A Conversatio a conversation with gayatri chakravorty spivakSpivak_politics and the Imagination

7/29/2019 A Conversatio a conversation with gayatri chakravorty spivakSpivak_politics and the Imagination

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A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the ImaginationAuthor(s): Jenny Sharpe and Gayatri Chakravorty SpivakSource: Signs, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter 2003), pp. 609-624Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/342588 .

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[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 28, no. 2]

2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2802-0008$10.00

J e n n y S h a r p e

G a y a t r i C h a k r a v o r t y S p i v a k

A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics

and the Imagination

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been instrumental in introducing a fem-

inist agenda to the field of postcolonial studies and, in doing so, forcing

womens studies to interrogate the underlying principles traditionally

relied on for gender analysis. Whether addressing the language of feminist

individualism or the surreptitious subject of power and desire, she has never

lost sight of the women on the other side of the international division of

labor, while at the same time refusing an all-too-easy recuperation of their

subjectivities.

I first met Spivak in Austin, Texas, a little more than twenty years ago.

As an entering freshman at the University of Texas, I was instructed to take

a class with a new English professor, who, like me, was from India. I,

resenting the assumption behind the recommendation, avoided studying

with Spivak. But her reputation as a Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist (as

she was known at the time) soon caught up with me, and I decided to

pursue a graduate degree and write a dissertation under her direction. It

was the early 1980s, when the now-familiar terms postcolonial and colonialdiscourse analysis were beginning to enter an academic vocabulary, and

Spivak was at the forefront of defining the emergent field. Since she left

the University of Texas shortly thereafter, I continued working with her

only by traveling to places as scattered as Urbana-Champaign, Toronto,

London, Houston, Middletown, and Ithaca. I still remember sitting in a

classroom at Cornell University, where she was a senior fellow at the Society

for the Humanities, and being transfixed by the most remarkable critique

of the subject of knowledge and semiosis of woman in Foucault and Hindu

law. Little did I know that she was working through the argument that

would become Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)perhaps the most well-

known, if misunderstood, of her writings.

Spivaks critics took her phrasing of the subaltern cannot speak to bea definitive statement rather than an interrogation of the academic effort

to give the gendered subaltern a voice in history. On revising the essay for

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610 Sharpe and Spivak

her book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), she characterizes herpassionate lament: the subaltern cannot speak! as an inadvisable remark

(308). But she also notes that so many of the examples her critics gave of

the subaltern speaking tended to equate subalternity with women in the

third world or ethnic minorities in the United States, a conflation that her

essay was intended, in part, to critique. Indeed, one of the concerns of her

recent work is to show the complicity of diasporic South Asians with a

corporate globalization that maintains subaltern women in a position of

subalternity.

I asked Spivak to return to the problem of speaking about the gendered

subaltern that she first introduced in Can the Subaltern Speak? She spoke

to me of a need to attend to intranational cultural differences between

an elite South Asian bourgeoisie and the rural poor who have been bypassedby decolonization. She described what it meant to engage the everyday

lives of subalterns, characterizing fieldwork as the only model for such an

engagement. As Spivak spoke, it became clear to me that what is often

identified as her pessimism about social change is intended to offset the

euphoria of the political activist who thinks that she is transforming rural

womens everyday lives. Spivaks deconstructive thinking is evident in her

characterization of social change as being more provisional than one would

like to believe. But it is an affirmative deconstruction that finds value in the

need for the ongoing work of a constant critique.

This conversation took place in Los Angeles in June 2001, while Spivak

was en route to her home in New York from Hong Kong via Sonoma,

California, where she had just attended the Crossing Borders Initiative,a Ford Foundation meeting to consider the future of area studies. The

imprint of her travels is clearly visible in the discussion we had. As Spivak

described to me her interaction with small farmers in rural Bengal, post-

doctoral Chinese students at the Hong Kong University of Science and

Technology, and her students at Columbia University, her strategic use of

what one might call a politics of the imagination started to emerge. The

Signseditors and I decided to call this conversation Politics and the Imag-

ination because we wanted to emphasize the argument that Spivak is mak-

ing about the imaginative power of corporate globalization and how it

requires an equally forceful appeal to the imagination for contestation.

