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.     

‘ … half-sick of shadows’: figure and ground in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s imagination of the subaltern

ABSTRACT

This essay moves the category of the subaltern out of the exclusive domain of colonial historiography and resituates it in the context of contemporaneity. Taking my cue from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s insistence on the dream of postcoloniality in the realm of the global, I examine two ‘empirical anomalies’ that redefine subaltern insurgency, cultivate democratic reflexes, and defeat the expectations of their moment and milieu. Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital serves as a framing device to elicit the still-persuasive dimensions of Spivak’s landmark essay for our historical moment. While I remain unpersuaded by both his premises and his conclusions, his argument does throw Spivak’s interventions in the project of Subaltern Studies into relief. My method throughout, in the manner of Spivak and Paul de Man, is one of interruption and undoing; my aim is to delineate what Spivak describes as ‘the resistance fitting our time’.     

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.     

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.     

Spivak’s Fantasy of Silence: A Secular Look at Suicide

Gayatri Spivak’s response to the attack of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2011, the event otherwise known as 9/11, was one of many responses that denote the event’s traumatic impact. In psychoanalytic terms, the psychic condition of trauma, identified by Lacan as the encounter with the real, is a shock which the subject initially misses; as such, the subject is compelled to make intelligible what was missed through what Lacan calls ‘fantasy.’ According to Zizek in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, the cinematic quality of the planes crashing into the towers, iterating the fantasies of Hollywood disaster films (16), pointed to a haunting in America of some historical trauma that returned in the real of 9/11 (17). Zizek’s reflection on 9/11 as a haunting in cinematic terms, pointing to a confluence of his scholarship and the event, sets a precedent for this paper’s focus on seeing in Spivak’s response to the suicide acts of 9/11 a haunting of the suicide rite of Sati in her earlier scholarship. This paper reviews Spivak’s representation of suicide in “Can the subaltern speak?” (1988) and “Terror: A Speech After 9/11” (2004), noting the non-coincidental echoes between these projects with respect to secularism and silence, affirming this paper’s proposal that in Spivak’s work, a trauma shared by western secular society is evident as a fantasy of silence.     

Subalternity reloaded: singularity,collectivity and the politics of abstraction

ABSTRACT

This contribution aims at outlining two different trajectories that can be traced throughout Spivak’s works, both of which take the concept of subalternity as their point of departure: the first analyses subalternity as a path to singularity and problematizes its consequences and impasses, while the second focuses on subaltern politics as a process of generalizability to be accomplished through self-synecdoche, namely through a metonymic process of de-singularization that only allows the subaltern to understand itself as a part of a collective whole (i.e. citizenship). The essay attempts to show the mutual complementarity of these two (seemingly) opposite moves in the direction of a possible strategy of desubalternization.     

A position embedded in identity: subalternity in neoliberal globalization

ABSTRACT

Gayatri Spivak asserts that subalternity is a position without identity and has no examples. This paper demonstrates that identities – imposed and subscribed to, contingent yet naturalized – have to be taken into account, particularly when we consider that such identities are inscribed into a war of positions. It argues that the notion of ‘subaltern’ in Gramsci, followed through in the idea of ‘subjugated knowledges’ in Foucault, read commonly as marginality, intervenes in established social relations to expose that Time is asynonymous with History. Subalternity, emblematized through positions, which are held by identities, plays a crucial role in negotiating that discontinuity between Time and History. The paper ‘relocates’ subalternity by redefining it as a process – in order to convey this, I use ‘subalternized’ instead of ‘subaltern’; identity, then, is also necessarily a process, captured temporarily in the course of political–cultural engagement. The essay reads the positions of racialized and gendered subalternized knowledges in the contexts of neoliberal globalization, in North America and South Asia, through the processes of identity-makings of two groups – the Minnesota Indian Women’s Resource Center (Minneapolis, USA) and the Feminist Dalit Organization (Lalitpur, Nepal).     

