COLONIALITY, SUBALTERNITY,
AND REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME
May 26, 2022
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. Her books are Myself Must I Remake (1974), Of Grammatology (1976; translation of Derrida’s De la grammatologie, with critical introduction), In Other Worlds (1987), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Other Asias (2003), An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2013), and Readings (2014). She has won the Kyoto Prize (2012) and the Padma Bhushan (2013). She holds fifteen honorary doctorates. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” has become a worldwide classic. She is finishing a book on W. E. B. Du Bois and editing a hitherto untranslated exchange between Giulia and Tatiana Schucht and the incarcerated Antonio Gramsci. She is active in rural education, ecological agriculture, the role of subaltern languages in the field of development, and the fate of future generations.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Thank you for your time in the midst of a very hectic schedule, Gayatri. We began talking about this conversation when you were in rural India, and now you are on the brink of beginning a tour of lectures and meetings that will take you to the Gulf, Africa, and beyond. My first question is whether you can tell us a bit of what you have been engaged with in India during these past few months?
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: I do not have much “all-India” involvement beyond signing petitions, showing solidarity, and movement connections. My work is teaching and training for the development of a pedagogy that will develop the intuitions of democracy in the children of the largest sector of the electorate: the outcasts and tribals. They don’t call themselves “Dalits” now, that’s more in southern India, but the name is being picked up because politicians are using them. I have four elementary schools for the last thirty-six years and I also work on the development of ecological agriculture. I work with girls and boys, women and men, from a gender-sensitive practice. I’ve also recently been asked to work with the ministry of education in West Bengal, which is my home state. But there I’m feeling my ropes because I’m a Rosa Luxemburg–style social democrat: if the state calls me, I will go. It’s both medicine and poisonous. I’ve been involved on lower levels with the state for a very long time, but now this is the ministry. There I’m really learning how I can work with a state like West Bengal.
ILAN PAPPÉ: There is your theoretical writing about education, and also you have this very practical experience in educating. I wonder whether the things you are doing in the schools are associated with what you refer to as “holistic education”—Marx’s idea of educating for citizenship.
Can you elaborate on this and how it might differ from concepts such as “unlearning”? Where do we carry out this kind of education? You mentioned that part of what you do is work within the national educational system, which is a model you can follow in many other countries. But not in authoritarian regimes or in settler colonial regimes like Israel, where probably we need to seek parallel, alternative, and maybe even clandestine ways of educating the educators. Whichever way we choose, it seems you are charting for us an activist path that might help us to go beyond academic conversations on inhumanities in our ivory tower. Am I reading too much into the concept of holistic education and how global or local your experience can be?
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: When I was using the word “holistic,” what I actually meant was no class apartheid in education, so that it goes from subaltern to elite in a certain way so that people really don’t know anything about the bottom layer.
But I do not work within the national education system. I teach the national curriculum so that my students can enter the mainstream, if necessary. But the situation of the subaltern, groups on the fringes of history, is not generalizable. Every subaltern situation calls for its own tactic, strategy, policy, et cetera.
As for “unlearning,” it is the privileged unlearning their privilege. I think that is very narcissistic. It is better to use the privilege for subalternist intervention, although not as a sustained top-down policy. But unlearning false information in textbooks is absolutely essential. One must see what form the unlearning takes, how it appears. If we are just focused on unlearning our own privilege, first of all, it never happens. And second of all, it’s that kind of narcissistic self-involvement that you see in how bourgeois ideologues talk about themselves, as if they’re the example of the most radical stuff, and how they ask questions. I find that “unlearning of my privilege” boring and I think privilege should be used, although not in a sustained way. But unlearning false information in textbooks? Absolutely essential. We do it all the time.
ILAN PAPPÉ: As you observed, “the subaltern” is a term that is at the times misused, sometimes even abused. In particular, there seems to be a tendency to ignore the underpinning Marxist analysis in your work on the topic. To a certain extent, we probably exhausted the discussion about the validity and usefulness of the term, had it not been for the tragic fact that this century introduced us to many more and new subalterns.
My first question in this regard: Is the definition dynamic enough to include not only the obvious new subalterns, namely the life-seekers and refugees of this century, but also those who are the citizens of settler-colonial countries, such as the Palestinian minority in Israel whose citizenry does not immunize them from subalternity? And a second interconnected question: In your mind, is subalternity still a phenomenological term—unlike class or gender—that enables us to analyze inhumanity but not represent its victims or engage with their predicaments? Is this a fair approach to the concept, after so many years?