Jenny Sharpe (JS): You have been most vocal against the tendency of

academics to equate globalization with migrancy and diaspora. You insist

that the rural is the new front of globalization through seed and fertilizer

control, population control, microloans to women, to name a few in-

stances. Can you elaborate some more on how you see the rural as the



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S I G N S W in te r 2 00 3 611

new front of globalization and what this says about the kind of face weare giving to globalization in our critical discourse?

Gayatri Spivak (GS): Things have become more specific since I wrote

about globalization understood as or presented as the movement of peo-

ple. It seems to me that now there are four models of globalization that

are in circulation. First, that there is nothing new about it, in other words,

that globalization is simply a repetition. Second, that globalization as such

can be identified with the efforts of global governance signaled by the

Bretton Woods conference remotely inaugurating the postcolonial and

the postnational world. This is the more sophisticated face of the old

identifying-with-the-people movement. And the third model is that the

entire globe is in a common culture fix, and its signature is urbanism. Its

against this one that I bring up the question of the rural. Finally, I dis-tinguish globalization from lets say world trade. It is true that the

tendency towards expansion is as old as the hills, but information tech-

nology has given it a dimension which deserves a special name. The

globe signifies some more abstract, more virtual thing, distinguished

from world systems by relating to the ascendancy of specifically finance

capital, competitive markets in negotiable instruments. This technological

phenomenon is the condition and effect of the fall of the Berlin wall. In

other words, at that point, globalization is seen as a rupture. In these four

models we have a view of globalization from repetition to rupture. In the

fourth one, were not looking so much at the movement of money as the

movement of data. Given this, I point out the virtualization of the rural,

the conversion of the rural into data through the patenting of indigenousknowledge and through pharmaceutical interests in seeds and population

control. Indigenous peoples, for example, are fined by trade-related in-

vestment and intellectual property measures, because they obviously had

not patented their knowledge over the last few thousand years and so

thats retroactively seen as an illegal trade practice. Through the conversion

of the phenomenon of the r ural, not blue skies and green trees, into data,

the rural front is a real front of globalization. The urban phenomenon,

which is much more spectacular, is what is visible and instrumental. Donna

Landry has recently commented on the fact thatin Britain at leastthe

countryside was recoded for consumption by the Game Act of 1681 (Lan-

dry 2001). What Im talking about displaces the consumption/production

binary into a virtuality that can include consumption as tourism.1

JS: Is it the visibility of urban centers that accounts for rural areas falling

off the map of our critical discourse on globalization? I ask this because

1 See Meyda Yegenoglus work on Turkey (forthcoming).



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if, as you indicate, the rural is a site of intensified globalization, it is whatwe should be talking about.

GS: But you dont need them on an old-fashioned map, you need them

on geographical information systems. Ive been talking about this for some

time, and it doesnt seem to register. This relates very strongly to women

because rural practices, especially at the grassroots level, were quite often

shared by women and men equally. Whereas field labor sometimes went

to men, though not exclusively, more of the conserving practices seems

to have gone to women. Im not romanticizing the indigenous com-

munities, what one might call aboriginal communities; Im just saying

that cultural conformity within those areas shows us patterns where

women are not necessarily inferior persons who are not active in what

one would call the public sphere, even if its not the public sphere aswe know it through European and colonial history. In that context, the

virtualization of the rural and its transformation into data within finance

capital involves and does indeed obliterate womens practices. As a major

phenomenon within globalization, this does not seem to ring a bell be-

cause it does not resemble the colloquial meaning of the word in the

dictionary, which is then translated into simply immigration patterns.

And then of course you can move into the usual lines that have been in

place now for twenty-odd years for describing those patterns.

JS: It is well known that, as one of the largest developers of biotech-

nology, the Monsanto Company patents its genetically engineered seed

so that farmers who use it are prevented from holding back a few seeds

to plant the next year, which is a traditional practice. You have writtenabout how the incursion of biotechnology giants like Monsanto into South

Asia has affected women.

GS: After a certain flood incident in Bangladesh, the handing out of

loans was made incumbent upon accepting only these engineered seeds.

But thats just one instance. The way in which chemical fertilizers are

inserted into the life cycle of rural folks as reward is quite staggering.

JS: So what is transpiring under the rubric of loans to rural areas is a

certain kind of traditional domain, to use that phrase, of women being taken

away from them.

GS: Well, its been recoded into another kind of discourse. And ulti-

mately its the transformation into data that interests me because it is not

only a source of human interest stories but an example of a much bigger

systemic change. And thats what Ive been trying to say about the rural.