Law Struggles and Hegemonic Processes in Neoliberal India: Gramscian Reflections on Land Acquisition Legislation

Abstract

This article explores how, in the context of an unfolding process of neoliberalisation in India, new terrains of resistance are crystallising for subaltern groups seeking to contest the marginalising consequences of this process. We focus particularly on the emergence of India's ‘new rights agenda’ through a study of the making of the Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2013. Conceiving of the emergence of the ‘new rights agenda’ as a hegemonic process, we decipher how law-making is a complex and contradictory practice seeking to negotiate a compromise equilibrium between, on the one hand, subaltern groups vulnerable to marginalisation and capable of mobilisation; and, on the other, dominant groups whose economic interests are linked to the exploitation of the spaces of accumulation recently pried open by market-oriented reforms. The negotiation of this equilibrium, we suggest, is ultimately intended to facilitate India's process of neoliberalisation.     

Everyday Matters in Global Private Security Supply Chains: A Feminist Global Political Economy Perspective on Gurkhas in Private Security

Abstract

In a case study of Nepalese Gurkhas working for Western private military and security companies (PMSCs), this article develops feminist global political economy understandings of global labour chains by exploring how the ‘global market’ and the ‘everyday’ interact in establishing private security as a gendered and racialised project. Current understandings of PMSCs, and global markets at large, tend to depoliticise these global and everyday interactions by conceptualising the ‘everyday’ as common, mundane, and subsequently banal. Such understandings, we argue, not only conceal the everyday within private security, but also reinforce a conceptual dualism that enables the security industry to function as a gendered and racialised project. To overcome this dualism, this article offers a theoretically informed notion of the everyday that dissolves the hegemonic separation into ‘everyday’ and ‘global’ levels of analysis. Drawing upon ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and discourse analysis of PMSCs’ websites, the analysis demonstrates how race, gender, and colonial histories constitute global supply chains for the security industry, rest upon and reinforce racialised and gendered migration patterns, and depend upon, as well as shape, the everyday lives and living of Gurkha men and women.     

Subalterns ‘speak’: migrant bodies,and the performativity of the arts

ABSTRACT

The contemporary globalizing world has unleashed new flows of migrant labour, among which are young women working in homes. As is well known, many find themselves in a situation of virtual slavery, having no juridical protections against both physical and emotional abuse, and against being held in servitude against their wills. While the situation of migrant domestic workers is increasingly well known, there has been little analysis of how their precarious lives look from their points of view and the complex set of affects and relations that make their lives meaningful. The following investigation treats the way their precarity can become political critique. It focuses on a critical locus of enunciation supplied by the conditions of migrant female domestic workers as it is articulated not in ethnographic work that solicits their actual voices, but through a focus on literary and cinematic texts in which the female protagonists compare domestic servitude to colonialism (in the case of Ousmane Sembene’s film Black Girl) and to war crimes (in the case of Zadie Smith’s story, The embassy of Cambodia). Mediated with some thoughts from Gayatri Spivak’s Can the subaltern speak and Mahasweta Devi’s short story The breast-giver, we also reflect on the ethical significance of aesthetic interruptions through other genres as illustrated by our reading of images from Ramiro Gomez’s Happy Hills painting and cardboard cutting series. In effect, the artistic texts we analyse raise an important ethico-political question regarding the effect of capitalist modernization on ethical life while provoking us to recognize the ethical weight of proximate and distant others.     

The voice of lived experience: mobile video narratives in the courtroom

Video is overtaking other modes of communication in new media. Whether from a smartphone, a wearable device or surveillance camera, video is being made, stored and shared in unprecedented ways. Once the exclusive territory of institutions becomes large enough to finance video production and its storytelling power, technology’s contemporary democratization is changing the landscape of visual narrative. This project explores the discursive nature of video based on a case study of a courtroom trial that was both about the legality of filming crime scenes and the evidentiary use of videos from crime scenes. This unique intersection of surveillance, counter-surveillance, word and image, body and text allows for deeper understanding of how video serves human purposes. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and textual analysis, we build upon Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm by identifying significant attributes of unedited, evidentiary video that distinguish it from other forms of visual documentation. Raw video’s hard-edged timeline presents narrative coherence in a way that resists discursive contextualization. This has important implications for public policy and citizen-generated video evidence.     

