Page 258 - DENG501_LITERARY_CRITICISM_AND_THEORIES

Literary Criticism and Theories

Notes These then are the essentials of Said’s formulations about ‘Orientalism’. Let us now move to the
essentials of Gayatri Spivak’s notion of ‘subalternity’. Spivak is a leading contemporary feminist
deconstructionist who pays careful attention to issues of gender and race. Her use of the term
‘subaltern’ is influenced by the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci consistently referred to
a subordinate position in terms of class, gender, race and culture. Spivak’s essay ‘Can the Subaltern
Speak?’ addressed the way the ‘subaltern’ woman is constructed, as absent or silent or not listened
to. The ‘muteness’ of women in postcolonial societies is the main issue which her work confronts.
The main argument of her essay is that, between patriarchy and imperialism, subject constitution
and object formation, the figure of woman disappears not into a pristine nothingness, but into a
marginal position between tradition and modernization.
Spivak uses the term ‘subaltern’ (of lower rank) for women, blacks, the colonized and the working
class. Subalternity comes to suggest the repressive dominance of white Western thinking and an
allegory of the displacement of the gendered and colonized (i.e. subaltern) subject, y the imposition
of narratives of internationalism and nationalism. The violence inflicted by Western forms of
thought upon the East is of great concern to Spivak. She takes ‘the third world’ to be a creation of
the west that locks non-western cultures into an imperial representation. ‘Worlding’ is the name
she gives to the process through which ‘colonized space’ is ‘brought into the workd; that is made
to exist aspart of a world essentially constituted by Eurocentrism.’
In these kinds of formulations one of the possible pitfalls in atteibuting an absolute power to the
hegemonic discourse in creating the native and not making enough room for the resistance of the
native. That brings us to Bhabha, the third figure in ‘the Holy Trinity’ and to his key notion that
is ‘mimicry’.
To Bhabha the operations of the unconscious in the imperial context are far from simple because
desire for, as well as fear of, ‘the other’, does not allow the identities of the colonizer and the
colonized to stay fixed and unitary. Colonial power undermines its own authority and can
paradixocally provide the means for native resistance. The site of resistance, the strategic reversal
of the process of domination that looks the colonial power squarely in the eye, is marked by
‘hybridity’, an ‘in-between’ space. It not only displaces the history that creates it, but sets up new
structures of authority and generates new political initiatives. It undermines authority because it
imitates it only outwardly.
On account of the difficulty of categorizing different cultures into universalist frameworks, Bhabha’
finds the idea of the ‘nation’ a little problematic. He thinks that the idea stems from the imposition
of a rather arbitrary ‘national’ character upon a necessarily very heterogencous collection of
people(s).

‘Mimicry’ designates a gap between the norm of civility as presented by European
Enlightenment and its distorted colonial imitation. It serves as the sly weapon of
anti-colonial civility and is an ambivalent mixture of deference and disobedience.

22.2 Said on Heart of Darkness

The thrust of Said’s 1966 book Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography is somewhat
different from his comments on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Culture and Imperialism (1993). On
page 25 of the latter book, Said states:
This narrative ... is connected directly with the redemptive force, as well as the waste and horror
of Europe’s mission in the dark world. ‘Whatever is lost or elided or simply made up in Marlow’s
immensely compelling recitation is compensated for in the narrative’s sheer historical momentum,
the temporal forward movement.’

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