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.     

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.     

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).     

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.     

Galvão among the cannibals: The emotional constitution of colonial power

Colonial domination was not a simple act of violence. Rather, it was written into the bodies and the hearts of the people—"white,” “black,” or whatever other combination might be held to exist. Using the example of the Portuguese African colonies in mid‐twentieth century, this paper aims at illuminating the emotional constitution of colonial power by exploring the uses of the trope cannibalism. In order to do that, recourse is taken to a reading of the non‐fictional writings of Henrique Galvão—one of the most active Portuguese intellectuals and Africanist politicians of the period. Subaltern persons were attributed terrible and mysterious tendencies that escaped simple rationality (they were zombified). In this way, a phantasmagoria of subalternity was constituted that, through fear, transformed domination into a structure of emotions. Thus, the repressive attitudes of colonial power were made to appear natural and unavoidable.     

The wageless life of the subaltern

ABSTRACT

One of the most striking legacies of the Subaltern Studies project has been the innovative methodologies and archives that it has mobilized to articulate the singular position of the subaltern outside the hegemonic terms of representation. Yet in its sweeping classification of non-hegemonic social groups and classes, Subaltern Studies has often tended to elide the precise economic determinants that define the subaltern as a class, and thereby foreclose the forms of agency that are available to people who occupy such singular positions of radical alterity that cannot be identified in hegemonic terms. Spivak’s deconstructive rethinking of the labour theory of value enables us to consider how the body of the gendered subaltern performs an important economic function in the contemporary global economy. But to what extent can such a theory account for the economic conditions of people dwelling in the slums and shantytowns of postcolonial cities, or what Michael Denning has aptly called the wageless life of the global poor? And how might we begin to address the gendered dynamics of wageless life? Through a reading of Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako (2006), this essay considers how the film’s juxtaposition of a fictional courtroom narrative in which the World Bank is put on trial and the everyday lives of characters who populate the courtyard in which the courtroom is situated raise questions about the limitations of the law and civil society to alter the socio-economic conditions of wageless life. With reference to Gayatri Spivak’s reflections on the relationship between the subaltern and the economic policies of global financial institutions the essay suggests that the narrative structure and mise-en-scène of Bamako offer a means of addressing the global economic conditions as well as the power relations that circumscribe the agency and voice of the subaltern.     

‘ … 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’.     

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.     

Renewable energy transition under multiple colonialisms: passive revolution,fascism redux and utopian praxes

ABSTRACT

This essay outlines intermedia theory’s contribution to the emerging multiple colonialisms framework and argues that a socio-ecological reproduction feminist approach to the multiple colonialisms problematic is critically necessary for thinking through the contradictions of renewable energy transition. A multiple colonialisms framework needs to be a kind of utopian theorizing, I argue, just as any feminist renewable energy transition seeking to realize energy democracy and energy justice must create a utopian collective praxis that regenerates common-being and reproduces common wealth. Drawing on research on a network of petroleum-free subaltern feminist agricultural cooperatives in Medak, India, and on the creativity of their media practices, this article examines the social contradictions of energy democracy and just transition politics in a conjuncture defined by green passive revolution and fascism redux. The essay proposes the concepts of ‘subaltern counter-environments’ and ‘molecular media’ to decolonize energy democracy and just transition discourse and to articulate the importance of an autonomous domain of subaltern politics for a degrowth strategy of regenerative delinking through and against the state. Molecular media created by the Feminist Energy Futures research collaboration at the University of Alberta seek to regenerate the bias of time in our contemporary intermedia ecology where the bias of spectacularized and colonized space is otherwise dominant so that regenerative delinking strategies can endure social contradictions they embody through subaltern counter-environments they can create.     

Speaking about building Rylands (1960s to 1980s): a Cape Flats history

This article looks at African and black men and masculinities, triangulated desire, race, and subalternity in Charles Mungoshi’s short story collections. It examines the negotiation of desire, and its interface and interplay with power relations and their negotiation in the colonial and postcolonial economies of domination and gender as depicted in the short stories. It uses the Gramscian concept of hegemony, Girard’s mimetic theory of triangular desire, and Sedgwick’s theory of gendered triangular desire, to examine these dynamics. It argues that colonial and postcolonial power and gender relations are negotiated through a complex interplay of desire that cannot all be accounted for by both Girard and Sedgwick’s models, necessitating their modification to deal with the complexity of desire in a colonial and postcolonial context. The short story collections examined span the colonial and postcolonial eras and these are Coming of the Dry Season (1981), Some Kinds of Wounds (1980), and Walking Still (1997).     

