence.
Nonsense! Female revolutionaries were celebrated. Some became members of parliament or occupied other such posts.
By accommodating the experiences and struggles of disempowered women, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak expands the narrow definition of the term subaltern, initially developed by Ranajit Guha and other historians. However, since Spivak includes upper-middle class women as subalterns,
Indira Gandhi is subaltern. So is Margaret Thatcher.
she also ends up complicating the term that only represented lower-class social groups of the world. At the same time it also removes the term from class orientation. We must keep in mind that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is not substituting class based notion with the gendered notion of subaltern.
She is talking nonsense.
Instead, she is further expanding its scope.
by talking nonsense.
She highlights how complete focus on class and economics neglects the significant historical contribution of women in Indian Independence.
There was no such neglect. After independence, some female freedom fighters became Governors or Chief Ministers- e.g. Sarojini Naidu & Sucheta Kripalani.
The inclusion of women, irrespective of their class, also highlights how the term and concept of subaltern was focused on a rigid class-system as well as on patriarchal religion, family and state.
It was shit. Who cares what it focused on?
Finally, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak concludes that ‘the subaltern cannot speak’.
To her. What would be the point? Why not raise your voice in the street to get into Parliament and then raise your voice in Parliament so as to become PM or CM?
This is because the agency and voice of the subaltern women are so entrenched in the Hindu patriarchal codes of morality
that Indira Gandhi was its strongest leader
and the British colonial representation of women as victims of ruthless and barbaric Hindu culture,
No. That was a story Raja Ram Mohan Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore paid the Brits to publicize.
they become impossible to recover. When Spivak says that the Subaltern cannot speak, it means that even when the subaltern attempts to speak, she is never heard.
When Spivak speaks, Indians laugh their heads off. She thinks Haitians pronounce 'Du Bois' as 'Du Boys' because they are still angry with the French.
Jacques Derrida by Arturo Espinosa Seguir
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) was a French philosopher born in Algeria whose theory on deconstruction had a significant impact on Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Before we explore how deconstruction impacted Spivak and how she shaped and expanded the theory, let us examine the major points of the theory
As clearly stated in his popular essay ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the discourse of the Human Sciences’, Derrida states that all meaning and coherence depends on a system of differences and binary oppositions.
He was wrong. All meaning is economic or utilitarian. A structural representation of a thing- be it a language or a species or the Cosmos- will have binary oppositions or a more or less ramified type theory.
For example, we understand the concept of speech because it is
useful to do so. We also understand the concept of fart and must learn not to do so in polite company.
different from writing,
No. The law may make no such distinction in some cases but not in others.
we understand ‘good’ because it is different from ‘bad’, and so on.
No. We classify them as antonyms. But pragmatics (i.e. how words are used) may change. Bad or 'wicked' may mean 'cool'.
Hence, in this way, all meaning is continuously deferred. Thus we never arrive at a final, stable meaning
Because you are babbling useless nonsense.
The truth and meaning in Western philosophy is based on this omission and erasure of the concepts of différance from history.
But Western philosophy was shit. Only STEM subjects are useful.
For Spivak, Derrida is important and interesting because he attempts to challenge and dismantle the philosophical system from within.
India did not have that system.
During a conversation with the theorist Oscar Guardiola Rivera, she very clearly states that the way Derrida writes is not meant for popular reading.
It is stupid and useless.
Instead it requires some preparation on the part of the readers.
Prepare to either laugh your head off, if you know philosophy, or be bored shitless.
She insightfully points out that the West perceives Derrida as a “dead, white, male”.
He really is dead.
Instead, we must remember that Derrida was a Jew in France who was writing from within the traditional framework of French philosophy and theory, and criticizing that very framework.
Apparently, you have to study Philosophy at High School in France. Teaching is a shitty enough job without having to teach utter shit.
For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jacques Derrida is someone who dismantles traditional theory from within, rather than from outside, and this is significant.
It really isn't. The plain fact is, the Madam Wu experiment in the mid Fifties showed that phenomenology was stooooopid. Husserl had barked up the wrong tree. Derrida was a fool to have wasted time on that shite.
Finally, she declares, we will never be able to understand Derrida, if we are threatened by his history.
There is no point understanding a shithead.
Just like Spivak, Homi Bhabha too uses concept of différance from deconstruction in his postcolonial theory.
So what? He is a cretin.
For postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Robert Young, deconstruction is specifically useful because it provides to them a theoretical vocabulary to question and challenge the very established and conventional theoretical concepts that have justified exploitation and colonization of the non-western societies.
What justifies exploitation is making lots of money. What challenges it, is kicking it in the balls or else not producing anything so no exploitation can occur.
For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Derrida’s thoughts are significant to make impactful intervention in the fields of colonialism, the international division of labor between the First and the Third World, and the global economy of today.
Trump is making such impactful interventions. But he went to Wharton and studied finance.
One of the most important works by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the field of deconstruction is her translation and preface to Derrida’s ‘Of Grammatology’. She translated Derrida’s work at a time when he was not as well known to the English speaking audience in the field of criticism, theory and philosophy.
Derrida was appreciated by low IQ people who wanted to get a PhD without ever having used a single brain cell.
In her preface:
this is the updated preface
Spivak gives a significant account of all the philosophical debates that had shaped and impacted the thought and works of Jacques Derrida.
No. She didn't understand the Husserl v Heidegger debate and did not, at that time know about Kojeve.
She also refers to critical debates and questions about Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington, Simon Critchley, Rodolphe Gasché, Marian Hobson, and Christopher Norris.
None of whom have any importance.
Her preface also provided insightful context about Derrida’s philosophy on deconstruction. Additionally, Spivak also offered intellectual commentaries on Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of truth, Edmund Husserl’s concept of phenomenology, Sigmund Freud’s views on memory and the unconscious, Martin Heidegger’s involvement with the question of being, and Emmanuel Levinas concepts of ethics. She also comments on Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi Strauss, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault. This detailed and insightful commentary by Spivak produces a very important and scholarly introduction to the deconstructive philosophy of Derrida. Her preface goes beyond the conventional translator’s preface and instead becomes an extremely significant and must-read scholarly work on Derrida’s thought and philosophy.
But the thing is shit as are all those referred to above. Husserl started off as a mathsy guy but went down a rabbit hole.
The way Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak engages with Derrida’s thought and philosophy is different from the conventional way Derrida is read.
Derrida had a sliver of political importance back when France had a big Communist party. Perhaps, if the Left revives there, people may find something useful in him. But he has no relevance for India or Africa or people whose main problem in life is that they have to sit down to pee.
We must keep in mind that Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak completely refuses to attempt to represent non-western subjects.
Nor does she represent western subjects.
Spivak is not cynical about the possibility of political agency and the history of subaltern resistance. Instead, she is extremely aware of how the dominant systems of knowledge and representation have already damaged and misrepresented the lives of many marginalized and disenfranchised sections.
There was no damage. When Katherine Mayo wrote a nasty book about India, Indians did not die of grief.
She emphasizes how the western intellectuals are completely complicit in taking away the voice of the oppressed by trying to speak for them, and represent them.
Why stop there? Why not say they are complicit in aggravated acts of fellatio by which trillions of gallons of Third World jizz is drained by Wall Street plutocrats?
Deconstruction is significant and useful because it provides Gyatri Spivak a critical strategy to recognise the oppressed without damaging them. In her portrayal of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri in her seminal essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Spivak very impactfully highlights how Derrida’s deconstruction enables and equips her to be more conscious and ethically responsible while she talks about Bhaduri’s singular, lived experience.
The girl hanged herself because she wanted to get married rather than have to go to school. Spivak pretends she was a Ninja assassin.
Vocabularies of political movements have a tendency to define experiences, history, and struggle of minorities in abstract terms such as workers, women, colonized, etc. Spivak argues that such words are ‘catachresis’.
They aren't. A worker really is a worker. Catachresis is where you say 'wanker' when you meant to say 'worker'.
Catachresis is the misuse or abuse of a term that is used to represent (rather misrepresent) multiple and varied experiences and environments under singular signs.
Nope. It just means 'misuse'.
However, in Derrida’s concept of deconstruction, catachresis doesn't just mean misusing a word. It also means the incompleteness inherent in all the systems of meaning.
Peano Arithmetic is a system of meaning. We know it is 'incomplete'. Using it as a dildo would be misuse. Using it to do sums is not.
For example, let us consider the term ‘tree’ in the English language. This word must represent a particular real tree,
Nonsense! In math, it means a particular type of graph.
but we do not know exactly which tree does the word refer to.
The context will clarify this.
There exists a certain perceptual ambiguity and a crisis of meaning.
If you are as stupid as shit- sure.
At the same time the moment we think of a specific particular “tree” we also repress the possibility of any other tree.
