PoCo Week 8

Language

Spivak explains that the first language we learn is important because of the ways in which it activates the public-private in everyone and allows a negotiation of the public and the private outside of the “public-private divide” that we inherit it from the legacy of European history (285).

From this , we can see the ways in which language becomes a place where the double bind emerges for postcolonial or non-Western scholars. To participate within academia on postcolonial narratives and experiences, they must engage within the linguistic realm that is deemed as readable by Western thought—the very oppressive powers that forced the colonial experience upon postcolonial populations—and that it was colonialism that closed linguistic diversity.

Stuart Hall explains that language is the privileged medium in which we make sense of things—it is the space in which meaning is produced and exchanged (Hall 1). Language becomes central to meaning and culture and is regarded as central to cultural values and meanings (1).

Language operates on as a representational system; therefore representation through language is crucial to the processes by which meaning is produced (1). We give meaning to things by how we represent them (3), and so, representations of history if also considered through a Western, colonial lens, lead to a misunderstanding of marginalized populations.

For example, Spivak explains that the mixing of Indian languages artificially to English, undoes the separated yet hierarchically shared histories of North and South Indian literatures (287). What Spivak is referring to here is how native languages lose their nuanced meanings and that grandchildren can no longer speak to their grandmothers (287). With the breakdown of intergenerational communication between family members of postcolonial populations, the question of how narratives of the experienced past gets lost.

When discussing language, Spivak explains that there are signs and there are traces:

Signs being those existing knowable symbols and images

Trace being a structureless structure that is always in relationship to something that is not knowing.

A trace is not a sign, for it cannot give you an exact definition of something, but it is a connection (492).

Sign promises us meaning and traces do not promise us anything. If we use this metaphor where sign is English and trace is the nuanced native tongue, we can find that, yes, English may be convenient (we can understand it, or maybe it is more universally known) but the real meaning of experience, which cannot be translated into words, is lost.

The Subaltern Woman

Spivak explains that many western intellectuals further silence the subaltern by claiming to represent and speak for her experience—using her experiences for their own purposes. Thus, instead of creating spaces of interpretation or potential for the subaltern’s experience, the subaltern woman is treated as an “absent nonrepresenter” of her own condition in documented official histories of India (292).

Spivak believes that intellectuals and academics that have written about real historical examples of social and political struggle, fail to create spaces for interpretation of the conditions of oppressed subjects (Spivak 276).

In terms of the subaltern woman, all that has been written about her experiences have been by others, not herself.

Spivak argues that colonialism has restricted the voice of the subaltern woman and thus she cannot know and speak about the conditions of her subjugation.

Spivak alerts us to how gender underpins, yet is often representatively and theoretically absent from, questions of capitalism, colonialism, race, and postcolonialism. In taking into account the historical arguments by other subaltern studies scholars and adding a post-Marxist approach to her views, Spivak's definition of the subaltern takes into account women's lives and histories (48).

Entering a Space of Woundedness

Georgis: when emotional realities are disregarded from perceptions of history, what remains is a reality of injustice (Georgis 170).

Avery Gordon: personal accounts in history are understood as "fictions of the real" (Gordon 11). She points to the importance of challenging the assumption of official histories being an "unproblematic window" to a "secured reality" when ethnographic representations are powerful "fictions" that we experience as true (11).

Georgis explains that some narratives allow us to enter a "space of woundedness" (170), which creates an area for us to work through mourning, loss, and trauma.

Deborah Britzman: when we are hearing narratives of trauma, we are placed in a position of "unknowing," and that we must absorb the experience of learning from being near to someone's loss. This means, too, that we must pay close attention to, or witness, what we have not noticed or experienced--this is what she calls "ethical witnessing".

In "ethical witnessing," one must identify their vulnerability to the narrative of trauma and recognize the other's difference within their story; this recognition is not with the aim to reproduce experience but to launch its "unthinkability" (172). The "unthinkability" of trauma refers to the way in which we cannot know someone else's trauma and that individual suffering cannot be understood by anyone but the person who had experienced it. What we can do, however, is to observe the moment of suffering in way that does not seek to legitimize it into our reality, but recognize it as being part of the individual's narrative.

Georgis claims that perhaps the subaltern women themselves cannot express their survival—that they may not be able to speak—but she refers to Amit Rai's statement as he asks, "can we be sure that her ghost does not?" (173).