斯皮瓦克和她的后殖民女权主义批评

斯皮瓦克的后殖民批评最突出特色是理论与方法上的异质性特征和鲜明的女性主义视角。她的后殖民女权主义批评的主要内容是揭露殖民主义和男性中心的权力话语对于第三世界女性的遮蔽和歪曲。她通过对西方白人女性的文学文本所作的后殖民的解读,为女权主义文学批评拓展了新的空间,也使后殖民理论得到了丰富和发展。     

Ethical encounters: Spivak,Alexander and Kincaid

This essay seeks to engage with the idea of the possibility of meaningful ethical encounters with another. It does not attempt to engage with the broader discourse of ethics. Its purpose is simply to read a few of Gayatri Spivak’s discussions about ethics and alterity and offer a reading of three postcolonial texts in the context of that reading.     

从斯皮瓦克的后殖民主义解读《我母亲的自传》

作为后殖民主义理论的重要代表人物,斯皮瓦克指出了“属下”不能发声这一事实,同时将女性主义融入到自己的分析之中,揭示了殖民地女性所遭受的帝国与男性霸权的双重权利话语的压制。运用斯皮瓦克的后殖民理论,分析了《我母亲的自传》中,主人公雪拉和她的妹妹,作为属下所遭受的压迫,同时分析了主人公自身意识的觉醒,对两种压迫奋起反抗,寻求一种自我的独立。     

Is the subaltern resilient? Notes on agency and neoliberal subjects

ABSTRACT

This essay engages the question of where Gayatri Spivak’s understanding of subalternity is to be located today, and it does so by first establishing a brief genealogy of thinking the outside of modern, capitalist economic and cultural modes of production. This genealogy reaches back to the classic Marxist figure of the lumpenproletariat, moves through its postcolonial reappropriation by Fanon as well as Gramsci’s original articulation of the subaltern, and arrives at Subaltern Studies’ re-articulation of Gramsci’s notion of the subaltern as well as Spivak’s critical dialogue with Subaltern Studies. This first part of the essay lays the ground for an argument that pertains to the relation between subalternity, agency, resistance, and resilience, within a context of neoliberalism in which agency is particularly salient as a way of accounting for the world. The discussion on subalternity and agency builds on Spivak’s critical engagement with the task of ‘giving voice’, as well as on Saba Mahmood’s work on the conceptual entanglement of agency and resistance. This leads me to the central argument that we may be witnessing a shift in the conceptualization of agency, which is particularly salient to a contemporary understanding of subalternity and the shift that the ‘new subaltern’ [Spivak, G., 2012. The new subaltern: a silent interview. In: V. Chaturvedi, ed. Mapping subaltern studies and the postcolonial. London: Verso] indicates: in current neoliberal times, it is perhaps less agency-as-resistance that informs an understanding of the subaltern’s agency, but rather agency-as-resilience. The essay concludes with a critique of resilience.     

斯皮瓦克与德里达的《论文字学》

斯皮瓦克通过对德里达《论文字学》的翻译阐释,把解构主义理论创建性地引入美国学界。在批评实践中,她不但精到地汲取《论文字学》中的解构主义精髓,并且进一步发扬了德里达的解构主义理念。其贡献在于,借力后殖民批评的多元话语态势,立身于现实文化视阈,存后殖民女权主义批评中,关注属下女性等弱势群体的生存样态,在事实上突破了德里达“文本外别无他物”的文字窠臼,以德里达的解构主义批评策略,将德里达的文字文本自身也进行了解构,形成了自己独具特色的文化文本政治批评。     

Empirical and analytical subaltern space? Ashrams,brothels and trafficking in colonial Delhi