No we don't.
This is true for all systems of meaning.
Only in the sense that all systems of meaning can be used as dildo.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak highlights that the vocabulary used by political movements are catachresis because they claim to represent all women, workers and proletariat.
A political movement may indeed represent all women, workers and wankers if its manifesto includes items which greatly advance the interests of such people.
However, this becomes problematic as there does not exist a “true worker”, or “true woman” or “true proletariat”.
Everybody may agree that some person fits that precise description.
For Gayatri Spivak, deconstruction is politically indispensable because it guards against the claims of Marxism, Western Feminism, and national liberation movements to represent and speak on the behalf of all the oppressed.
Tibet only fell to the Communist Chinese because the Dalai Lama had foolishly dispensed with Deconstruction.
In the case of political mobilization, using master words such as anti-colonial national liberation, feminism, socialism etc is catachresis not just because they are inappropriate but also because they end up abusing the people whose lives and experiences they define.
This may happen but then again the reverse may be the case.
The voice of a woman or a worker is given by a political proxy, or an elected representative who speaks on behalf of constituencies.
So what? This is just the theory of comparative advantage in action.
As these representatives speak on the behalf of the minorities and the oppressed, they disastrously refer to them as a unified political subject.
Which they may in fact be. If they aren't, other would be representatives can garner support from sections of the 'oppressed' and win elections.
This coherent and collective political identity is not a transparent portrait of the true worker or a woman.
It may be useful enough. Language is utilitarian. Why get your knickers into a twist just because what people say does not magically correspond to how things are?
These identities are just a consequence of the dominant discourse that represents these groups.
Nope. Discourses don't matter. Economics does.
By utilizing deconstruction, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak demonstrates how language of political struggle damages the workers, women, and the colonized.
Nope. She just tells stupid lies.
Through the example of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri in 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', Spivak shows how individual, complex, lived experiences, lives, struggles, and histories are erased by the unifying radical vocabulary of political discourses that is used to represent them.
She pretended her great aunt was a Revolutionary Assassin. Indians thought this very funny. Why not suggest that your granny's puppy dog was actually Leon Trotsky?
Deconstruction becomes important because it is a more flexible and responsible way of reading that accommodates singular lived experiences, lives, struggles and histories.
But it has produced no such history book.
Derrida’s rethinking of Ethics and responsibility to the Other.
Sarah Kofman
In the year 1980,
Mitterrand, in alliance with the Communists, would take power the very next year. His Leftist policies failed and he shifted to the Right.
a conference called ‘The Ends of Man’ was held in France, at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-La-Salle, which was eventually published in French as ‘Les fins de l’homme: à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida’ (1981). It was attended by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jean Luc Nancy, Phillipe Lacoue Labarthe and Sarah Kofman, and they discussed how politics was situated in Derrida’s thought. This conference eventually was discussed by Spivak in her essay ‘Limits and Openings of Marx in Derrida’ published in ‘Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993)”.
By which time Marxism was as dead as a dodo save in West Bengal.
In the essay, Spivak points out how the initial discussions of the conference were focused on the binary opposition between the philosophical concept of political, and politics as the real concrete event.
This is merely the difference between concept and percept.
This binary opposition was initiated by Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillipe Lacoue Labarthe. However, Spivak in her essay states that this binary of politics as an abstract philosophical concept and politics as real event is problematic.Following Kant, we say a judgment is “problematic” if it represents a predication as “merely possible” (or “arbitrary”). I suppose it is possible that some abstract concept matches reality exactly. It is fine to say it is possible that such is not the case in politics.
This is because this segregation reduces and restraints deconstruction as just an abstract philosophical practice that is disconnected from the actual political events.
Which was true. There were Liberal parties which drew on Liberal political philosophy and Islamic parties which drew on Islamic political philosophy and Marxist parties which drew on Marxist political philosophy. No party drew on Derrida's shite.
Spivak avoids this and rather focuses on careful readings of Derrida’s early and later works.
But this does not alter the fact that there was no political movement associated with his stupid shite.
She asserts that in his works there is a movement from philosophical questions about being (ontology), knowing (epistemology) and truth, towards the ethical and social aspects of violence, justice, friendship, and hospitality.
Such was the Greek philosophical tradition which Derrida drew upon.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak emphasizes that deconstruction of the conventional Western philosophy has an ethical aspect to it that questions all rational programmes that make up political decision making.