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: Well, I do think that “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was a beginning. I was having a certain kind of very metropolitan crisis about being taken to be an expert on French deconstruction. It was really a bit bogus because one is so de-skilled and one is always obliged to speak about the place of origin, et cetera, that at that point I should have realized it was good fortune to be taken as an expert on deconstruction! But that was when I wrote two pieces, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism” and “Can the Subaltern Speak?” But “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was really a beginning, and then things changed.
When the rights of citizenship cannot be accessed, as in the case of Palestine, that is certainly subalternity. We are doing it at home and we are doing it in India: taking away citizenship through various modes from Muslims who have lived there forever but do not have the papers. How would they prove it? That is subalternization, taking away rights of citizenship. And when our Palestinian colleagues suffer absolute discrimination in international professional travel, that is subalternization. Subalternity and subalternization are two different things, again asking for different kinds of strategies. The subaltern is certainly also racialized and gendered. We certainly need to engage with them—not just to learn from them how to teach, but also to consolidate infrastructure so that someday they can be heard.
If you just keep it as an idea, or especially if people come forward and say, “I’m a subaltern, I can speak. Hey, listen!” they haven’t understood that it’s not about self-promotion. Not every kind of suffering or location is subalternity as one can use it—because these are people now who vote! This is why I talked about intuitions of democracy, et cetera. Someone asked me, “How can you do it?” I can’t tell you. I’m just failing. I’ve learned from my mistakes for thirty-six years. Because you don’t undo the denial of intellectual labor—which is another condition of subalternity—by just being nice. I’m learning how to learn from failures and not think of them as failures.
It’s possible to fail in a certain way with the subaltern in a common enterprise, but intellectual labor cannot be taught. So “how?” is really one of those impatient elite questions. You would not ask me to teach you how to sing in just one session, would you? And it’s certainly more complicated, more difficult than playing the piano or singing revolution. Therefore, I would say that, yes, we need to engage it, but engaging with subalternity is not so easy. And anytime we want to represent ourselves as subalterns, we should stop immediately. Frederick Douglass did not represent himself as a subaltern. Remember him.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Let’s move to your engagement with history in the widest possible sense of the term. You help professional historians, like myself, to see the importance of theory when writing our historical work. And you use history to clarify a moral, philosophical position.
You are meticulous in your historical research, and my impression is that any point you want to emphasize comes with a historical example—culminating in your upcoming work on W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois allows us to build a new genealogy of racism, including what you called in your book An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization “low-grade racism.” Why do you attach so much importance to concretizing your theoretical arguments with historical examples? Is it a method of widening your readership? Is it a way of maintaining relevance to reality beyond discussive realities? Or is it something different altogether?
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: I have never asked myself, “Why do I always concretize the theoretical?” I’m glad you pointed it out. And, yes, I do! I’ve never thought to justify this. Maybe it’s the literary impulse to turn thinking into learning. I wish I had a couple of hours to talk about this incredibly hard thing—the imaginative activism of entering another space, effacing oneself as far as possible. For example, the last few days in Dakar and before that at the new Mohammed VI Polytechnic University. Having soldiered all my life, I have a strong self-concept, so that begins to interfere! It’s a resistance. But the imaginative activism of entering another space, effacing oneself as far as possible, comes out in interaction with historian friends.
I’ve never thought of the precolonial as a comfort zone, but that’s because I come from this caste, Hindu background. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is not postcolonial—it’s a very strong critique of the precolonial. I’ve taught myself to look for the universalizable there, in the precolonial, without universalizing. And to think secularism outside of the colonial story, which I am still trying to do.
I will think about this involvement with history, because it seems to me that history—its truth claims and verifiability—must go hand in hand with the fact that, in the literary, we learn to learn from the unverifiable. In a very difficult way. And the unverifiable is something that helps in the subaltern work because Gramsci’s main point is that they do not have access to historiography, which is the difference from the South Asian subaltern studies group.
ILAN PAPPÉ: A different aspect of the way you use history is to my mind more ambivalent, as probably it should be. History is also a reservoir of structures that can reemerge or be called upon by contemporary societies. When you were engaged in Radiating Globality,1 you and your colleagues noticed the resurgence of precolonial structures you refer to as “the negative outcome of the failure of liberation.” But when you discuss secularism and gender in traditional—for absence of a better term—societies while berating what you called “ready-fix feminism,” or when you mention the Ottoman Empire, which you beautifully described as “the carrier of an attitude of conflictual coexistence toward religious difference,” you seem to have much more respect for precolonial realities and even attitudes.