HYBRIDITY AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

There is a steady consensus within academic cultural studies concerning the fact that reifications (or ‘essentializations’) of ethnicity, whether literally meant or practically used, like reifications involving gender or national identity, are not good from a political perspective. The common response invokes hybridity as a counter-concept strong enough to dissolve the dangers of either hegemonic or counter-hegemonic reification and by the same token is able to ground a sufficiently fluid politics of identity/difference that might warrant the cultural redemption of the subaltern. Nevertheless, the political force of hybridity, such as it may be, remains to a large extent contained within a politics of the colour line. Without abandoning it, that is, without altogether abandoning the terrain of a politics of the subject, it would seem necessary to move beyond the theorization of hybridity in cultural studies in order to find ways to articulate subaltern resistance against the terror of dominant identities more effectively within a larger commitment to economic justice.

Hybridity categories, once they solidify into a strategic political project, circumscribe political life to subjective agency; but subjective agency does not exhaust the political. Ultimately, the postulation of subjective agency as the limit of the political remains trapped within a Cartesian game of calculation and counter-calculation which is by its very nature unable to break through and beyond the internalization of hegemony. Some appeal to a position of exteriority remains necessary in order to restitute the possibility of what,following Balibar, we might call ‘unconditional insurrection’. Unconditional insurrection does not name a voluntaristic project of world revolution. It names, rather, the possibility of an other history, of an alternative historical memory: a memory made possible by the simple fact that things could be, and could have been, other than what they are.     

Imag(in)ing Women's Agency

The use of images is central to Amnesty International's 2004 campaign ‘Stop Violence against Women’. Looking at how Amnesty International uses images to show women's agency reveals a conflation of the terms sex and gender. Despite its best efforts, Amnesty International's goal of empowering women ultimately remains out of reach because it fails to read violence against women in a gendered context. Through interviews and analyses of the images, this article claims that Amnesty International's concept of agency is trapped in a heterosexist, masculinist grammar that perpetuates non-agential articulations of women in human rights discourse. This article offers an alternative reading of gender and agency that contextualizes violence, opening up spaces in human rights discourse to begin to look at what causes individuals to resort to violence and at how violence may be perpetrated because of the presence of particular genders.     

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.     

Ethnosemiotics: Some personal and theoretical reflections

The question of how individual memory fits, or more accurately, does not fit with history is at the heart of this paper on Maryse Condé’s novel Heremakhonon about Veronica Mercier, a character who was born in Guadeloupe, lived in Paris and travels to West Africa in search of an ancestry that was interrupted by slavery. Suggesting that readings that focus on Mercier as a character are limited in approach, it reads the novel as a staging of time and is attentive to the gaps between thought and speech, between memory and history, between Guadeloupe and Africa, and between women’s personal sexual pleasure and the impersonal reproductive body that interrupt the narrative. The central character’s personal quest for her African roots – for ‘niggers with ancestors’, for Africa as a singular lost object, which necessarily involves ignoring the subaltern – is nuanced by the novel’s deployment of heterogeneous time.     

Legal discourse and the cultural intelligiblity of gendered meanings1

This paper considers the methodological challenges that ‘post-modern’ approaches to gender ( Cameron 2005 ) pose for the field of language and gender. If we assume that gender cannot be ‘read off’ the identities of speakers, but rather is a social process by which individuals come to make cultural sense, then how do we best investigate this process? As Stokoe (2005) and Stokoe and Smithson (2002) have argued, it is problematic within such frameworks to conduct research that pre-categorizes individuals as women and men, since it is individuals' constitution as women or men that should be the issue under investigation. Indeed, for Butler (1990: 145), to understand ‘identity as a practice … is to understand culturally intelligible subjects as the resulting effects of a rule-bound discourse’ (emphasis in original). This suggests that we attend to cultural norms of intelligibility (i.e. the ‘rule-bound discourse’) and their effects. Following Blommaert (2005) and Woolard (forthcoming) , in this paper I investigate a speech event, a courtroom trial dealing with sexual assault, where understandings of social identities and categories (i.e. ‘norms of intelligibility’) are not only evident in the local talk of speakers and hearers, but also in the recontextualizations of this local talk by powerful institutional representatives (i.e. judges). By examining such recontextualizations of courtroom talk, gender is not ‘read off’ the identities of individuals (i.e. courtroom participants) but rather investigated as it appears in the cultural sense-making frameworks of judges. Moreover, given that judges are the ultimate interpreters of the linguistic representations of courtroom talk, this paper also demonstrates some of the social consequences associated with the performance of culturally intelligible and unintelligible gendered identities.     

