P OSTCOLONIAL E PISTEMOLOGIES Gurminder K Bhambra Wednesday 6 th November, 2013

R OOM C HANGE REMINDER … DateLectureGKB 3-4GKB 4-5NG 4-5 6/11/13F107 F107 – essay workshop /11/13L /11/13F S /11/13Conference for DTC funded students 4/12/13S0.21S0.08 S0.28

P OSTCOLONIAL S TUDIES Edward W. Said’s Orientalism ; Homi K. Bhabha’s The Location of Culture; Gayatri C. Spivak’s Preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology and ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Said opened up the question of the production of knowledge from a global perspective Movements for decolonisation provoked a fundamental crisis within Orientalist/Western thought

S AID ’ S O RIENTALISM The errors committed by the Orientalists were twofold: first, they got things wrong because there was no Orient to depict; second, the Orient they described was a misrepresentation. They created the Orient, as a general category, and misrepresented what was observed. Provocation: how is what we know framed as knowledge through particular systems of representation and the practices of colonial governance based upon them?

S PIVAK : C AN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK ? Spivak addresses current Western efforts to problematise the subject and questions how the Third-World subject is represented in Western discourse. In this text she offers an analysis of the relationship between Western discourses and the possibility of speaking of (or for) the subaltern woman.

C AN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK ? P ART 1 Spivak assesses the contributions of French post- structuralist theory Key issue: the question of ideology is ignored as is the post-structuralist theorist’s own implication in intellectual and economic history. Two forms of representation ‘speaking for’, as in politics; re-presentation, as in art The difference is that between a ‘proxy’ and a ‘portrait’ (276)

C AN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK ? P ART 2 Spivak addresses imperialism and the construction of the colonial subject as Other. ‘It is the slippage between rendering visible the mechanism and rendering vocal the subject’ (285). The paradigm of the intellectual must involve a recognition of the fact that their privilege is their loss (287). Deleuze and Foucault’s silences on the epistemic violence of imperialism would matter less if they did not choose to speak on third-world issues.

C AN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK ? P ART 3 ‘a nostalgia for lost origins is detrimental to the exploration of social realities within a critique of imperialism’ (291) To render the thinking subject transparent is to efface the relentless recognition of the other by assimilation Spivak concludes this section by arguing that developing work on the mechanics of the constitution of the Other is more useful than invocations of the authenticity of the Other (294)

C AN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK ? P ART 4 Unlearning would involve a recognition of the ideological formation of the subject as an object of investigation (296) ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ ‘the women actually wanted to die’ These statements in effect legitimise each other and silence / through the silencing of the women’s voice Between patriarchy and imperialism, the figure of the woman disappears

C ONCLUDING T HOUGHTS Concern for the oppressed can hide the privileging of the intellectual To render thought transparent is to hide the recognition of others through assimilation Networks of power are heterogeneous and so require a persistent critique Speaking for and speaking about They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented

“To not see is to abnegate responsibility, not to be seen is to be isolated or to be left to perish, a fate that may not be merely individual but collective” (Sangari 1990: 231). In the animal kingdom the rule is, eat or be eaten; in the human kingdom, define or be defined – Nandy