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ABSTRACT
The contribution of postcolonial writing to our understanding of precarity lies in its post-structuralist emphasis on the question of representation so that the act of representing precarity becomes discursively precarious. Gayatri Spivak’s foundational essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” provides us with conceptual tools to problematize what may be called “discursive precarity” – that is, that set of enunciative conditions in which intellectuals speak on behalf of the precariat – but also run the risk of silencing them by substituting subaltern voices with their own. The article explores Derek Walcott’s Omeros as a poem of discursive precarity by examining a rhetorically unstable double-movement, wherein the poet-narrator’s identification with, and alienation from, the subaltern is dialectically and irremediably mediated by his own position of privilege. Paradoxically, the poem can only achieve legitimacy through the acknowledgement of its lack of legitimacy to sing of, and for, the subaltern.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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Notes
1. I follow the traditional Aristotelian definition of analogy premised on proportion (as A is to B, so C is to D; see Aristotle Citation1951, 1457b). In this sense, analogy is a comparison between two relations, and not between two terms, that are explicitly or implicitly compared, as in simile and metaphor. Still, as a form of similitude, analogy is linked to simile and metaphor, though the precise relationship has historically been subject to rhetorical debate (Quintilian Citation[1920] 1996). Metaphor in turn has been famously counterpointed by Jakobson (Citation1956) with metonymy as processes of substitution and contiguity respectively. Walcott’s complex poetics bring all these facets into dense networks of interrelated echoes and ironies.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sneharika Roy
Sneharika Roy is associate professor of comparative literature at the American University of Paris. Her book The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh (2018) offers a fresh comparative theory of epic, bridging classical and postcolonial scholarship. She is also a contributor to the MLA volume on teaching Amitav Ghosh (2019) and to the ongoing encyclopaedic project Dictionnaire encyclopédique des littératures de l’Inde.