Its not just women as we understand them as human beings of a certain

kind but a kind of systematization of a certain way of being into this



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S I G N S W in te r 2 00 3 613

abstract average knowledge power, if you like, which is data, which doesin fact signal a much bigger change than just womens oppression.

JS: If you consider data collecting to signal something larger than simply

womens oppression, how would you respond to the argument that the

new electronic technology is giving third-world women a direct access to

global markets?

GS: Superficially of course its true. Capital in its newer formations seems

more socially productive, but when people speak about this, they are speak-

ing very abstractly. They are not thinking about actual people. Im now

going 180 degrees from inviting people to understand the virtualization of

the rural as a huge systemic change, a recoding, a reterritorialization. But

at the same time, in order to understand the terrifying power of the abstract

as such, one must supplement it with the human beings within these kindsof situations. The enthusiasm for these abstract groups of women accessing

the marketplace through the Internet leaves completely untouched what

happens to these women on the ground. Even when you interview the

women, you are not getting the whole picture. First of all, the questions

produce the answers. Secondly, the subaltern is so disarmed by attention

that in fact the answers are pathetically untrustworthy. If you actually involve

yourself into the life detail of these women who are accessing the market,

you would see that their access may superficially bring in a better income,

but it does nothing else for the human quality of the womans life. Then,

you come to the third point: have these people made a broad-range qual-

itative analysis of what group has access to global markets through the

Internet? What class stratum? Where? In what kinds of societies? BecauseI can assure you, I have had a good deal of experience over the last twelve

years with hundreds of women with whom it has been my good fortune

to associate myself; the bottom layers of the rural poor have no access to

the Internet. They dont even know what the Internet is. This is the largest

sector of the electorate in the global South. And to access the Internet

without infrastructural accompaniments does not lead to a just society.

JS: You have written that the problem of international feminism today

is the deployment of the upper-class hybrid female as a model for the

gender training of poor rural women. You have identified, as a defining

moment in this shift, a restructuring of the World Banks Women in

Development programs as Gender and Development, which you see

as coterminous with the Fourth World Womens Conference at Beijing

in 1995. Weve been through the criticism of Third World Woman as

signifier and of the universalization of a certain kind of feminist model

through the idea of global feminism. The language of international fem-



7/17


inism has now shifted to terms like heterogeneity, multiplicity, decentering.Yet it appears that there is still some kind of universalizing logic at work

in the Gender and Development programs. What kinds of problems

does such gender training pose for feminism as an intellectual discourse

and political movement?

GS: I would like to say that I dont have an unexamined opposition

to United Nations Womens Conferences. Im quite sure that there are

things that get done there that are good things. My problem is that they

are so wasteful, since they are unenforceable.

JS: Wasteful?

GS: In terms of resources. A huge wanton expenditure of resources for

months and years in order to produce declarations that are unenforceable.

And really the enthusiasm that is generated is in a class that is not reallythe class that we are thinking about. I was speaking to a wonderful young

woman in Hong Kong, involved in various projects, one of which is

schoolchildren teaching computers to older folks. So I said: Well, hows

it going? And she said something to me that was so wise. She said: Its

going wonderfully well for the schoolchildren. Wow! I knew this one

had her head set right on her shoulders. People dont realize that even if

the euphoria and enthusiasm generated in the self-styled activists, the ones

who are organizing, can be shown in the subaltern women who have been

collected for the occasion, it does not mean what the more fortunate

women think it means. The euphoria belongs to the occasion rather than

to long-term consequences.

JS: Can you give an example of the kind of activist work you arecriticizing?

GS: Well, Im actually finishing a piece of writing for an Oxford Amnesty

collection where I talk about a case. When there are human rights inter-

ventions on the lowest social stratum, the poorest of the rural poor, theres

not muchand this is my basic critique in terms of all the questions you

have askedthere is not much trouble taken to actually engage with the

structures of feeling of the groups who are supposedly being helped. It

is good to dismiss the concern to exhibit themor to forget the needs of

the urban subproletariatas a politics of virtue, as Deborah Mindry does

in the Signs issue on globalization (2001). But for me the point has been,

what do we do with the rural poor, then?with, not for. Since no effort

has been made to rearrange the mental theater of the ones who have been

helped for a new production, the consequences of being helped out of a

violent situation do not last. They remain perennially in a place where

wrongs proliferate and have to be righted periodically. We who thought of

feminism as a movement that deals with awareness and gender sensitivity



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S I G N S W in te r 2 00 3 615

as well as material solutions find these solutions hardly feminist, exceptinsofar as they involve people who can be physically diagnosed as female.

