Hyper‐self‐reflexive development? Spivak on representing the Third World ‘Other’

Abstract

This article emphasises the relevance and importance of Gayatri Spivak's work for those of us involved in the field of development (as academics, researchers or development workers). Spivak underlines how our representations, especially of marginalised Third World groups, are intimately linked to our positioning (socioeconomic, gendered, cultural, geographic, historical, institutional). She therefore demands a heightened self‐reflexivity that mainstream development analysts (eg Robert Chambers), and even ‘critical’ ones (eg Escobar, Shiva), have failed to live up to. The article examines Spivak's writings to illustrate the reasons, advantages and limits of this hyper‐self‐reflexivity.

Notes

Ilan Kapoor is in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3. Email: [email protected].

The controversy turns mainly on Spivak's statement, towards the end of her article, that the ‘subaltern cannot speak’ (1988a: 308), which some have interpreted as saying that the subaltern has no agency or is doomed to silence. Spivak has often had to defend against such interpretations, and has recently revised both the article and the statement (cf 1999: 246ff). This controversy will be dealt with later in the article.

The term ‘subaltern’ is a Gramscian one, central to the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective (of which Spivak is part). It refers to groups subordinated and marginalised based on ‘class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way’ (Guha, 1988: 35). What Spivak means by the term is ‘subsistence farmers, unorganised labor, the tribals, and the communities of zero workers on the street or in the countryside’ (1988a: 288), emphasising the marginalisation of the women members of these groups.

See my biography in Notes on Contributors for (a few) details of my own involvement in this field.

I use the term ‘hyper’ as a prefix, suggesting a vigilance above and beyond conventional self‐reflexivity, a radical self‐reflexivity (hence my hyphenation, viz ‘hyper‐self‐reflexivity’); and not as the slang ‘hyper’, short for ‘hyperactive’ or ‘over‐stimulated’ (which would not be hyphenated, viz ‘hyper self‐reflexivity’).

Said's work (eg 1978, 1993) shows how Orientalism (the West's cultural representation and subjugation of the Third World) pervades the writings of such icons of Western literature as Dickens, Austen, James and Hardy, as well as present‐day Western media reports about the Third World, particularly the Islamic world.

Spivak often refers to herself as a ‘Marxist‐feminist‐deconstructivist’ (eg 1990a: 133), by which she indicates that her analyses are informed by all three perspectives, recognising that each one has its limits and problems, and that each can sometimes complement, but also be discontinuous with, the other two (ie a critical interdisciplinarity). Note here, for example, how she complements her Marxist political‐economy reading of imperialism with a feminist one (ie the condition of subaltern women under globalisation) and a semiotic/culturalist interpretation of Marx's ‘commodity fetishism’.

The term is problematic for Spivak because it derives from a field (ethnography) in which the power relationship between the Western ethnographer and the native informant, that situates the former in a dominant role and the latter in a subordinate one, has until only recently been left unquestioned (1999: 6). Note that in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Spivak uses the figure of the native informant in several ways: as the West's Other, as collaborator in Western ethnographic work on the Third World, but also as Spivak's implied reader (ie she exhorts the reader to put her/himself in the difficult position of the native informant).

Note that Spivak tars both diasporic and Third World native informants with the same brush here, arguing that all—intellectuals, researchers, professionals—are privileged and complicit in capitalism and Western(ized) education. Thus, an Indian academic has no credible claim to being ‘purer’ or having a more ‘authentic’ ethnic identity or experience than his/her Western diasporic counterpart. Spivak is adamant that intellectuals and elites cannot claim a space uncontaminated by capitalism and imperialism (cf 1990a: 67–70; 1988a: 291).

Of course, as is implicit here, there is much overlap and slippage between ‘who represents’ and ‘why we represent’, since our geopolitical positioning intersects with our institutional positioning, thus confounding the ‘who’ and ‘why’ of representation. Or, to put it another way, who represents and why we represent are part and parcel of the same process of discursive framing. I have only formally separated the two in this article for the sake of (my own) organisation of arguments; their interrelationship is at the very least implied throughout.

Spivak does not really delve into the microtechnics of fieldwork, but there is a rich ethnographic literature that generally supports her line of thinking (eg Crewe & Harrison, 1998; Khan, 2001; Lal, 1996; Sylvester, 1995; Visweswaran, 1994; Wolf, 1996). Lal, for example, shows how the researcher's voice is often used to support his/her arguments and interests: the ‘narrative serves to whet the readers' or audiences' desire to know, and the narrators need to prove that one really was “There!”…there is thus always a danger that “the people one studies are treated as garnishes and condiments, tasty only in relationship to the main course, the sociologist” ’ (1996: 201).

Shiva provides a more nuanced and less essentialist argument on this issue in her later work with Maria Mies (compare Mies & Shiva, 1993: 20).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ilan Kapoor

Ilan Kapoor is in the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3. Email: [email protected].