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.     

Modes of Cognitive Praxis in Transnational Alternative Policy Groups

Abstract

Transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs) are networks and centres within and around which counter-hegemonic knowledge is produced and mobilized among subaltern communities and critical social movements. Based on in-depth interviews with practitioners at 16 TAPGs, this article presents eight modes of cognitive praxis and discusses how they appear in the work of alternative policy groups. The eight modes are not sealed off from each other, but overlap and interpenetrate. In combination, these modes of cognitive praxis strive to produce transformative knowledge concomitantly with knowledge-based transformation. The analysis evidences tracings of a double dialectic in the cognitive praxis of alternative policy groups: a dialectic of theory and practice, and one of dialogue. It is in a forward movement—fostering solidaristic dialogue among counterpublics in combination with the iterative integration of theory and practice—that alternative knowledge makes its indispensable contribution to counter-hegemony.     

Therapeutic politics: critique and contestation in the post-political conjuncture

ABSTRACT

This article addresses forms of political engagement in the therapeutic field. Drawing on ethnographic research on popular psychology self-help, alternative and complementary health practices and new spiritualities, the paper takes issue with the dominant interpretation of the therapeutic as a depoliticizing force. Although this interpretation captures important facets of the phenomenon, the paper suggests that something more complex is afoot. It argues that therapeutic practices may also animate political contestation and critique, and challenge the prevailing grammar of political conflict. It substantiates this argument by identifying two modalities of politics in the therapeutic field: collective mobilization through a political party, and therapeutic practices as a form of lifestyle politics. It goes on to suggest that, together, these modalities constitute a subaltern counterpublic politicizing the political economy of health and the erosion of democratic governance. The paper concludes by suggesting that analysis of the therapeutic field may shed light on the shifting logics of political contestation at the contemporary political conjuncture.     

World Music,nation and postcolonialism

Recent scholarship on representational politics in popular music tends to dwell on the macropolitical entailments of contradictory desires acted out through the consumerization of culture within the globalized circuitry of supranational capitalism. This article takes a micropolitical look at what salsa means for working-class Puerto Ricans in the colonial diaspora, positing salsa as a musical culture that fuels, and is fuelled by, the organic intelligence of its practitioners. Comparatively analysing the performative content and contexts of two albums produced at the symbolic juncture of the Quincentennial (1992) – Willie Colón's Hecho in Puerto Rico and Ruben Blades' Amor y Control – and sharing an auto-ethnographical account of experiences with salsa music in the Puerto Rican colonial diaspora, this article explores the cultural politics obtained between mainstream appropriations of Latin musical cultures and salsa within the working-class communities who created it. Thus shifting the critical lens from above to below, the most salient concerns become the ethical dimensions of subaltern (kin)aesthetics and knowledges, which can be charted alongside the overt rejection of consumerist assimilation, the conscious racialization of cultural agency and other articulations of liberatory desire.     

Subaltern cosmopolitanism: concept and approaches

‘Cosmopolitanism is back’, proclaimed David Harvey presciently in 2000 (Harvey, 2000: 529). In the face of injustice, inequality and violence emerging from globalization processes, the last decade has witnessed a cascading interest in the vision of a world community in which sameness and difference are harmoniously dealt with. Across the humanities and social sciences, there have emerged multiple ways of understanding what exactly cosmopolitanism means for research. To push this concept to greater rigour, scholars have tried to demarcate its conceptual boundaries by underlining its conjunctural nature (Werbner, 2006). Thus we have such notions as rooted cosmopolitanism, working‐class cosmopolitanism, discrepant cosmopolitanism, ethnic cosmopolitanism, and vernacular cosmopolitanism. Of all these conjunctural terms, subaltern cosmopolitanism has gained noteworthy attention of late. In one of her articles published in 2010 about the old baggage and missing luggage of cosmopolitan theory, for example, Glick Schiller claims that the possibilities of strengthening cosmopolitan theory lie in ‘a further development of a subaltern cosmopolitanism’ (2010: 414). In this Viewpoint, I will first present an overview of how subaltern cosmopolitanism has been deployed by scholars, and then evaluate its particular purchase in cosmopolitan studies, and finally suggest fortifying the critical sinew of this concept by drawing on conversations about other weighty issues that concern the humanities and social sciences of today.     