There is a difference between the two things: between woman-centered

philanthropy and democratic pedagogic involvement. Thats what Im talk-

ing about.

JS: So, what youre talking about is a real need for infrastructural

changes, for instance? Or something that is more than simply the quick

fix?

GS: Yes, involvement with broader infrastructural changes. You and I

both teach in the humanities. If one thinks about humanities education

as a sustained, uncoercive rearrangement of desires with no guarantees,

that is what Im talking about. If we really feel that we are in our profession

because we want to do what were doing, then our engagement with theworlds disenfranchised women has to be as thick as the engagement with

our students.

JS: You have said on several occasions that you are only a literary critic

and are very clear about intellectual work not being the same as political

activism. Yet you seem to be describing a kind of political activism that has

a paucity of imagination. Would you say that there is a need for work to

be done not only on the political front but also on the imagination?

GS: One not without the other. My friend gave me a name, which is

Miss Supplementarity. And this is quite appropriate! I truly feel the

moment one emphasizes the one over the other, it is a bad scene. And I

think one of the problems with Marxism was that quite often one would,

in a kind of doctrinaire way, emphasize or dismiss anything that seemednot to be amenable to that adjective. Let me give you an example that

relates to pharmaceutical dumping. When one is speaking to a group of

grassroots farmers, one finds oneself using a very bad concept metaphor

that has been thoroughly criticized by bourgeois feminism. This is the

metaphor of the land or the soil as mother, which is an extremely powerful

and strategic instrument if it works completely through the imagination.

On the one side are the seed and fertilizer companies with their ferocious

push upon the rural poor. And on the other side is a metaphor that says,

if you buy this fertilizer and put it in the soil, next year you cannot raise

anything in the soil if you dont use it again. The soil is our mother, your

mother and mine. We are making our mother addicted. This metaphor

is used in an area where, by drinking urea-contaminated cheap liquor,

people die quite often. And urea is a big ingredient in chemical fertilizers.

JS: This metaphor is used by?

GS: I use it! Ive never heard anyone else use it! For ecological agri-

culture, you know. What am I doing there? Im being disingenuous, using



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this powerful politically incorrect metaphor. Im not someone who be-lieves in the sanctity of truth. For me, an appeal to the imagination is

material practice. I knowingly use a metaphor completely disapproved of

by mainstream feminism. I knowingly use some kind of attitude from

temperance movements. I knowingly use the notion of family values

among the rural poor; you know the notion of sin against the mother, et

cetera. I knowingly use these strategically. This is the kind of thing whereby

rather than use fear of punishment, you use a certain kind of imaginative

terror in terms of the consequences of putting foreign seeds and fertilizers

in the soil. I also detail exactly what happens: the hardening of the soil,

the dying of the insects, the dying of all the things that actually help keep

the soil alive, the loss of taste, the poisoning of products, the fact that we

in the affluent countries now choose to buy organic materials, et cetera.I mean you can give them a lot of hard information but to make the very

poor turn away from high-yield grain, you have to use a certain kind of

imaginative discourse. I dont want people to think that when I use the

word imagination, I mean some kind of incredibly pure, holier-than-thou

effort. No, Im not Martha Nussbaum. Im not reading Dickens with

them.

JS: Your use of imaginative discourse is especially contaminated because

you say you knowingly use a metaphor that is disapproved of by main-

stream feminism. That statement shows a disjuncture between knowledge

and strategy. It would be interesting to place your deployment of a con-

taminated metaphor alongside a gender training that is intended to render

such metaphors useless.GS: I am an education person, you know; Im a teacher. Just as sitting

here in the Signs office at UCLA Ive been talking about hiring, about

departmental styles and teaching, when you sit among farmers, you talk

about agriculture. And so, one year, when it became clear to some of

these farming friends of mine that I knew something about the other side

of ecological agriculture, I was asked to address a larger group of farmers.

I was very nervous at first, thinking Im not really an ecological agriculture

activist. But then I thought that if asked one should speak, because nobody

comes to these areas. I should make clear that among my audience are

women. I shouldnt really even say audience; I should say interlocutors

because they do speak themselves about farming practices. So, its not as

though Im addressing a group of men with this contaminated metaphor.

