Conditional volatility model estimations

Etymologically, the term ‗subaltern‘ is a creation of the British Colonial contact with India. In other words, subaltern means ‗Subordinate‘ or

‗inferior‘. It is by implication ‗inferior modes of knowledge‘. The subaltern historiography seeks to establish the balance of knowledge by demonstrating that the ‗inferior‘ is made so through discourses of power and politics. Spivak preferred to use the ‗subaltern‘ to encompass a range of different subject positions which are not predefined by dominant political discourses. She states that this term suits as it can accommodate social identities and struggles of women and colonised. According to her, the flexibility of this term is very important as it can include all types of subjects especially of neglected group to bring them into the main stream.

Spivak accepted the subaltern movement because she is committed to articulating the lives and histories of such groups in an appropriate and non-exploitive way. She observed the social and political oppressions in postcolonial societies that got place in her writings. Her writings, including translations and textual commentaries provide a powerful counterpoint to the erasure of women, peasants and tribals from the dominant historical and political discourses in India.

Of note is that the term, ‗Subaltern‘ was popularised by Spivak‘s essay entitled ―Can the Subaltern Speak?‖ (1985) where she contends that:

The Subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundrylists with ‗woman‘ as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish.

Spivak expands the original definition of subaltern developed by Ranjit Guha and asks to include the struggles and experiences of women from the

‗Third World‘. The emphasis on the gendered location of subaltern women expands and complicates the established concept of the subaltern. Spivak objects to Western female dominancy as like male dominancy in the social activities. Asking the question, ‗Can the Subaltern Speak?‘ Spivak challenges the gender blindness of earlier postcolonial theories from a feminist standpoint. It also demonstrates how Spivak expanded the definition of the term- Subaltern to include women (avoiding narrow class based definition). Spivak argues that there is no space from which the sexed subaltern can speak. She concludes further by stating that the subaltern cannot speak because the voice and the agency of subaltern women are so embedded in Hindu Patriarchal codes of moral conduct and the British

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Colonial representation of subaltern women as victims of a barbaric Hindu culture that they are impossible to recover. Spivak also states that subaltern as female cannot be heard or read in the male-centred terms of the national independence struggle. According to her, the subaltern cannot speak means that even when the subaltern makes an effort to speak, she is not able to be heard. In other words, their speech acts are not heard or recognised within dominant political systems of representation. Here Spivak would not want to deny the social agency and lived existence of disempowered subaltern women that receive their political and discursive identities within historically determinate systems of political and economic representation (Morton, 2003:67). Spivak‘s silencing of the ‗subaltern‘ refers to all women in India but we know that women in colonial India cannot be put in one category. The critic, Benita Parry, has criticised Spivak‘s notion of silent subaltern as:

Since the native woman is constructed within multiple social relationships, and positions as the product of different class, caste and culture and testimony of women‘s voice on those sites where women inscribed themselves as healers, ascetics, singers of sacred songs, artisans and artists, and by this to modify Spivak‘s model of the silent subaltern. (1998:35)

The question of Spivak, ‗Can the Subaltern Speak?‘ is ambiguous. That is because; we don‘t know who asks this question, the subaltern or the superior imperialist. According to Benita Parry, Spivak‘s use of poststructuralist methodologies to describe the historical and political oppression of disempowered women has further contributed to their silencing. (1998:39)

Responding to Spivak‘s work, Bart Moore-Gilbert states that there are clear historical examples where the resistance of subaltern women to the colonial world is recorded in dominant colonial discourse. (1997:107) In their article, ‗Can the Subaltern Vote?‘, Medevoi, Shankar Raman and Benjamin Comment that Spivak does not offer any perfect political solutions or theoretical formulas for emancipating subaltern women, rather exposes the limited and potentially harmful effects of speaking for such disempowered groups (Medevoi et. al, 1990:133). Furthermore, in an article entitled ‗Can the Subaltern Hear?‘ Colin Wright provoked angry response to Spivak‘s question, ‗Can the Subaltern Speak?‘ (Eagleton (ed), 2000:34). In all, Spivak‘s theory of the subaltern is a part of a longer history of left-wing anti-colonial thought that was concerned to challenge the class-caste system in India (Tibile, 2012).

