page_title: Subaltern (postcolonialism)
section_title: The voice of the subaltern
hierarchical_section_title: Subaltern (postcolonialism) / The voice of the subaltern
caption_attribution_description: English: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak at Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2007. Photo by Shih-Lun CHANG.
context_page_description: In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates and identifies the colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire. Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the men and women who constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and economic elites in the history of India.
  As a method of investigation and analysis of the political role of subaltern populations, Karl Marx's theory of history presents colonial history from the perspective of the proletariat; that the who? and the what? of social class are determined by the economic relations among the social classes of a society.
context_section_description: In Geographies of Post colonialism (2008), Joanne Sharp developed Spivak's line of reasoning that Western intellectuals displace to the margin of intellectual discourse the non–Western forms of "knowing" by re-formulating, and thus intellectually diminishing, such forms of acquiring knowledge as myth and folklore. To be heard and to be known, the subaltern native must adopt Western ways of knowing (language, thought, reasoning); because of such Westernization, a subaltern people can never express their native ways of knowing, and, instead, must conform their native expression of knowledge to the Western, colonial ways of knowing the world. The subordinated native can be heard by the colonisers only by speaking the language of their empire; thus, intellectual and cultural filters of conformity muddle the true voice of the subaltern native. For example, in Colonial Latin America, the subordinated natives conformed to the colonial culture, and used the linguistic filters of religion and servitude when addressing their Spanish imperial rulers. To make effective appeals to the Spanish Crown, slaves and natives would address the rulers in ways that masked their own, native ways of speaking.
  The historian Fernando Coronil said that his goal as an investigator must be "to listen to the subaltern subjects, and to interpret what I hear, and to engage them and interact with their voices. We cannot ascend to a position of dominance over the voice, subjugating its words to the meanings we desire to attribute to them. That is simply another form of discrimination. The power to narrate somebody's story is a heavy task, and we must be cautious and aware of the complications involved." Like Spivak, bell hooks questions the academic's engagement with the non–Western Other. That in order to truly communicate with the subaltern native, the academic would have to remove him or herself as "the expert" at the center of the Us-and-Them binary social relation. Traditionally, the academic wants to learn of the subaltern native's experiences of colonialism, but does not want to know the subaltern's (own) explanation of his or her experiences of colonial domination. In light of the mechanics of Western knowledge, hooks said that a true explanation can come only from the expertise of the Western academic, thus, the subaltern native surrenders knowledge of colonialism to the investigating academic. About the binary relationship of investigation, between the academic and the subaltern native, hooks said that:
  [There is] no need to hear your [native] voice, when I can talk about you better than you can speak about yourself. No need to hear your voice. Only tell me about your pain. I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. I am still [the] colonizer, the speaking subject, and you are now at the center of my talk.
  — "Marginality as a Site of Resistance" (1990)
  As a means of constructing a great history of society, the story of the subaltern native is a revealing examination of the experience of colonialism from the perspective of the subaltern man and the subaltern woman, the most powerless people living within the socio-economic confines of imperialism; therefore, the academic investigator of post-colonialism must not assume cultural superiority when studying the voices of the subaltern natives.
caption: Engaging the Subaltern's voice: the philosopher and theorist Gayatri Spivak at Goldsmiths, University of London.
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