1. This essay was originally published in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed.
Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg
In her much cited essay ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’ Spivak, following Marx’s The
Eighteenth Brumaire, constructs the subaltern as a space of difference. The subaltern is
structurally excluded and can only enter existing structures by an identification on her
part with those already positioned with the means to represent themselves. In this essay
Spivak emphasises two senses of representation; representation as ‘speaking for’ as in
politics—Vertretung; and the theatrical sense of representation as re-staging or ‘placing
there’ — Darstellung. Representation is also never adequate or complete. Spivak’s main
concern, then, in relation to the question of, can the subaltern speak?, is with the meaning
transaction between speaker and listener. Even when the subaltern makes an effort in
death to speak she is not able to be heard. It is speaking and hearing that completes the
speech act
Spivak is centrally concerned with the unstable and catechrestical nature of language
itself. The idea of catechresis (as a metaphor without an adequate literal referent) is
applied to western notions of nation, nationalism, citizenship and multiculturalism for
which, she suggests, there is no adequate referent in postcolonial contexts. She distances
herself from these terms while demonstrating the crimes that are attendant upon them.
Her concern is less with producing a legitimating counternarrative than with the
deconstructive project of bringing provisional certainties into crisis and examining the
shifting limits of knowledge and judgement. Spivak also reflects on the ethics of
relationship as she attempts to imaginatively inhabit other people’s narratives in such as
way as to tell someone else’s story as her story of feminism, to tell another’s story
without appropriating it.
Though often accused of being too theoretical and obscure, Spivak suggests that theory
provides the necessary reflexivity to fulfil the responsibility of the academic

2. In her influential essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Gayatri Spivak identifies
postcolonial Indian women with a racial and economic underclass and shows
how the inscription of women in a male-fabricated tradition has dislocated their
realm of influence from the political by actively denying them access to law and
authority, which remain a male prerogative. Spivak evokes the Hindu woman’s
subaltern position of sexualised otherness in which her inaccessibility to language
leaves her in a silenced, aporetic space of abjection.
If the subaltern has a voice, as some feminists would argue, whose language
would she use, given the fact that she is silenced within and by the patriarchal
economy? Postcolonial feminist interrogations of language seek to address the
following questions: Does the elaboration of a specific womanspeak, a special
language articulated for and by women, provide the necessary space in which
women can posit their specificity as sexual, social and political beings? Or is
womanspeak in itself based on a pattern of exclusion that undermines the creation of a
common, plurivocal language, accessible to both men and women?
The call for the recognition of a plurality of woman-centred experiences is located within
women’s interrogations of their respective cultures and traditions and their critical
reevaluations of age-old cultural and religious mandates that have lost their present-day
applicability. Postcolonial feminisms seek to determine whether women, as the
purveyors of culture, can lay claim to their own right of ownership of that culture. For
example, feminists from Africa and the African diaspora have embraced the idea of social
or othermothering, whereby the use of the term mother is not restricted solely to the
biological mother and her functions, but extends itself to include a community activist of
feminine orientation who works toward the overall benefit of the group.
As a result, motherhood has been converted into a mystical abstraction that has
obfuscated the harsh realities of motherhood in several societies. The communal mother,
who occupies a privileged place in West African societies, exemplifies Alice Walker’s
definition of a womanist who is committed to the integrity, survival and wholeness of
entire peoples due to her sense of self and her love for her culture.

3. The split between womanism and feminism has resulted from the complicity between
white western feminism and white patriarchy to further marginalise the experiences of
women of colour by representing them as the negative instance of the white, middle class
female model. In her groundbreaking essay ‘Under Western Eyes’ (see Mohanty Russo,
Torres (eds) 1991), Chandra Mohanty has shown how these representations have, for the
most part, centred on a sensational or exaggerated sense of the daily reality of indigenous
and Third World women who have almost always been defined in terms of their
illiteracy, poverty, social and religious victimisation. Mohanty warns against the dangers
of such limited representations that tend to freeze women in time, space and history.
Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-century Chinese Literature and
Society
by Lu Tonglin
However, beyond the defiance of a dead male intellectual, our deliberate pose as "inferior
men" is also meant as a reminder of the artificial nature of naming and the abuses that
may follow from such naming. Such abuses are especially problematic when we speak in
the name of a subordinate group, while hiding our own motives and intentions. Spivak's
article, "Can the Subaltern Speak?," is useful, then, in a different way. Spivak
convincingly shows us how the Indian ritual practice of widow burning, sati, was used
either by certain Indian nationalists as the representation of male desire for a golden past,
or more significantly, by British colonists as the justification for their colonization. While
the former was eager to preserve the patriarchal order by proving the insubstantiality of a
female life without a husband, through whom a woman's desire is articulated, the latter
tried to justify their colonialism by abolishing this "inhuman" ritual "ethically."
Caught between them, the subaltern, Spivak concludes, "cannot speak.''31 The fate of the
voiceless subaltern is also the fate of tens of millions of Chinese women throughout the
centuries
Perhaps the absolutely negative answer Spivak gives to her own question—"the subaltern
cannot speak"—should give way to a more flexible question: Can the subaltern be heard?
And how? Spivak's own essay provides an answer when she describes the death of
Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a young woman who committed suicide at the age of sixteen or
seventeen in North Calcutta in 1924. The subaltern can indeed be heard—as
Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri is through Spivak's writing. Subalterns do speak, but they do not
necessarily speak as an American academician. It depends on how and to what extent
intellectuals working in the First World are willing and able to understand them in their
language, despite or thanks to their theoretical positions. By narrowing the definition of
the term "speak" in her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?," Spivak risks privileging the