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4.0 CONCLUSION

In this unit, you learnt that Gayatri Spivak is best known for her overtly political use of contemporary cultural and critical theories to challenge the legacy of colonialism on the way we read and think about literature and culture. Spivak‘s critical interventions encompass a range of theoretical interests, including Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, postcolonial theory and globalisation. Along with other leading contemporary intellectuals such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, Spivak has challenged the disciplinary conventions of literary criticism and academic philosophy by focusing on the cultural texts of those people who are often marginalised by dominant western culture: the new immigrant, the working class, women and the postcolonial subject. By championing the voices and texts of such minority groups, Spivak has also challenged some of the dominant ideas of the contemporary era. Such ideas include, for example, the notion that the western world is more civilised, democratic and developed than the non-western world, or that the present, postcolonial era is more modern and progressive than the earlier historical period of European colonialism in the nineteenth century. Indeed, for Spivak the effects of European colonialism did not simply vanish as many former European colonies achieved national independence in the second half of the twentieth century. It is only few other contemporary intellectuals that have managed to sustain, like Spivak, a sophisticated engagement with contemporary critical and cultural theory, while always grounding that intellectual engagement in urgent political considerations about colonialism, postcolonialism and the contemporary international division of labour between the ‗First World‘ and the ‗Third World‘.

5.0 SUMMARY

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's writing is a commentary on the first world's practice of imposing its political power over the Third world through indirect strategies. It‘s highly sophisticated system of production and dissemination of knowledge has strengthened its power through education, mass media and market forces. As you have learnt in this unit, Spivak believes the civilising mission of European colonialism is itself founded on the use of culture as a form of rhetoric. Thus, literature, or the teaching of literature, has been instrumental in the construction and dissemination of colonialism as a ruling idea. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak‘s literary criticism has greatly informed and influenced the practice of reading literary texts in relation to the history of colonialism. In essays such as ‗Imperialism and Sexual Difference‘ (1986), and ‗Three Women‘s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism‘ (1985), Spivak examines how the civilising mission of

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imperialism was written and disseminated in and through several classic texts from the English literary tradition, including Daniel Defoe‘s Robinson Crusoe (1719), Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre (1847) and Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein (1818), as well as a historical narrative from the colonial archives. Like Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, Spivak repeatedly emphasises that the production and reception of nineteenth-century English literature was bound up with the history of imperialism. Spivak's writing has been described by some as opaque. It has also been suggested that her work puts style ahead of substance.

6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT (TMA)

Discuss the concept of Subaltern Theory as enunciated by Gayatri Spivak.

7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READING

Das, B. K. (2002). Twentieth Century Literary Criticism. New Delhi:

Atlantic Publishers and Distributers.

Guha, Ranajit. (1983). Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. OUP: India.

_____________ (1998). (ed.), A Subaltern Studies Reader: 1986-1995.

Minnesota: University Press.

Moore-Gilbert, B. J. (1997). Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics. London: Verso.

Morton, Stephen. (2003). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. London and New York: Routledge.

Said, Edward W. (1978). Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient.

(Reprint 1995). London: Penguin.

Singh, Deepak Kumar. (2012). ‗Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: As a Postcolonial Feminist‘. Proceedings of National Seminar on Postmodern Literary Theory and Literature, January 27-28, 2012, Nanded, India.

Spivak, Gayatri. (1976). Of Grammatology (translated with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie), Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins.

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_____________ (1985). ‗Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography‘. From Ranjit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies IV:

Writing on South Asian History and Society. New Delhi: OUP.

____________ (1998). In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics.

London: Routledge.

_____________ (1990). (ed.) The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, and Dialogues. London :Routledge.

_____________ (1993). Outside the Teaching Machine. London:

Routledge..

_____________ (1999). (ed.). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present, Harvard, UP.

_____________ (2003). Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press.

Tibile, Ramesh. (2012). ‗Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: An Indian Literary Theorist‘. Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research journal, Vol. I. Issue. IV, 1 October 2012. www.galaxyimrj.com.

Young, Robert. (1990). White Mythologies: writing History and the West.

London: Routledge.

____________ (1995). Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge.

____________ (2001). Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction.

Oxford: Blackwell.

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MODULE 3 AFRICA IN THE EYES OF EUROPE: COLONIAL