Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Can the Subaltern Speak? Essay The term "subaltern" was introduced by South Asian historian and a member of the Subaltern Studies Group, Ranajit Guha, in his eloquent article "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India," wherein he defined the term in the sense of subordination in South Asian society, which in turn made it a part of postcolonial studies. Guha explained it as the difference in demography between Indians and the "elite." Later, Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Francesco Gramsci, possessing a natural inclination towards the historiography of the subaltern, adopted the term in his own writing. In his renowned work Prison Notebooks, Gramsci used the concept to denote those populations that are subjected to the hegemony of the dominant class. Gramsci"s idea of "subaltern" was later borrowed as well as questioned by Indian-American critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in order to deconstruct the postcolonial attempt of liberating and empowering the third world with notions of subjectivity and representation under her direct lens.

Este sigue siendo uno de los libros que he escrito cuya lectura más me satisface  aunque la situación que el texto refleja sea la más sombría para nuestra disciplina. En él planteo, en efecto, el fenómeno del surgimiento de los estudios culturales en Inglaterra, su paulatina institucionalización, sus sucesivos giros hacia la semiología y la deconstrucción, su traslado a los Estados Unidos, su consecuente consagración en América Latina, su progresivo viraje hacia la derecha política y su sorprendente improductividad metodológica.

El desarrollo del libro se atiene al siguiente esquema:

0. Definiciones: ¿Qué son o qué han llegado a ser los estudios culturales en la actualidad?

1. Genealogías: ¿Cómo es es la demografía de los estudios culturales? ¿Hay abundancia de textos de re­ferencia, o más bien una proliferación de artículos breves y unos pocos proyectos de cierta envergadura?

2. Estudios Culturales y disciplinariedad: ¿Constituyen los estudios culturales una antidisciplina libre, o reproducen los cánones disciplinares de la ciencia normal? ¿Han cumplido los estudios culturales su promesa de apertura, o buscan instaurar alguna clase de ortodoxia?

3. Teorías y métodos: ¿Ha habido algún asomo de creación teórica en el interior de los estudios culturales, o viven ellos de la depredación de metodologías ocasionales tomadas de las tradiciones científicas de las que ellos reniegan?

4. Estudios Culturales y Posmodernismo: ¿Son realmente los estudios culturales una superación del posmodernismo, o representan en cambio su fase tardía? ¿Ha habido cambio o crecimiento en lo que va del posmodernismo a los estudios culturales, o se trata siempre de la repetición de los mismos argumentos?

5. El proyecto fundacional: ¿Es recuperable el proyecto inicial de los estudios culturales, o carece de una entidad teórica claramente expuesta, susceptible de impulsar proyectos nuevos?

6. Política y ciencia: ¿Es la crítica que articula a los estudios culturales de orden político, o más bien la iz­quier­da política y la prác­tica científica son los verdaderos contendientes?

7. Estudios Culturales y Antropología: ¿Qué consecuencias disciplinares tiene la definición de un campo de estudios culturales separado de la antropología?

8. Estudios Culturales y crítica: La reacción crítica contra los estudios culturales ¿dará algún resultado, o es ya dema­siado tarde?

Desde sus mejores momentos, los estudios culturales han experimentado una prolongada pero indudable declinación. Los textos fundamentales de las últimas bogas teóricas (el perspectivismo, el giro ontológico, el decolonialismo) ya no le dedican un solo renglón. La gente más joven ignora que alguna vez los estudios culturales se hayan pensado como la forma de recambio que presenciaría o llevaría adelante la muerte de la antropología.