What Im trying to say is that the association of certain kinds of tenors

and certain kinds of vehicleswe are literary folks and so refer to the

textbook definition of tenor and vehicle, underlying idea or principal

subject, and the figure, which is the way metaphors seem to workis



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S I G N S W in te r 2 00 3 617

not transcendental; it is historical. Thats something that has to be un-derstood. The particular line from specific tenor to specific vehicle is not

common to all cultural production, so one has to be able to distinguish

between things that have been coded one way for us and another way for

them. But for this you have to be patient. I think thats the universalization

that is really not much use in gender training. There is also an assumption

of bureaucratic egalitarianismthe assumption that people are units that

are mechanically equal. This is not a bad thing, but in a culturally different

field it is counterproductive if not supplemented by other kinds of efforts.

Cultural difference is spoken of but, by enthusiasm or convenience, a

common human essence is assumed which denies the procedural impor-

tance of the difference. There is a related assumption: that the history of

a sharing of the public and the private is the same among all groups ofmen and women as the one that follows through in terms of northwestern

Europe or sometimes even Britain. This is the problem it seems to me.

Its not so much a universalization as seeing one history as the inevitable

telos as well as the inevitable origin and past of all men and women

everywhere. Thats the problem. Incidentally, I went to a Peoples Alliance

office in Kolkata (Calcutta) before going, to get some tips, since they

have international publicity with ecological agriculture, and they too used

metaphors, but metaphors that would ring no bell with the farmers, such

as natural balance, et cetera, in the most ornate Bengali prose. I left

them feeling altogether cheered up!

JS: But the assertion of things being coded one way for us and another

way for them risks reifying cultural difference. I am thinking about culturaldefense as a legal strategy for defending immigrant Asian men living in

the United States against charges of gender violence. This is an attention

to difference that insidiously reinscribes an older colonial model of othering.

GS: Of course it does. And the question that really comes up is: different

from what? I would say that the culture of the rich and the culture of the

poor in these countries are marked by a cultural difference that is larger

than the cultural difference we self-consciously invoke when we diasporics

speak to the metropolitan white folks. The question of cultural difference

for some years now has become exacerbated in other ways, by the dif-

ference between intellectual labor and manual labor. There is an extreme

difference in educational techniques used for the poor and the middle

class. And Im now able to convince the ones who suffer from the con-

solidation of very bad educational techniques by using another metaphor,

which is a metaphor of class apartheid. That is to say, the ones who are

going to work their heads (in Bengali there is an expression) are taught

in one way, and the ones who are going to work their bodies are taught



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in another way. Metaphorically, this cultural difference, the cultures ofclass, is much more significant than cultures identified by crudely defined

national difference. Thats what the cultural difference question means to

me now, not just the heritage of colonialism.

JS: So in fact the national cultural difference is . . .

GS: Intra-national!

JS: Yes, there is a kind of ideological work being done by the concept

of cultural difference, one of eliding class.

GS: Intranational cultural difference, for me, is now as significant and

as important, as it works in the interest of international cultural difference.

And of course to make the big difficult statement, the international civil

society crosses borders in the name of woman. And this difference is now

fleshed out mostly in terms of violence against women, womens rights,all that kind of stuff. Thats how I understand it today. Im much more

fixated, fixed on intranational cultural difference of class as it is at work

for and with the international cultural differences. There is an internal

line ofculturaldifference within the same culture, apart from the usual

mechanisms of class formation. It is related to the formation of the new

global culture of management and finance and the families attached to it.

It marks access to the Internet. It also marks the new culture of inter-

national nongovernmental organizations, involved in development and

human rights, as they work upon the lowest strata in the developing world.

Before the advent of modernity, the country-to-town movement, the field-

to-court movement, the movement along the great trade routes operated

to create the kind of internal split of cultural difference within the sameculture that may be the real motor of cultural change. Across the spectrum

of change, it is the negotiation of sexual difference and the relationship

between the sacred and the profane that spell out the rhythms of culture,

rhythms that are always a step ahead of its definitions and descriptions.

JS: You have told the story of the only female member of the Lodha

tribe who managed to make it to university and who hanged herself for

reasons unknown. There were rumors of her involvement in illicit love

affairs. This story is clearly intended to resonate (and it does) with the

one you tell about Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri in Can the Subaltern Speak?

