Gayatri Spivak: "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1983)

Spivak, of Indian descent, makes a intervention in post-colonial, feminist and psychoanalytical criticism by attempting to locate (or dis-locate) the subaltern and show the subaltern cannot speak.

She has a "politics of the open end" in which "deconstruction acts as a 'safeguard' against the repression or exclusion of 'alterities'...people, events, or ideas that are radical 'other' to the dominat world view."

"almost from the start, she emphasized how deconstructions interest in the 'violence' of traditional hierarchical binary oppositions (between male and female, the West and the rest, etc.) afforded a passage from literary theory to radical politics." Spivak herself writes that "the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self's Shadow."

"Spivak sees postcolonial studies as a new instance of this attempt to liberate the other and to enable that other to experience and articulate those parts of itself that fall outside what the dominant discourse has constituted as its subjecthood."

The subaltern holds a subordinate position that is always in relation to but stands outside of the and ambivalent to the central locus of power. However, the subaltern itself is a heterogeneous group. Radical political movements tend to romanticize subaltern and put the responsibility upon the subaltern to liberate themselves despite their place outside the system.

Spivak argues against essentialism because the subaltern cannot be easily or neatly categories. "Leftist intellectuals who romanticize the oppressed...essentialize the subaltern and thus replicate the colonialist discourses they purport to critique." "A person's or group's identity is relational, a function of its place in a system of differences." She does argue for a "difference feminism" "which stresses alliances among women across their differences." She introduces the concept of "strategic essentialism": "In some instances, she argued, it was important to strategically make essentialist claims, even while one retained an awareness that those claims were, at best, crude political generalizations."

Spicak turns to Frued's analysis of colonialism. "She remains leery of any attempt to fix and celebrate the subaltern's distinctive voice by claims that the subaltern occupies the position of victim, abjected other, scapegoat, savior, and so on." Spivak notes that her analysis offers an acknowledgement of the the dangers of "interpreting and representing the other."

"The subaltern is not privileged (within the dominant discourse), and does not speak in a vocabulary that will get a hearing in institutional locations of power. The subaltern enters the official and intellectual discourse only rarely and usually through mediating commentary of someone more at home in those discourses. If the problematic is understood in this way, it is hard to see how the subaltern can be capable of speaking."

Spivak then tries to recover the speech of the subaltern through an analysis of an Indian woman's suicide.