But all political decision making is questioned for ethical, economic and other reasons. It's just that Derrida's shite had never been used in that fashion because it was silly.
Derrida’s concept of ethics is based on the thoughts of Emmanuel Levinas stated in his work ‘Totality and Infinity’.
This was the Jewish 'Mussar' (ethical) tradition of saying that the material needs of the other should be taken as one's own spiritual needs. This is 'diakonia' or the mission to the poor and vulnerable which all Religions claim to have.
According to Levinas, “ethics is nothing more than the singular event in which the Self encounters itself in an ethical relation to the face of the Other.”
Levinas was wrong. Even Robinson Crusoe faces ethical and moral questions. Still, this was orthodox Hegelian shite and Kojeve had popularized it in France.
It is the moment the Self comes face to face with the Other, when the question of ethics is initiated.
Because if I can't see your face I naturally conclude you don't exist. A ghost must be kicking me in the bum.
Derrida did not completely dismiss Levinas’s philosophy. Instead he emphasized how there was absolutely no guarantee that the singular event of face to face encounter between the Self and the Other will be ethical.
D'uh!
He states that there is nothing to prevent the Self to harm or even kill the Other.
Derrida's colleagues gave him a wide berth. He was notorious for suddenly stabbing people as their faces came closer to him.
Simon Critchley in his ‘The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas’ states that the “attempt to articulate conceptually an experience that has been forgotten or exiled from philosophy
e.g. the fact that Kant was notoriously flatulent.
can only be stated within philosophical conceptuality,
the synthetic a priori nature of the fart must be conceived apodictically
which entails that the experience succumbs to and is destroyed by philosophy’.
Flatulence has been destroyed by philosophy. That's why it is impossible that my fart just stank up the room.
The moment we attempt to ethically and responsibly respond to the Other,
by farting
we risk destroying their voice.
you can almost taste my farts.
At the same time, this attempt to responsibly acknowledge and interact with the Other might also transform the Self-centered philosophical discourse such that it begins to recognise the Otherness.
A guy says 'help me. I've just been hit by a bus'. Ignore the cunt. Otherwise you might destroy his voice. As for what 'philosophical discourse' recognises, who gives an actual fuck?
Deconstruction takes this chance. It questions the principal conditions of possibility that make western philosophy and theory comprehensible, and attempts to trace the ‘Other’ people, experiences, histories, or cultures that are excluded, destroyed or silenced.
If philosophy had this magical power, we wouldn't need armies or prisons or executioners. Also, nightclubs wouldn't need bouncers to keep people like me out.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak employs Derrida’s method of reading with literary and historical discourses in order to trace the omissions that are inherent in Marxism, decolonisation and feminism.
They totally ignore penguins- more particularly lesbian penguins.
For Spivak, the greatest gift of Deconstruction was that it emphasizes and recognizes the complicity of theory with the object of its critique.
Fair point. If you gas on about how such and such a philosopher was totally evil, you are complicit in promoting his oeuvre. Best just ignore him same as everybody else.
In her ‘A Literary Representation of the Subaltern’ (1988), Spivak challenges the socialist and democratic false promises made to people by the representatives and leaders of the anti-colonial resistance movement during India’s struggle for freedom.
Those promises were true enough. What was missing was an account of how general purpose productivity was to be raised and how the nation planned to feed and defend itself. You can't eat democracy or socialism which is why you are welcome to tell them to fuck the fuck off.
She states that these promises completely ignore and omit the lower-caste workers and women.
Nope. They got the vote and Hindu Dalits and Adivasis got affirmative action and reserved seats.
These people find no place in the new Independent India.
Save as Chief Ministers- like Mayawati- or as President- like Smt. Murmu.
According to Spivak, the mythology of 'Mother India' that was concocted during and after India’s struggle for freedom only perpetuated the class system that was established during the British rule.
Which is why she fucked off to Jim Crow America.
Indian Independence did little to nothing for lower-castes, subaltern women. She challenges this class-based structure of nationalist mythology in her analysis of ‘Breast Giver’, a short story by Mahasweta Devi.
Ritwik Ghatak's idiot niece.
Through the deconstructive reading, Gayatri Spivak emphasizes how decolonisation ends up perpetuating the colonial structures of class and gender that it claims to oppose and get rid of.
It claimed to get rid of Colonists and actually did so. However, it is true that Nehru failed to abolish gender. That is why Spivak has to sit down to pee. Fuck you Chacha Nehru! Fuck you very much!