Networking Through Loose and Strong Ties: An Australian Qualitative Study

Given the significant role attributed to community organizations by many social capital scholars, it is appropriate to investigate the dynamics of that process. In particular, Woolcock and Narayan (World Bank Res. Obs. 15(2): 225–249, 2000) have suggested that bridging and bonding are two different types of connections, whereby bridging is associated with loose ties across communities and bonding is associated with strong ties within a limited group. This qualitative study explores the loose and strong ties of 39 participants connected through community organizations in rural and urban New South Wales. The results suggest that loose and strong ties are not synonymous with bridging and bonding. In general loose and strong ties differ in degree rather than in kind and people prefer to bridge through their strong ties. The interesting exceptions were ties to professionals, which were highly trusted but defined as loose ties. It is suggested that a model for a high social capital society might be a chain of well-bonded groups each with strong links to some other groups.     

The Profession: Comments from an Interactionist's Perspective

Abstract

The paper focuses on the structure and process of the public and private institutional regulation of race relations. This theoretical analysis posits that the public and private sectors are governed by public and private governments. The analysis reveals that the governance of race relations has shifted from the public to the private corporate bureaucracies. In that shift from the public to private governance, blacks continue to be discriminated against as a political class and for that reason they continue to make group claims and seek group remedies through enabling legislation and Affirmative Action programs.     

Wang Ming-hui and Blacklist Production: the Third World/Asia turn of Taiwan’s new music production

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the music group ‘Blacklist Production’ (also known as Blacklist Studio) that was established in the late 1980s when the Martial Law was lifted in Taiwan, and the group’s original works of music. It investigates the music composition and thinking process of Wang Ming-hui, the founder of Blacklist Production, and analyses two albums produced by the music studio, Songs of Madness (1989) and Lullaby (1996), as a way of reconsidering and reflecting the feeling process and limitations of the nativist ideology from 1989 to 1996 that took shape in Taiwan’s society. In addition, the paper also explores Wang’s musical practices through which he has tried to answer the question of ‘how to express thoughts with music’. Through the historical analysis of musical works and interviews with Wang Ming-hui, the paper suggests that ‘Taiwan’s New Music Production’ brought up and practiced by Wang and Blacklist Production is embedded with the possibility for Taiwan’s culture and imagination of modernity to ‘turn’ the referent point to the Third World/Asia.     

Anti‐Racism in Movement: Afro‐Brazilian Afoxé and Contemporary Black Brazilian Struggles for Equality

This paper examines the Afro‐Brazilian afoxé as a form of cultural struggle that critically contests narratives and practices that reproduce racial inequality in contemporary Brazil. Through their afoxé in the interior of São Paulo, the Orùnmilá Cultural Center mobilizes Afro‐Brazilian knowledge and cultural practices to challenge culturalist treatments of Afro‐Brazilian “difference” in the management and representation of carnaval. I explore how such treatments reflect broader state‐orchestrated attempts to undermine black anti‐racism and the implementation of substantive policies to address racial inequality in various spheres, including education and culture. The afoxé and the Orùnmilá Center's broader work constitute an important, contemporary means through which black organizations in Brazil make visible and vocal public claims for representation and self‐determination. Such work pushes policy‐makers and academics to reinterpret the terms of black inclusion vis‐à‐vis subaltern or “other” cultures, historical experiences, perspectives, and participation in societal transformation.     

Introduction: Globalisation and identity

Abstract

This paper examines the identities of early leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) at a time when British influences still prevailed in South Africa. African attitudes to the “British World” reveal complex identities that also reflected political and cultural variations according to race, class and region. Relations between ANC leaders and the African “elite” and between the elite and subaltern strata were not straightforward. A careful reading of the discourses in and around Congress points to contradictory attitudes to things British and to ambiguous identities that lingered and contributed to the mix of social and national ideas and identities that influence contemporary South Africa.