She hanged herself because she had been unable to carry out a political

assassination on behalf of the armed struggle for Indian independence.

The suicide was a mystery because people presumed that the reason was

an illicit pregnancy, but she was menstruating at the time. I found the

resemblance between the two scenes of female suicides separated by class,

caste, temporality, and space to be, and I use the Freudian term, uncanny.

Is there a story to be told in that resemblance?



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S I G N S W in te r 2 00 3 619

GS: I think its the other side of the heterosexual reproductive normas family values, which is about as close as one comes to a universal.

Although it is not a universal because of what I have talked about in both

these situations. I saw Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri as a subaltern, and indeed

she was a subaltern, but if one is being very strict about the term, then

she was a lower-middle-class urban person, and therefore she was not

really subaltern. And as for Chuni Kotal, the woman from the Lodha

tribe, by going to university, she had become sort of upwardly mobile,

and therefore strictly speaking she too was not a subaltern. But one notices,

in many subalternized female societies, a certain phenomenon that I have

described as originary queerness, which is a thing different from the het-

erosexist reproductive norm. It may be that from which sexual difference

differs. It will not be disclosed in a subject elaboration that I know totheorize. But when the heterosexist reproductive norm works, then it is

right from the positive articulation of family values. Now this should not

make us argue that therefore its all right for international feminism to

go and interfere, because what we just talked about is the heterosexist

reproductive norm, not an entire cultural fabric. Ive discussed in a recent

piece the way in which destitute widows in Vrindavan are terribly ironic

against the institution of marriage. So, while we are pointing at the op-

eration of a heterosexual reproductive norm, we can also locate critical

moments. A dominant that operates across divides does not sanction unex-

amined cultural interference in the name of international feminism.

JS: You said that neither of these women were subaltern in a strict use

of the term. But if we are talking of the subaltern in the strict sense, then,what kinds of narratives can we rely on? Or are we already bringing them

into a particular kind of logic? Does subalternity have to remain unnameable?

GS: When one thinks about subalternity in the sense of no lines of

mobility into upward social movement, its still not unnameable. We must,

however, take a moratorium on naming too soon, if we manage to pen-

etrate there. There is no other way for you and me to penetrate there.

Whatever the hell else we are doing, we have to be earning trust. Un-

fortunately thats also the model of good fieldwork. That is why I say

fieldwork without transcoding to describe this other approach, a fieldwork

whose end is not producing discourse for our equals by bringing back

news. Theres nothing particularly good about penetrating into subal-

ternity. Im not in search of the primitive or anything. But if we are going

to talk about it, then I will say that if one manages to penetrate in there,

and its not easy, then I think what we have to do is take a moratorium

on speaking too soon. I used to be against information retrieval years ago,

but now Ive thought it through in greater detail. We hear a lot of talk



13/17


nowand Im not particularly happy about itabout intellectual capitaland cultural capital. And its a nice, trendy, sexy metaphor. If we are going

to use that metaphorology, then I would say that this is like mercantile

capitalism: buying cheap and selling dear because nobody can go there.

So thats something one really must be careful about. Its not unnameable.

In many ways, its only too easily nameable!

JS: Well, I suppose I meant unnameable in the sense of avoiding a

transcoding and a quick conversion into a particular logic. But I am in-

terested in what you say about inevitably finding oneself doing fieldwork.

GS: There is no other model. You are a person who is clearly not a

subaltern person, who has moved into a group which clearly is subaltern

with no kind of mobility. And you are earning trust so that you can do

whatever it is that you are there to do. So Im thinking of the best modelsof fieldwork. One is tempted, when one is not an anthropologist oneself,

to equate anthropology with its worst examples. You know what I mean?

That patient effort to learn without the goal of transmitting that learning

to others like me, it seems to me, can be described by others as fieldwork,

and I would not have a way of saying no. My goal is not to produce well-

written texts about those experiences. If that were so, then I would not

be able to learn because my energies would be focused toward digesting

the material for production. Its as simple as that. There is nothing mys-

terious there. If your energies are focused toward that, you are constantly

processing, and you are processing it into what you already know. Youre

not learning something. So this is why I say that you should perhaps call

it fieldwork, because learning from below is too pious sounding. Andtoday, I would accept the word fieldwork because its less self-ennobling

than learning from below.