The sages of India conceived a comprehensive picture of the reality of all forms of creation which are also manifestations of the Supreme Consciousness. They also understood that the almighty consciousness gave birth in the process of creation to numerous gods and goddesses. Each god has a distinct purpose to fulfill. The tantra sastra similarly, teaches that apart from the material world in which we live, there exist other worlds and universe.
The Supreme Godhead controls these systems through the medium of a hierarchy of gods and goddesses (devatas). These entities exist in various planes on the rising tier of consciousness. These devatas help man in his uphill journey of liberation. The tantra developed this line with an eye on practical utility and this spiritual science is acclaimed as a great sadhana sastra or practical science. The concept of Sri Chakra Though the Supreme Consciousness is formless, nameless or timeless, in manifestation it has to limit itself to a form. The formless great radiance has to radiate rays of definite forms and channels them as the various gods thus creating out of ONE, MANY with specific and distinguishable forms ad features.
These lines of light create the form-patterns of the goods which are known as yantra or charkas. A yantra is an instrument, a machine or a storehouse of power. It contains rather, in itself in a controlled form, the uncontrollable power of the deity. Tantrics believe that by worshipping the charka of a deity, the worshipper realizes the same deity or in other words he merges with it. Mandala an important aspect of a yantra which is frequently drawn or made with powders of various colours. The mandala is used in the case of any deity whereas the charka is intended for a specific deity. In south India it is a practice in most of the homes to draw a mandala in front of the house every morning to bring in auspiciousness and to ward off evil. The Tamil word for mandala is kolam (guise), as it contains in disguise the divine power. The mandala employed in tantra is no decorative imagery for a ritual. It provides a potent Pages 289 - 291 material focus for the operation of subtler forces within and without. The Chakra like the mantra leads one to direct perception of the Divine form and that is the reason why so much emphasis is given to the Chakra in tantric worship. In the Chakra are caught the lines of beauty, harmony and symmetry on which the eternal geometrician fashions the universe.
And they are therefore, drawn with lines, triangles, circles and squares. All these are symbolic. The Symbolism The circle represents the principles with no beginning and no end. The triangle represents the triple principles of creation, the lower triple worlds as well as higher. It points out to the one that is threefold, the yoni, the origin of all matter. A triangle with apex turned up indicates a broad – based one – pointed aspiration rising from the depths to the heights. In tantric paralance it is called vahni kona, the cone of fire. This is the fire of aspiration which is ever burning in the heart of the worshipper and which carries (vah=to bear) on its crest his surrender to the Divine. The triangle with apex downwards in Sakti, the grace of the Divine Mother.
The well-known satkona formed by superimposition of a triangle with apex downwards over a triangle with apex upwards signifies a rising aspiration and a responding grace, the ascent of the being and the descent of the deity or in other words the dynamic Sakti superimposing on the heart of the static and supine Siva. The lotus flower signifies the gradual unfolding of the latent powers in the being. When the Chakra is conceived as the material manifestation of the Deity, all the emanations of the Deity are also conceived as stationed in the Chakra. The main deity (pradhan) takes abode in the centre of the Chakra while its emanations gather round the pradhana as the parivara devats. Worship is done to the parivars and then to the pradhana.
The Sri Chakra is a configuration of nine triangles, five triangles with apex downwards superimposed on four triangles with apex upwards. It consists of nine chakras. There are nine Chakreshwaris, nine classes of yoginis and nine mudras. Like the ninefold of Sri Chakra, the mantra is also nine fold as it contains only nine letters. The masters are nine in number. The human body has nine apertures. Therefore, an identity is sought to be established between Pages 289 - 291 the Chakra, Deity, Mantra, Guru and the sadhaka’s body. Sri Chakra is most auspicious and worshipped to get all the auspicious things in life, finally culminating in the attainment of liberation. It is also worshipped for the “six acts” viz., appeasement, attraction, stoppage, enemity, removal and death. The techniques for these specialized acts are described in various tantric texts. CONCLUSION The tantra deems it essential to inculcate the doctrine that no worship of the Deity is complete without the worship of the Deity’s body in a material image-an idol or a picture or some symbol in the physical world. Inner worship leads one on the path of yoga and knowledge.

