Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" to Deepa Mehta's "Fire"

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Oregon and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Literature.Seventeen years ago Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published "Can the Subaltern Speak?"-one of the most influential theoretical works in the field of postcolonial studies and an essay that continues to be a critical force in the evaluation of the epistemology of history and globalized capital (hence certain terrains of ideology) in the twenty-first century. Spivak has forced us to apprehend the discomforting (lack of) answers to the question "Can the subaltern speak? What must the elite do to watch out for the continuing construction of the subaltern?" (90). Specifically, she questions whether Indian women imbibed with the nonsecular ideologies of Hinduism have a say in their own existence (even death!) and what agency these women secure in the perpetual resurrection of the very roles that construct their gendered domination. Spivak goes on to argue that "in seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman, the postcolonial intellectual systematically 'unlearns' female privilege. This systematic unlearning involves learning to critique postcolonial discourse with the best tools it can provide and not simply substituting the lost figure of the colonized" (91).Though it may be somewhat problematic to assume that a process of unlearning can truly occur, Spivak crucially demonstrates that to gain a rudimentary understanding of the subaltern woman, the interlocutor must renounce the benefits of privilege. Spivak also writes: "When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern, the notion of what the work cannot say becomes important. In the semioses of the social text, elaborations of insurgency stand in place of 'the utterance'" (82). That is, when reading events in social contexts such as colonialism, we must not mistake political rebellion-action-This content downloaded from 205.186.52.23 on Sat, 29 Nov 2014 11:17:09 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions COMPARATIVE LITERATURE /308as unmediated speech or as the act of delivering a self-evident utterance. For insurgent action arises when those in power hear but don't listen, and those who would have spoken are forced to find more immediately radical avenues of political persuasion. Likewise, readers of texts must not mistake the protests imbedded within their own interpretations for the subaltern women's agency. Indeed, ways of thinking transform agencies as they re-form them; that is why Spivak states that postcolonial critics must "learn that their privilege is their loss" (82). The exch...

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