‘Imperialism and Sexual Difference’ is another essay where Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak uses deconstructive approach to assess political programmes. In the essay, she highlights how western feminism and feminists are unable to incorporate the experiences of Third World women, during the construction of the universal feminist subject.
She was objecting to some Sudanese Professor in Saudi Arabia who had dared to question the practice of female genital mutilation.
All women throughout the world do not suffer the same kind of oppression. Moreover, the western feminist criticism focuses entirely on how women are excluded from the ‘masculinist truth-claim to universality or academic objectivity’. As a result, this focus perpetuates the universalist errors by suggesting that all women tolerate the same oppression just because they are women.
Did you know many women are actually penguins? Why does nobody talk about that?
Spivak critiques Western feminism for ignoring the experiences of Arab, African, and Asian women through the lie of ‘global sisterhood’.
Also, how come White women are so freakin' white? Could they not paint stripes on themselves like zebras? Would that really be too much to ask?
This critique of feminism clearly illustrates the importance of the practice of deconstructive reading.
Telling Sudanese women not to protest at female genital mutilation is a great service to them.
Deconstruction underlines how almost all intellectual practices are politically complicit and involved with political and social structures.
Also they are politically complicit in sucking off trillions of Turd World hobos.
Spivak’s deconstructive reading is often criticized on the grounds that it leads to nothing more than a critical paralysis rather than amount to any effective political intervention. For example, Asha Varadharajan states that Spivak’s exposure of complicity ends up preventing her from articulating the specific moments of political resistance.
Asha used to beat up 'Proud Boys'.
However, for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the deconstructive acknowledgement and affirmation of complicity does not paralyze critical or political thinking. Instead, it becomes the starting point from where we can develop a more responsible and aware intellectual practice.
i.e. telling stupid lies about your Great Aunt who was actually Leon Trotsky.
Spivak employs deconstruction beyond its narrow disciplinary framework and engages it with political concerns. For example, in ‘Responsibility’ (1994) published in Boundary, she interrupts Derrida’s analysis of Heideggar’s philosophy and discusses political issues such as the limitations of the World Bank’s 1993 Flood Action Plan in Bangladesh.
She has the mind of a magpie. With hindsight, attacks by libtards on the World Bank were counterproductive. Power passed to billionaire company promoters like Ambani, Adani etc.
Similarly, in ‘The Setting to Work of Deconstruction’ (1999), she interrupts a summary of Derrida’s thoughts to analyze counter-globalist development activism.
i.e. the sort of stupid shit which the Chinese did not tolerate.
In this way, works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak deviate from the conventional disciplinary codes of western critical theory.
There is no such code. The thing is garbage.
She attempts to rework the ethical dimensions of critical theory and assumptions that shape political practices.
Why bother? If nutters can prevent the World Bank doing infrastructure investment, Billionaires, using money from public sector banks, will step in and do the job for a much higher price.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spiva
Spivak’s works like ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’,
where she lied about her great aunt
‘The Rani of Sirmur’,
where she said history had erased a Queen who was famous and celebrated.
and her commentaries on the works of Mahasweta Devi, have significantly impacted the Western feminist thought.
Because women like reading about how all women everywhere have always been utterly shit.
One of Spivak’s most significant contribution is the demand that Western feminism must accomodate and acknowledge the material histories, experiences, and lives of the ‘Third World’ women in its narrative of women’s struggles against oppression.
She wants them to believe her stupid lies.
Spivak also wrote about French feminist theory, 19th century English women’s writing, and Marxist feminism. In her works like ‘French Feminism in an International Frame’ (1981), ‘Feminism and Critical Theory’ (1986), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak provides us with insightful commentaries on French feminist thinkers like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous.
Who were stupid and useless.
One of the main contributions of Spivak in feminism is that she challenges the universal, dominant, and conventional assumptions of feminism that they speak for all women.
This was certainly untrue of 'first wave' Feminism.
She collaborated with prominent postcolonial feminist thinkers such as Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Nawal El Saadawi, and Kumari Jayawardena and emphasised that feminism must respect and recognise different races, religions, class, cultures, and citizenship among women.
In other words, white feminists must shut the fuck up.
We must be mindful that Spivak is not an anti-feminist. Instead, she rigorously attempts through her critique, to strengthen the arguments and political claims of feminist thought.
Provided those arguments aren't listened to- because women can't speak- and those claims are disregarded- because women are utterly useless.