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I engage with Gayatri Spivak’s writings on the figure of the subaltern, focusing on a recurrent tension in her writings, and in readings of them. The tension is between two seemingly contradictory definitions of the subaltern. One, more empirical definition, has featured in Spivak’s writings for over 25 years and identifies the subaltern as the non-elite, the immobile or the figure beyond the reach of the state. Against this more empirical definition comes the famous analytical definition of the subaltern as he or she who ‘cannot speak’, being defined by their inaccessibility in the archive, as broadly conceived. This paper will argue that these two interconnected definitions have their respective forms of space, which demand different methodologies. I will suggest that an over-emphasis on the analytical definition has led to an over-cautious approach to subaltern spaces, neglecting the compulsion to attempt to find and say something about subaltern spaces, as Spivak insists. The paper demonstrates this approach through the examination of a report into the abuse of women in some of Delhi’s ashrams in the 1930s, so as to suggest how we can use studies of empirically archived subaltern space to think about the analytically subaltern spaces that must always be beyond exploration.     

Migrant identities: Personal memory and the construction of selfhood

Gayatri Chakravotry Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason explicitly asks the reader to examine the limits of its argumentative structure. Just as Spivak has recently argued that the form of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy is paratactic (a way of using language that withholds connections and conjunctions), Spivak’s own A Critique of Postcolonial Reason is carefully constructed to force the reader to supply links between the sections of the text. In this sense, Spivak achieves a poetic effect, one that is not unrelated to the contemporary paratactic prose poetry of Harryette Mullen. The formal parataxis of Spivak’s work also serves to reflect an argument in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason about the difficulty of forging solidarity among disparate migrant and racialized groups in the Western metropolis.     

Work(ing) out

The recent marketing of new genetic tests for popular genealogy is one significant interface between the science of new genetics and public culture in the West. These new commodities offer to situate individuals within global patterns of human genetic diversity, locate genetic origins and sort out true biological relatedness from practised kinship. Taking two cases of recent attempts to popularize genetic tests in popular genealogy, this paper considers how ideas of gender, reproduction, nation, ‘race’ and relatedness are being shaped by and deployed within their discourses of genetic kinship. In these efforts to geneticize genealogy, the idiom of kinship and the gendering of narratives of reproduction and descent are used to make these tests meaningful and to distance them from ideas of ‘race’ and ethnicity. Discourses of family relatedness provide a grammar for translating the complexities of new genetics into public culture. At the same time, geneticized genealogy produces new versions of genetic kinship, in the form of Y-chromosome genetic brotherhood, Mitochondrial DNA clan membership and global genetic kinship. Yet, notions of genetic kinship also provide cultural resources for the making of personal and collective identities in a myriad of ways and with diverse implications for the politics of ‘race’ and national belonging.     

论斯皮瓦克的属下研究

本文以斯皮瓦克的属下研究为论述对象,首先追溯了"属下"的概念,并论证了斯皮瓦克通过对以福柯和德勒兹为代表的西方知识分子的激进理论、以克里斯蒂瓦为代表的西方女权主义以及印度属下研究小组的批判,得出了她的著名论断:属下不能说话。尽管斯皮瓦克未能关注属下阶层如何得以发声的过程,她对"属下不能说话"的原因的深刻剖析对于提高读者对属下阶层所遭受的无声苦境的认识有深远的意义。     

Relocating subalternity: scattered speculations on the conundrum of a concept

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the special issue ‘Relocating Subalternity: Scattered Speculations on the Conundrum of a Concept’, in which we take Spivak’s particular invocation of (gendered) subalternity and its scholarly reception as a point of departure to confront the ‘foreclosure’ of subalternity. While the gesture of (re)locating inevitably triggers a tense dialectic between the attempt to define contingent empirical loci and subalternity’s resistance to be empirically circumscribed, we suggest that relocating the subaltern from her (non)place may provide constructive avenues for performing a productive ‘ab-use’ of the notion of subalternity. The engagement with the notion of subalternity that this issue encourages suggests that one should claim the heuristic epistemological and political value of the category of subalternity against every conceptual attempt to dilute its aporetic specificity, as well as against any simplistic effort to shorten the distances between the subaltern and its possible interlocutors in the name of too-easy transnational alliances.