This article challenges claims made for Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers as a piece of non-fiction, using the text to explore questions around subaltern agency and voice that have been at the centre of postcolonial studies since Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asked “Can the Subaltern Speak?” It foregrounds the continued relevance of Spivak’s question in the postmillennial context of the neo-liberal city, particularly as it relates to issues of urban governance, and argues that a postcolonial reading of Boo’s book reveals a new set of triangulated connections between subalternity, literary non- fiction and the neo-liberal Indian city. Beautiful Forevers reveals how the violent infrastructures of such cities continue to be shaped by the legacies of colonialism and exacerbated by neo-liberal urban govern- ance, and how the genre of literary non-fiction is responding to, and at times both complicit with and resistant to, this neo-liberal urban regime.

Luca Guadagnino's A Bigger Splash (2015), I argue, produces a sensorial registration of the presence of scattered subalterns. More importantly, an 'aesthetics of indirection' (con)figures the disturbing island-space between Italy and North Africa, where the intermittent appearance of subaltern subjects disturbs normative understandings of place and produces counter-intuitive understandings of relationality. The filmic construction of 'intermittent adjacencies' between subaltern presences and narrative protagonists produces figurations of disturbing relationalities between privilege and destitution, pleasure and pain, life and death. The logic of intermittent adjacencies left conspicuously un-integrated by the plot provide a sensorial and political provocation for thinking through the geopolitics of globalization in the context of the displacement of people.

In an era when identity politics is being co-opted into wider nationalist agendas and diversity increasingly embroiled in ethnic division and separatism, how have artists engaged with cultural translation to open up the act of interpretation?

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics.
Keywords: decolonial intellectual; dramaturgical reading; subaltern; Gayatri Spivak; Michel Foucault; Oedipus Tyrannos

Este libro es la traducción al español de la célebre introducción a la edición en inglés (1976) de: De la grammatologie (1967) de Jacques Derrida; algunos años después de la traducción al español, en el año 1972. La autora nacida en 1942 en Calcuta, India, impulsa con su traducción la recepción de las obras de Jacques Derrida en los Estados Unidos, obras cuyo debate y acogida marcarían algunas líneas de la academia en Norteamérica: estudios culturales, postcoloniales y de género. Más allá de una simple introducción, Gayatri delinea elementos de su propio pensamiento, en particular, el cruce “entre” materialismo y deconstrucción; igualmente, la problematización del sujeto como dominador, es una constante que la autora explora en torno a la deconstrucción.

In his article, "Globalization, Pedagogical Imagination, and Transnational Literacy," Ezra Yoo-Hyeok Lee explores the juncture of comparative literature, globalization and postcolonial studies as to how creative writers, literary critics, and cultural theorists respond to globalization and its challenges. Arjun Appadurai expounds that globalization has demanded new research conceptualization and invention in academia. Subsequently, Lee investigates methods through which educators and scholars in comparative literature take up such a demand. In turn, Lee proposes a transnational literacy which offers a responsible form of cultural explanation, through which to explore the interrelations between the national and the postcolonial or global paradigms, both emergent as frames of current cultural change. Lee also offers a close reading of critical works by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Diana Brydon, and David Damrosch to elaborate on the concept of transnational literacy and to consider ways of circumnavigating around Eurocentrism in comparative literary and cultural studies.

I interrogate whether a historically located violence on the body of the gendered subaltern can be made ethically legible (specifically, I read a moment of sudden textual transgression, as a certain archival mark that can be called ‘non-human’ overflows the disciplinary contours of a feminist historiography of the ‘sati debate’), where no normative or institutional frame can provide any clear or unbiased account. I justapose this reading with certain 'insecting' moments in the work of Jacques Derrida.

This piece is an ongoing dialogue with and historical contextualization of indisputably on the most important scholar/ teacher/ activists on earth: Gaytatri Chakravorty Spivak.  To this end, it features back(words), after(words), and forwards...