JS: What about the teaching you have just finished in Hong Kong? Do

you consider that fieldwork?

GS: I think in a certain sense, everything, for me now, has become

fieldwork. So the word has lost its interest.

JS: Are you a wild anthropologist?

GS: Well, I have always been; we have always been. Thats how I talked

about colonial subjects and postcolonial subjects. And today it is very true

of the new immigrant. Very true indeed. We internalize the folkways of

the metropolis without disciplinary authorization. Hong Kong for me is

a very interesting case. As you know, Im not really yet fully back. Ive

been teaching for five months at the Hong Kong University of Science

and Technology, and Im just on my way back to New York. This university

is among the top forty in science and technology in the world, and the

humanities component is much more old-fashioned, because its clearly



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S I G N S W in te r 2 00 3 621

not a radical humanities university. I was asked to teach poststructuralism.When I went there, I saw that in factwell, the students themselves told

me in a preliminary meetingthey didnt know the rest of Western literary

tradition. So, I scrapped my course immediately, and I started teaching

from Aristotle on down. What I was interested in doing was speaking as

an Asian to Asians, because the languages used in Hong Kong are Chinese

and English. So, with my miserable classical Greek, Im pushing Aristotle

in Greek, with my miserable Italian, Im pushing Dante in Italian. I kept

telling themYou read the West not because everything Western is good,

so that you can theoretically apply it to your raw material. Do not read

the West because everything Western is bad, so that you can show how

Chinese was better. Both are the same thing. Read it because it is there

and, in certain respects, it won. Then youll see that its interesting. Andthen, when we began to read all these other languages, and of course,

they didnt read these languages at all, I would try extremely hard to push

through. I would say to them, remember, its not only Chinese that loses

by translation; these languages also lose by translation. There was no

English when Aristotle wrote. You have to think about that. And within

that, to always keep my head straight on gender. That was much more

difficult, because in a postgraduate seminar at a science and technology

university, you cant make the usual kinds of gender pronouncements. So

you have to think through the ways in which you are going to make this

gender analysis not just relate to U.S. feminism and Hong Kong feminism,

or to Asia Labor Monitor. I remember the class where we did Hrotswitha

von Gandersheim; for me the question is why must we read a piece ofliterature by a woman in order to get to the beginnings of feminist theory,

but the oral presentations related to a Filipina pointing at how Catholicism

oppresses women, and a Hong Kong Chinese woman doing character-

ology because her teachers are influenced by mainstream Euro-U.S. fem-

inism. I found, without planning, that I could only undo this by showing,

by example, that an Asian could take Europe as the object of investigation.

Is this to be interpellated as an Asian? This was, for me, an incredibly

interesting learning experience.

JS: In saying that you were an Asian teaching Asians about the Western

tradition, are you saying that you didnt teach the course the same way

you would at Columbia?

GS: Its not that I would not teach it differentlybecause I didnt go

in thinking I would teach it any different. But this was an unusual situation

of one kind of Asian teaching another kind of Asian the traditions of the

West, but in the original languages. I did not feel disenfranchised in the

way in which . . . It amuses me, I dont really feel disenfranchised at



15/17


Columbia, but you know metaphorically, as an Indian woman teachingAristotle to white Americans, there is a certain peculiarity.

JS: Although you can do it in the original language . . .

GS: But nonetheless! So it isnt that I would have taught the course

differently at Columbia, but I found myself really in a fully different teaching

situation. I can say that while teaching at Columbia I have been trying

hardest to emphasize the imagination as an in-built instrument of othering

ourselves. Because I think the real problem at Columbia is that the student

is encouraged to think that he or she lives in the capital of the world. The

student is encouraged to think that he or she is there to help the rest of

the world. And he or she is also encouraged to think that to be from other

parts of the world is not to be fully global. And New York City can become

transparent. So therefore my biggest undertaking, my biggest task, is activelyto dramatize the imagination as an instrument of othering. In other words,

to teach how to read in the most robust sense, that is to say, suspending

oneself and entering the text and the other. If indeed we are thinking about

othering as a good thing, it is a kind of chosen othering, as it were, the

chosen othering through the imagination. Strictly speaking, nothing is more

conducive to this than working on a cultural script that is not supposedly

yours. And that is one of the reasons why I admire the directions in which

your work has gone. And Ive said this to many people. I consider this to

be altogether admirable.

