The wageless life of the subaltern

ABSTRACT

One of the most striking legacies of the Subaltern Studies project has been the innovative methodologies and archives that it has mobilized to articulate the singular position of the subaltern outside the hegemonic terms of representation. Yet in its sweeping classification of non-hegemonic social groups and classes, Subaltern Studies has often tended to elide the precise economic determinants that define the subaltern as a class, and thereby foreclose the forms of agency that are available to people who occupy such singular positions of radical alterity that cannot be identified in hegemonic terms. Spivak’s deconstructive rethinking of the labour theory of value enables us to consider how the body of the gendered subaltern performs an important economic function in the contemporary global economy. But to what extent can such a theory account for the economic conditions of people dwelling in the slums and shantytowns of postcolonial cities, or what Michael Denning has aptly called the wageless life of the global poor? And how might we begin to address the gendered dynamics of wageless life? Through a reading of Abderrahmane Sissako’s film Bamako (2006), this essay considers how the film’s juxtaposition of a fictional courtroom narrative in which the World Bank is put on trial and the everyday lives of characters who populate the courtyard in which the courtroom is situated raise questions about the limitations of the law and civil society to alter the socio-economic conditions of wageless life. With reference to Gayatri Spivak’s reflections on the relationship between the subaltern and the economic policies of global financial institutions the essay suggests that the narrative structure and mise-en-scène of Bamako offer a means of addressing the global economic conditions as well as the power relations that circumscribe the agency and voice of the subaltern.

KEYWORDS:

• Abderrahmane Sissako’s Bamako
• subaltern
• World Bank
• structural adjustment
• wageless life
• civil society

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Stephen Morton is Professor of English and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Southampton. His publications include States of emergency: colonialism, literature, and law (Liverpool University Press, 2013); Terror and the postcolonial, co-edited with Elleke Boehmer (Wiley-Blackwell 2009); Foucault in an age of terror (Palgrave 2008) co-edited with Stephen Bygrave; Salman Rushdie: fictions of postcolonial modernity (Palgrave 2007); Gayatri Spivak: ethics, subalternity and the critique of postcolonial reason (Polity 2006); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Routledge 2003); as well as essays in Textual Practice, Public Culture, New Formations, Parallax, Wasafiri, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Canadian Literature, The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory and Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. He has also contributed chapters to The Oxford Handbook to Postcolonial Studies (2013), The animal question in deconstruction (2013), and Postcolonial reason and its critique: deliberations on the thought of Gayatri Spivak (2014).