CAN THE

SUBALTERN SPEAK?
 Yogeswary Rajendran
(D20091034403)

Subashini Krishnan (D20091034406)

Usha Nair (D20019034416)

Speaking for/as the other
- Subaltern as an ‘inferior’ rank (i.e. the
lowest strata in society). The term was
used by Antonio Gramsci.
- It may be emphasized that subaltern is a
term that commonly refers to the
perspective of persons from regions and
groups outside the hegemonic power
structure.
 Epistemic Violence
(Definition)
- Violence done to the ways of knowing and
understanding of non-western, indigenous
people.
- Western ways of knowing have been help
up as the “way of knowing”.
- Other forms of knowledge have been
rendered as less valid, or even downright
wrong.
• To be heard, to be listened and taken
seriously, others must also adopt
western thought, reasoning and
language.
Epistemic Violence
(Example)
• ‘White men are saving brown women from brown
men’
• Spivak shows us that it is either the white man
explaining why Sati is a barbaric custom and must be
abolished or the brown man insisting that it is a ritual
that renders the woman sacred.
• At no point is the voice of the ‘brown woman’ heard.
It is the woman who becomes sati, yet no one comes
across the ‘testimony of the women’s voice
consciousness’.
Spivak explains that the recovery of a
subaltern voice especially from the
history may involve a generalized and
stereotyped fiction.
 Spivak argues that it is difficult to recover
a voice for the subaltern without opposing
the heterogeneity.
 She plays her role in improving the
possibility of adopting short-term
grouping.
 This known as “strategic essentialism”.
 It refers as a strategic using a clear
image of identity to fight for women’s
rights and tribal rights.
 Strategic essentialism is a
term coined by Gayatri
Spivak.
 Refers as self defined and
focuses much on her
work on post colonial
issues and marginalized
populations.
 Strategic essentialism
refers to ‘the ways in
which subordinate people
were put aside in terms of

local differences’.
• This approach increase the notion of
“authenticity”.
• Spivak’s main concern is with the people of
India and females in Asia.
• “Can the subaltern speak” is categorized as
the western academic thinking.
• Spivak discusses the way in which western
thinking and ideology frames and represent
the third world.
• She started her research by labeling the
third
world as the ‘other’ and ‘over there’.
 Third World male Poor women
and female of a nation

• Can Spivak (a women) “speak as”, she put

herself as a Third World person and also as an
Indian woman.
• She is expected to do it in international
conferences.
• Spivak worries when she try to “speak as”.
• Besides that, she also worries about
“generalizing herself”.