The early feminist social and political struggles during and after the 1950s had successfully facilitated democratic rights and freedoms of women in North America and Europe.
No. All women in the West, save in some Swiss Cantons, had got the vote by 1945.
This feminist struggle was based on liberal humanism according to which all humans were equal and must have equal rights. At the same time, European feminist Simone de Beauvoir pointed out that liberal humanism traditionally perceived women as ‘other’ or as ‘inferioir’ to Man who was the universal humanis subject.
She was certainly inferior to Sartre.
The difference between men and women was based on biological foundation that was absolute and unaffected by social or cultural influence. However, Beauvior rejected this universal humanist notion. She asserted in her seminal work ‘The Second Sex’ that ‘one is not born a woman, one becomes a woman’.
Some Feminists weren't too happy when some men became women and won all the gold medals in athletics.
She asserts that gender identity is always informed by social construct and can be resisted through political as well as social resistance and struggle.
If so why not 'socially construct' women as having super-powers?
French feminist thinkers like Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva concur with Beauvoir that gender identity is socially constructed. However, at the same time, it is not something that can be ignored or avoided at will. This is because gender identity is entrenched and regularly enforced by powerful patriarchal institutions like Family, Education, Media, Law and the State.
Not to mention Mind-Control rays broadcast by my neighbour's cat. Why is the fashion industry not supplying women with tasteful tin-foil hats?
For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva have been extremely influential in redefining the Western feminist thought.
They had zero influence because they were crazy.
Spivak suggests in ‘This Sex Which is Not One’ , that the attempt to independently define a woman risks ‘falling prey to the very binary oppositions that perpetuate women’s subordination in culture and society’.
Also, if we 'independently define' death as ceasing to be alive, we perpetuate death.
Against this binary system of men and women, she proposes a critical strategy called strategic essentialism.
E.g. saying 'I'm a woman' because you want to go to a woman's prison where you can beat and rape the inmates rather than get beaten and raped by male convicts.
Spivak’s contibution to feminism is immensely influenced by Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous.
Which is why it is shit.
However, she shifts the focus of feminist concern about the difference between men and women to the cultural differences between the women of the First World and those in the First World.
Turd World. Spivak was playing the race card.
One of the main loopholes of French Feminism is that it tends to narrate the experiences of Third World women in terms of west female subject.
rather than the Lesbian penguin subject. Sad.
This approach overlooks major crucial differences in culture, language, history, and social class. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak further develops this idea in her analysis of Mahasweta Devi’s short story ‘Breast Giver’. In the story, Jashodha, a subaltern female protagonist, works as a professional mother
Nanny?
and wet nurse for an upper-class Brahmin inorder to support her crippled husband. Spivak highlights how the Jashodha challenges the conventional western feminist assumption that childbirth is unwaged domestic labour.
Surrogate mothers may be paid quite handsomely.
Her reproductive body and breast milk are a valuable asset and a source of income for her and her crippled husband.
If you employ a maid servant, you generally have to pay her a wage. Western women know this.
Unfortunately, the continuous exploitation of Jashodha’s reproductive body results in her painful death from breast cancer.
But breast feeding reduces the risk of such cancer!
Through her analysis of this short story, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out how Western Marxist feminism neglects and underplays the theory of value and ignores the mother as a subject.
It also ignores Lesbian penguins.
This is how Jashodha challenges the universal assumption of western feminism to speak on behalf of all women.
in the same manner that my farts challenge Donald Trump to a game of strip poker. Frankly, its not a challenge that is difficult to overcome.
The struggles and lives of subaltern women like Jashodha are far removed from the experiences and practices of feminism in a university classroom.
As are penguins- even of the Lesbian variety.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak points out that this privileged distance from the Third World women must not cause us to forget the perpetual oppression suffered by them.
Also, please don't forget the perpetual oppression of Lesbian penguins. Did you know they aren't allowed to qualify as actuarial scientists even in supposedly progressive Denmark?
She asserts that careful reading, specially in a university classroom has potential political and social consequences.
The kids in the class start thinking they are wasting their money and their time. They end up voting for Donald Trump.
Gayatri Spivak also points out how the world portrayed in literature, history, and media motivate people to ignore and forget about the struggles, lives, and experiences of subaltern social groups.
This is also true of Pornhub.
She challenges this academic and popular ignorance towards Third World women through her project of ‘un-learning our privilege as our loss’. This project of un-learning has been impactful on feminist theory and criticism.
If you teach shite, helping students unlearn that shite is a good thing.
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