JS: I am interested in juxtaposing the different sites of your teaching

in order to see how each location transforms your pedagogical practices.

You have already talked about teaching in Hong Kong and New York.Correct me if my information is wrong, but I read somewhere that you

organized a teachers training course in Bangladesh, and I would like you

to talk about this as a third site of your teaching.

GS: No, not in Bangladesh. I mean, yes, I did do it in Bangladesh, but

my general focus is in India. I hope in fact in some way to move away

from my own cultural inscription. I did try it for a little while in Algeria.

I have other plans about which I will say nothing. But the Indian stuff is

because my mother tongue is Bengali, and if you really want to involve

yourself with what I calledIve said it once already, but that is my

phrasethe largest sector of the electorate in the global South, then you

must know their native language well. I mean, I know Hindi, but not in

the way in which one can actually train extremely ill-trained teachers.

JS: When you say ill-trained, what do you mean?

GS: Badly educated, you know. Mostly not high school graduates.

JS: They are going to be teaching in rural schools?



16/17

S I G N S W in te r 2 00 3 623

GS: They are not going to; they do teach. They teach in these schoolsthat I run. So, yes, I do train them how to teach. What else?

JS: Well, can you speak a little bit more about your schools in India,

because when you talked about your teaching in Hong Kong, you estab-

lished a whole scenario . . .

GS: Because the Hong Kong scene can be imagined. But if I talk about

these places, first of all, I think I would get the kind of approval from

your readership which I would much rather earn because of my theoretical

work. You know, there is a certain kind of benevolent approval which I

really resist. Im being as honest as I can be.

JS: Well, I was thinking more theoretically, because you are a teacher.

GS: These are one-room schools, okay, so they are very different from

my own upbringing. Remember what I was saying about intranationalcultural difference? These people are generally aboriginal, whereas Im a

metropolitan, middle-class caste Hindu. First of all, it took me the longest

time to learn what the nature of the bad teaching was. Believe me, Jenny,

that is a long process, because you cannot undo thousands of years of

oppressing the mind through these nice kinds of Montessori-style exper-

iments. So in fact, the real challenge is to be able to produce principles

of change in teaching that can be internalized by this ridiculously feeble

teaching corps. Im not at all sure of anything thats happening or not

happening. When you see these things in pictures and posters and booklets

or television, the protofeudal, downwardly class mobile, liberally outraged

activists are always present. Im sorry that this cynicism has come up in

the last ten or twelve years. The question is how long this education wouldlast if the activists were not at all present? How long? Two years? Two

months? Three years? Five years? Fifty years? Maybe seventy years, as in

the case of the Soviet Union? History is much longer. So thats the way

in which one learns how to teach with no guarantees.

JS: The undoing is the most difficult?

GS: Well, not anymore. I used to talk about the undoing before I had

started this stuff. If you get into it, it gets undone. You dont even know

how its getting undone. Youre surprised by it. Youre surprised by the

unexpected, and it affects your other kind of writing. So its really a lot

of fun although its so uncertain. There are absolutely no guarantees, so

one has to remember what that young woman said so correctlyIts

good for the schoolchildren. But the moment you feel its really working,

you have to stop and ask yourself, for whom is it working? Give it a try;

be absent. See. And you will see within the week . . . its not so easy to

undo a thousand years.



17/17


JS: Weve reached the end of the interview. I dont know if you wantto add anything else at this stage.

GS: I dont think so, except for what a pleasure this conversation has

been. Weve known each other now for such a long time, and generally,

the interview session is with a relative stranger. It was fun to speak in the

presence of intimacy, past intimacy.

Department of English

University of California, Los Angeles (Sharpe)

Department of English

Columbia University (Spivak)

References

Landry, Donna. 2001. The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and

Ecology in English Literature, 16711831. New York: Palgrave.

Mindry, Deborah. 2001. Nongovernmental Organizations, Grassroots, and the

Politics of Virtue. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26(4):

11871211.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and

the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, 271313.

Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing

Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Yegenoglu, Meyda. Forthcoming. Inhabiting Other Spaces: Touristsand Migrants

in the Postcolonial World. In Transactions: Tourism in the Southern Mediter-ranean, ed. Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Reiker.

Documents

A Conversatio a conversation with gayatri chakravorty spivakSpivak_politics and the Imagination