4. language, and thus the position, of First World intellectuals vis-à-vis Third World women
despite her insightful criticism of British colonialism
Spivak herself writes earlier about French feminism:
The point that I am trying to make is that, in order to learn enough about the Third World women
and to develop a different readership, the immense heterogeneity of the field must be appreciated,
and the First World feminist must learn to stop feeling privileged as a woman

5. As scholars teaching or studying at North American universities, we indeed enjoy some
institutionalized privileges, such as a relatively greater freedom of speech and an easier
access to certain kinds of information. But does this mean that we have nothing to
learn from those who are less privileged in this respect, and who are the objects of our
studies in one way or the other? In other words, are our institutionalized privileges
sufficient to justify an overall privileged feeling with regard to Third World women?
Why does the subaltern not have any other choice other than an objectified voice and
total silence? How can we appreciate "the immense heterogeneity" of Third World
women without a thorough understanding of their languages? Instead of hastening to
teach them how to behave as "true women" or "true feminists" with a package of
knowledge acquired in North American institutions, why can we not start to learn how to
understand their positions in relation to social and historical changes? As Chow points
out, we cannot avoid a certain degree of objectification when we speak for/of others. The
question is how to minimize this degree.
Since China has undergone numerous upheavals and revolutions during the twentieth
century, women, as the oppressed group of society, have been encouraged to participate
in social changes, which are supposed to bring about their own emancipation. To a
different degree, each of us, as a feminist studying Chinese literature and culture in the
West, is facing the same problems as Chinese women during the revolution. Our voices,
as representatives of Third World women, are easily commodified in the American
academy, where Third World cultures have recently taken on a high exchange value
The question remains as to whether we should accommodate ourselves to our
commodification, or whether we should use it to resist commodification itself. The first
option implies repeating whatever is fashionable in the American Academy regardless of
the specificity of the gender situation in China. The second option requires a much more
painstaking effort to make the voiceless subalterns, women in China, heard among
Western intellectuals. This task raises the question: As feminist scholars working in the
First World, are we able and willing to hear the voice(s) of women in China? The
majority of our audience for the time being consists mainly of Western intellectuals,
whose language is in fact different from that of the objects of our studies. In view of this
situation, the first option, were we to choose it, would be far more convenient than the
second, because all we need do is shape the object of our studies in the image and
language of our audience according to the law of a market economy. But the price to pay
would be heavy: we would contribute to our own silence by silencing the objects of our
studies as in the case of the three May Fourth male

6. Central to such issues is the question: "Can the subaltern speak?," as we find it in Gayatri
Spivak's essay of the same title.7 In this regard, the history of modern Chinese literature
can be seen as a paradigm for contemporary cultural studies, simply because the most
written figure in this history is none other than the subaltern, whose speech has been
coming to us through fiction, poetry, political debates, historical writings, journalistic
representations, as well as radio plays, films, operas, and regional cultural practices.
speaking of the subaltern, Gayatri Spivak says:
The subaltern is all that is not elite, but the trouble with those kinds of names is that, if you have
any kind of political interest you name it in the hopc that the name will disappear. That's what
class consciousness is in the interest of: the class disappearing. What politically we want to see is
that the name would not be possible.9
Precisely because the truly minor is the voiceless, it can be seized upon and spoken for.
As Spivak says, "If the subaltern can speak . . . the subaltern is not a subaltern any more
Ethics after Idealism
By Rey Chow
Because for Spivak "speech" and self-representation signify, by definition, access to the
symbolic and to political power, her conclusion is a pessimistic one: the subaltern cannot
speak. If the subaltern can speak, Spivak adds later in an interview, then she is not a
subaltern anymore.
Between Spivak's radically unsentimental pronouncement, which devolves from the
deconstruction of language as Law (whose function is to prohibit rather than to enable),
and the more humanistic idealism of those cultural critics who continue to assert that the
subalterns have spoken, an enormous discursive dimension unfolds. This discursive
dimension, which constitutes the third prominent type of analysis in cultural studies, is
that of "minority discourse."

7. A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America
by Shankar, Lavina Dhingra
In numerous interviews, as well as in critical essays, Spivak often describes herself as an
"outsider" and as a "resident alien," and specifically, as a citizen of postcolonial India, not
of the United States ("Postmarked" 76, 78). In In Other Worlds, she acknowledges that
even after living in the United States for nineteen years, she feels like an "outsider" (102);
the title of her book Outside "in the" Teaching Machine clearly implies the inside-outside
dichotomy. In her 1993 interview with Sara Danius and Stefan Jonsson, she refers to
herself as "a Europeanized postcolonial" (48). Elsewhere, rather eagerly, Spivak
acknowledges her designation as an "expatriate English Professor," in the December
1990 issue of the leading Indian news magazine India Today (quoted in Spivak,
"Burden," 153). The self-identifying label she uses thus is expatriate, not immigrant; an
outsider, not an insider.
Subaltern study, introduce the idea of representation to the group
The word subaltern & idea of popular do not inhabit continuous space at all
Sublatern:
Position without an identity: somewhat like a strict identification of class
Class & poverty or race and color or geneder and sex
Sati…was seen as a resisitance against the British by Spivak.
Outside in the Teaching Machine: Literary representation of the female subaltern as
holding up the rural economy.
Her resistance is not being recognized. To have what they are saying being recognized.
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