Abstract:
Thus asserts Gayatri Spivak in her essay “Can the Subalterns Speak?” According to the
general thrust of Spivak’s argument in this essay, her final assertion that the “subaltern
cannot speak” denies the gendered subaltern the ability to represent herself and achieve
voice agency. Spivak’s contention that “the subaltern as female cannot be heard or read”
also precludes the possibility of others re-presenting the subaltern woman save as a blank
or empty space. Hence the “circumscribed task” Spivak envisions for the female
intellectual is to merely foreground the “space” or “absence” that according to Spivak, is
the subaltern woman in discourse—Colonial, Western or Native Elite. This presentation
of the gendered subaltern as completely inaccessible, and more crucially, incapable of
agency or resistance leads to a problematic conclusion: colonialism in collusion with
(native) patriarchy effected a complete “erasure” of the (subaltern) woman. This is
however a clearly untenable proposition (Mani 1992: 403). The 1889 description of the
plight of the Hindu widow written by a widow and a potential sati herself,2 as Ania
Loomba points out, is testimony to the fact that subaltern women, such as the figure of
sati that Spivak alludes to, did in fact “speak” (1998:237). I would therefore like to argue
that the subaltern woman can be re-presented3 in imaginative writing and further, that she
can be portrayed as an “agent”4 particularly at certain specific historical junctures.
The depiction of the gendered subaltern as “an (empty) space, an inaccessible
blankness” (Moore Gilbert 1997:102) is problematic on several counts.