In contemporary women’s writing, mythical models of self-empowerment and personal growth permeate a number of novels from various cultural backgrounds and geographic areas. I will focus on the transformation of a major legend, that of Orpheus, which had influenced all Western literature since Greek and Roman times. Orpheus the poet who mourns the untimely death of his wife symbolizes the divide between the male and the female in the West, with Eurydice relinquished to the underworld. In contemporary women’s literature, we witness a radical shift from this paradigm, with a new Eurydice emerging from the unseen, in order to expound her vision of the world she wants to live in. This new figure is linked to various other feminine mythical figures of empowerment, including a new Ariadne and even new forms of Mahadevi. From a transnational perspective, women writers contribute to a reinvented transcultural dialogue that better represents the new conditions of our lives. Ananda Devi (Mauritius Island—France and Switzerland), together with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a North-American author of Indian descent, are both important builders of connections between East and West, especially in their rewriting of the figure of Draupadi and other major mythical paradigms.

This piece is a 'conference report' about ISA 2018 (International Studies Association 59th Annual Convention, San Francisco). The review focuses on two panels on international ethics and decolonial critique organised by Louiza Odysseos and Myriam Fotou: 'Eurocentrism, Racism, and the De-Colonization of Ethical Enquiry'.
I start the piece with a quick presentation of the International Studies Association in the broader context of International Relations as a discipline (IR) — therefore, the piece is accessible to non-IR specialists.

In contemporary women’s writing, mythical models of self-empowerment and personal growth permeate a number of novels from various cultural backgrounds and geographic areas. I will focus on the transformation of a major legend, that of Orpheus, which had influenced all Western literature since Greek and Roman times. Orpheus the poet who mourns the untimely death of his wife symbolizes the divide between the male and the female in the West, with Eurydice relinquished to the underworld. In contemporary women’s literature, we witness a radical shift from this paradigm, with a new Eurydice emerging from the unseen, in order to expound her vision of the world she wants to live in. This new figure is linked to various other feminine mythical figures of empowerment, including a new Ariadne and even new forms of Mahadevi. From a transnational perspective, women writers contribute to a reinvented transcultural dialogue that better represents the new conditions of our lives. Ananda Devi (Mauritius Island—France and Switzerland), together with Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a North-American author of Indian descent, are both important builders of connections between East and West, especially in their rewriting of the figure of Draupadi and other major mythical paradigms.

This article explores the relationship between theory and praxis by contrasting three different models of intellectual endeavor: totalizing, particular and decolonial. Attending to the critique that Gayatri Spivak raised against Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in Can the Subaltern Speak?, this article advocates a dramaturgical reading of texts as a model for political theory to address subaltern agency. It reads such agency in the smile that Pier Paolo Pasolini registers in his 1967 film version of Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannos. Dramaturgically read, Oedipus reveals another text, the tragic history of a yet insufficiently explored democratic alternative that goes against the established democracy and its complicity with inequality in the continued naturalization of slavery despite its foundation in equality. This subtext demands understanding Oedipus as a political production from the speechless agency of dissident servants, a more subversive aspect of democratic politics.

من خلال التحليل النقدي لبنية الأخبار الموجهة للمهاجرين الأفارقة، تناقش الدراسة علاقة الإعلام بإنتاج وإعادة إنتاج خطابات ما بعد الاستعمار حول هجرة الأفارقة إلى أوربا. تهدف الدراسة إلى فحص الخطابات الأخبارية التي تنتجها وسائل الإعلام الغربية عند تناول مشكلات المهاجرين الأفارقة الذين يحاولون الوصول إلى الدول الأوربية عن طريق البحر. تطرح الدراسة سؤالين اساسيّيْن: ما مدى كفاية المعلومات التاريخية والسياقية التي تقدمها وسائل الإعلام الغربية عن الأسباب الحقيقية التي تدفع المهاجرين الأفارقة للمخاطرة بحياتهم من أجل الهجرة إلى أوربا؟ وهل يجري تمثيل المهاجرين الأفارقة بعدالة في مصادر الأخبار التي تتحدث عنهم؟ للإجابة عن أسئلة البحث، تطبق الدراسة منهجية التحليل النقدي للخطاب، في عدد من الأخبار المنشورة من قبل وكالة فرانس٢٤، ووكالة دويتش فيله الألمانية، ووكالة أنسا الإيطالية.

