Finding the Center: Constructing the Subaltern Master Narrative

Can the subaltern speak? This is the rhetorical question posed by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay titled with the same question (1988). From the essay's very beginning, it becomes clear that the question is not simply one about the subaltern's capacity to engage in articulate discourse on its own behalf. Rather, it is rhetorical, centering on the authenticity and validity of Western intellectuals such as Foucault and Deleuze to represent subaltern people in the neo-colonial world and on their home turf. Her position is that Foucault's and Deleuze's affirmative answer to her question is an empty gesture of affirmation of the subaltern, of the oppressed as a subject serving as a projection of their own experience onto the oppressed, thereby enhancing the exploitation and oppression of the latter by international capitalism. The latter part of the essay focuses on how the British and elite Indian interpretations of widow suicide--self-immolation--was filtered and denatured by these interpretations, and in one case of an activist's suicide undertaken during menstruation, obscured and rendered the intended meaning of the suicide invisible, thereby providing a negative answer to Spivak's question. Thus Spivak's and much of the Subaltern Studies group's focus, begun in the early 1980s, has been on the issue of representation. The originator of the notion of the subaltern, the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci (1891 -1935), used the term as a disguise for the terms "proletariat" or "working-class," for much of his writing was done while he was imprisoned by the fascists and thus he needed to avoid the prison censor. As a result, the expression became more generic in meaning and later was used by intellectuals to refer to peasants and to ethnic and racial minorities, that is, to historical instances of resistance to oppression excluded by culture-bound followers and interpreters of Marx who are hidebound to Western/European conceptions of class struggle and warfare. In the Prison Notebooks (1971) Gramsci optimistically alludes to the capacity of the subaltern to represent itself by developing critical awareness and class consciousness, although he does not use the latter expression. He mentions that at a point in the development of capitalism when the subaltern understands the divided interests of the capitalist and ruling class in relation to "the broader spheres of the national and international division of labor," the "subaltern precisely for that reason is no longer subaltern, or at least is demonstrably on the way to emerging from its subordinate position" (1971, p. 202). Thus, it is clear from this observation and from a reading of the rest of this text that Gramsci's project focuses on the connection and development of the subaltern's critical consciousness with action, that is, revolutionary action evoked, inspired and leavened by heightened consciousness and philosophical sophistication--praxis. In fact, his euphemism for Marxism is "the philosophy of praxis." He is not--as a literal interpretation of the above quote might conceive it--suggesting that understanding or insight automatically dissolves or transforms subalternity into something else: it does mean, as his phrase "is demonstrably on the way" suggests, that a significant process whose ultimate goal is liberation, has started. Thus, while Gramsci hewed to a Marxian line he expanded the purview of Marxian analysis of the "superstructure" beyond the relegation of thought and culture to ideology. For Gramsci, therefore, the focus was not on representation but on the development of subaltern consciousness unto action. This is not to denigrate the Subaltern Studies group's focus, nor Spivak's. What then is the point of my elaboration of the meaning of Spivak's question and Gramsci's notion of the subaltern? In clarifying the meanings of the notion in use, and in comparing Spivak's and Gramsci's use of the term (or shall we say, in comparing their somewhat different emphases), I wish to frame an expanded space within which a subaltern master narrative--that is, a broad intellectual perspective encompassing a theoretical grasp of the subaltern's social and historical context as it bears on the possibility of action--can be, and actually has been, constructed. …