Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
1. A Critique of
Postcolonial Reason Chapter 3: History
a.
Discussion on the dominant culture
through colonialism.
i. Epistemic Violence: Term used to describe the forcible
replacement of one structure of beliefs with another.
b.
Author wants to explore not necessarily
“true” realities, but how one explanation of reality is established and becomes
the normative one.
i. Examples can be illustrated with the British codification of
Hindu Law.
c.
Hindu law was broken into four texts
that staged the body of ideas defined by the subject’s memory. The system provided four ways of resolving an
issue.
i. The change is to a binary British vision of resolution. The Brits looked for Indians who were:
1.
Indian in color but English in taste,
morals, opinions and intellect.
2.
So they could take the vernacular and
inflections of English language and translate them to Indian language for
instruction.
d.
The author questions if the subaltern
speak. In other words, to the people
outside of the hegemonic landscape have a voice.
i. When studying a people, the studying must me done in context
with the dominant influence over the people.
Their history occurs within the hegemony of the dominant culture.
ii. Many members of India’s elite are intellectuals and natives
and offer their perspectives and opinions in their writings and conversations
with intellectuals in other parts of the world.
1.
These intellectuals tend to fit in with
the hegemonic environment.
2.
The masses tend to be heterogeneous.
3.
Spivak calls into question how accurate
the accounts are.
iii. Subaltern studies must look at the “buffer zone” of the
elite.
1.
Marginal views are a deviation from the
ideal.
2.
How far deviations can occur, without
punishment, from the standards of the elite, must be understood as they provide
context for investigating the marginalized people.
iv. The statement being made is that without including and
understanding the indigenous people, history is only speaking from the voice of
the dominant culture.
v. Another layer of oppression can apply to women who have
already been marginalized.
1.
The ideological construction of the
sexes keeps men dominant.
2.
If the native population has no voice,
then the female are pushed further into the shadows.
vi. Example of Bhubaneswari, an Indian woman, hanging herself.
1.
The hanging occurred due conflicting
emotion of not being able to commit an assignation and continued trust.
a.
She had chosen the time to hang herself
when she was menstruating.
b.
She knew her actions would be
classified as illegitimate passion and pregnancy. A dominant view.
c.
She physically waited until
menstruating to displace that notion.
d.
The idea of her suicide due to an
affair was acceptable. It fit within
hegemony ideology.
e.
The other idea was considered a lack of
insanity. Her voice was snubbed due to
the dominant perspective of things. It
could even be said that her actions were looked over because the hegemonic view
could not see further than itself.
vii. We must understand that we mute the marginalized view by our
own perspectives.
viii.
Simply by being postcolonial or the
member of an ethnic minority, we are not “subaltern.” It is reserved for sheer heterogeneity of
decolonized space.
1.
When a connection has been made with
subaltern, we are inserting them into the hegemony.
Works
Cited
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. The
Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch et al. 2nd ed. New York: W.W.Norton &
Co., 2010. 2110-2126. Print.
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