Poco a poco va ganando fuerza la necesidad de entender y estudiar los procesos coloniales en la Antigüedad desde una perspectiva que vaya más allá de las teorías aculturacionistas, lo que conlleva la necesidad de emplear enfoques teóricos como el postcolonialismo, en lo referente a las interacciones que se produjeron durante los contactos que pueblos, como griegos o romanos, mantuvieron con muchas de las sociedades con las que tuvieron contacto, a través de los diversos asentamientos que en aquellas regiones se establecieron desde época temprana.

Los procesos de construcción identitaria pueden, así, ponerse en relación con los conflictos inherentes a los desarrollos de sociedades coloniales, expresados muchas veces a través de cultos, ritos y mitos. Cualquier tipo de encuentro cultural representa un proceso complejo, a todos los niveles, entre grupos sociales, que debe abordarse lejos de las teorías basadas en la influencia unidireccional que, por este motivo, tienden a realizar un nivel de análisis superficial donde muchas facetas de interrelación se dejan de lado o se niegan, pero de las cuales tenemos noticias gracias a las fuentes clásicas y arqueológicas. Es necesario intentar ahondar en el punto de vista de los colonizados, en la medida en que ello nos sea posible (Loomba, 1998), dado que es lógico pensar en la existencia de una transferencia multilateral de ideas, costumbres, etc., entre los sujetos que mantuvieron un tipo de contacto prolongado o, al menos, regular, sin que tengamos que entender a los colonizados como meros receptores pasivos.

La teoría postcolonial ha surgido con fuerza para afrontar esa nueva concepción de los procesos de interacción cultural; sin embargo, ¿se ha logrado abandonar por completo las reminiscencias relacionadas con el marco conceptual de la sociedad que intenta definir al “Otro”? ¿Podemos emplear términos como aculturación a la hora de definir un proceso colonial sin que ellos mismos conlleven cierta carga ideológica? No es mi intención dar respuesta aquí a preguntas tan importantes y que, aún hoy, generan un intenso debate, sino sólo exponer el proceso de surgimiento de la teoría postcolonial como un nuevo enfoque teórico surgido de una realidad contemporánea y aplicado a procesos de interacción cultural colonial en diversas épocas.

The book 'Socjalistyczny postkolonializm. Rekonsolidacja pamięci' (Socialist Postcolonialism: Memory Reconsolidation) is about the Polish postcolonial tradition of before 1989, which has been blanked out of memory. The year 2000, i.e., the year in which the Polish translation of Ewa Thompson’s book Imperial Knowledge. Russian Literature and Colonialism appeared, is taken as the beginning of Polish postcolonial thought. However, the general thesis of the present book is that widely understood postcolonialism functioned in Poland before 1989. The real beginning of thinking in postcolonial terms started with the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, held in Wrocław in 1948. The purpose of the book is to reconstruct the rubbed out history of socialist postcolonialism and to determine the reasons why this cultural phenomenon was remembered/forgotten. This first task is achieved by analyzing political, press, literary, scientific and artistic discourses referring to the so-called Third World and its relations with the semi-peripheral Second World, i.e., Poland; while the second task is treated within an original conceptual framework for writing about remembering/forgetting, using the category of re/consolidation drawn from neuroscience and psychology. The work uses the terms “socialist postcolonialism” and “postcolonialism of the Second World” alternately and refers to postcolonial studies, although conceptually it is rooted in memory studies which are also seeing intense development in Poland.