Of Art and Drudgery: Homekeeping,Martha Stewart,and Techné

Stewart’s voice is an exceptionally influential viewpoint in how we imagine and construct the twenty-first century North American home. In an era where more women than men attend college and where women make up a (slim) majority of the workforce, Stewart’s popularity is baffling to many. Locating Stewart within North American traditions of domestic advice, the author investigates how Stewart frames domestic arts as techné, arguing that Stewart’s profitability and popularity are so robust and wide-reaching because she rescues domestic arts from denigration, refiguring homekeeping as a techné of worth and importance. This article provides a framework for understanding the meaningful ways domesticity and design function as an ethics of daily life, problematizing the gendered dichotomy between production and consumption.     

A reconceptualization of state transnationalism: South Korea as an illustrative case

Our reconceptualization of state transnationalism underlines the active role that states can play in generating and sustaining cross‐border flows between a nation's homeland and its diasporic communities. This represents a sort of ‘middle ground’ between formerly hegemonic state centric’ approaches to global processes (focusing heavily on the ‘international’) and more recent ones emphasizing ‘transnational’ dynamics (which primarily arise through the agency of cross‐border migrants). We discuss a typology of approaches and avoid the tendency to set nation‐states against global and transnational processes. In fact, we highlight the various ways in which states often initiate key transnational flows, such as migration and the integration of diasporic communities into the sending nation, as well as maintain and regulate various processes instigated by immigrants. As an iconic case, we present an illustrative study of the South Korean government and Korean diasporic communities in the USA. Finally, in a brief conclusion, we outline some challenges for future research.     

Narrative Manhood Acts: Batterer Intervention Program Graduates' Tragic Relationships

We analyze how twenty graduates of a Batterer Intervention Program constructed autobiographical stories about their relationships with women they assaulted. We focus on the presentation of gendered selves via narrative manhood acts, which we define as self‐narratives that signify membership in the category “man” and the possession of a masculine self. We also show how graduates constructed self‐narratives as a genre that was oppositional to organizational narratives: rather than adopting the program's domestic violence melodrama or preferred conversion narrative, graduates used the larger culture—especially “bitch” imagery and sometimes racialized discourse—to construct tragedies. Our study demonstrates the usefulness of narrative analysis for research on batterers' accounts and manhood acts, and also shows how oppositional genre‐making can be a method to resist organizational narratives.     

“It’s More Appropriate for Men”: Management and Worker Perceptions of the Gendered Ideal Worker

Abstract

Drawing on qualitative interviews at a Mexican-owned multinational manufacturing corporation, this article analyzes how perceptions of the ideal worker shift during workplace transformation to impact women and men differently. Prior to transformation, women and men perform distinct forms of labor on the shop floor. When the company moves from labor-intensive to technology-driven production, the ideal factory worker changes. Management (re)assesses and (re)values skills, responsibility, and commitment. These seemingly gender-neutral attributes create different outcomes. Automation and teamwork are recast as men’s work; women are sent home. I argue that women’s exit is not about the nature of the work. Rather, gendered stereotypes embodied in perceptions of the ideal worker justify and normalize women’s elimination from the factory. These findings reveal how presumed gender traits play a pivotal role in the company’s adjustment to global economic processes, privileging masculinity and devaluing femininity.