This is a more ambivalent relationship to precolonial structures. In this respect, I find you are very much attuned to the fascinating contemporary work done by Arab and North African thinkers who conjure the past as an inspiration for alternative models of liberation that will take them out of what they call “the long winter of Arab postcoloniality.” They dig into the past, also, to liberate themselves from equating universalism with Westernism, or Eurocentrism, in a search so poetically enunciated by the Tunisian poet Amina Said when she writes, “I issue from my childhood and thus from nowhere else.” Is it possible that part of decolonization is also demodernization, if modernization equates across Westernization? Or is it at least a cautious demodernization?
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: If we sat down together, as happened yesterday when I gave the inaugural talk for the Dakar Biennale, we begin to see how much we did agree. Maybe if we sat down together, the agreements would emerge. I was talking to them about why this kind of gesture is potentially a gesture that denies complicity, being folded together. In my work, I began to realize that the left and the right were completely allied—and you cannot do anything without noticing this. I was saying yesterday that there is no nationalist shame in acknowledging collaboration with certain areas of colonialism—very class-fixed, gender-focused. This is a complicated situation. I asked them to look at Flora Shaw’s book, A Tropical Dependency: An Outline of the Ancient History of the Western Sudan with an Account of the Modern Settlement of Northern Nigeria. This book was written by Flora Shaw—who later married Lugard, the head of Nigeria—and published in 1905. W. E. B. Du Bois’s personal copy is broken into nothingness.
When I asked yesterday, most people didn’t know the name of this book, which is about the fantastic Ifriqiya Islamic Empire in this area. Shaw was very much for this and against the Europeans, but she had a kind of racism against the Bantu that generally is still implicit in the Ifriqiya studies—that, for her, the Bantu lived in swamps and were cannibals. And I said to them, “Take a look—this is Du Bois’s copy. He certainly knew this book very, very well. And ask yourselves in what way these kinds of implicit attitudes are still ours.” As I say, the book came out in 1905.
So I’m not completely comfortable with creating alternative histories. I even said, “Why is that necessary? That’s a European fantasy.” Europe is also part of our heritage, but a Europe transformed by us. This is what we should investigate—that Europe was not “standing there by itself,” although it was trying to. The person who spoke after me at the Biennale, Ibrahima Wane, was fantastic on this. He gave such concrete examples of the transformation of Europe through the past centuries. It was Skip’s idea—Henry Louis Gates Jr.—that we should think about. The idea of “signifying”: how we are folded together, how we are part of what we critique. And that gives us a much stronger position than the creation of this binary opposition.
It can be a comfort zone. But that comfort is not the same as being global together. It’s theocracy in India, it’s the Silk Road in China, and it’s Europe being interpellated once again as the source of democratic behavior, when we look at Ukraine.
So it seems to me that we would really need to sit down together and ask ourselves, “Is this, indeed, what we want, too?” And that may be because of my historical position. I come from one of the worst traditions in the world, Aryanism, so therefore perhaps it’s hard for me to step out of it.
ILAN PAPPÉ: As I promised, the last part of our conversation will focus on Palestine. We will begin with Islamophobia. When the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya began, as someone who wrote about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine I was horrified by the similarities between the two cases in terms of planning, execution, the making of the refugee—and the international silence, which continues until today. In many ways it is a repeat of the years 1948 to 1950 in Palestine. Is there at the heart of the denial of the Palestinian ethnic cleansing and refugee problem, and the ethnic cleansing or genocide of the Rohingya, a strong element of Islamophobia? Particularly when compared with the compassion shown by the West to so-called white refugees from Ukraine, and notwithstanding the obviously different historical circumstances. Is this something that we need to face and calculate when other people are not raising their voices?
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: I want to share with the audience what I shared with you. I’m like a schoolchild—I write down exam questions. So at three in the morning, I was writing all these answers. And do you know what answer I wrote to this question? “Yes, Islamophobia.” All the other answers were long, but I don’t think this one requires a long answer. Of course, Islamophobia. And as part of a genocidal 86 percent majority in my country, I have to speak about Islamophobia in a way that carries shame. When the Babri Masjid was destroyed, my mother called me and wept on the phone, saying, “I’m ashamed to be a Hindu.” It’s the position that one occupies. That’s why I say to my students in the villages, “I’m your enemy. I’m good, but you must do without me. My parents were good, but thousands of years of destruction are not undone by two generations. You must do without me.”
With the Rohingya situation, this idea of homelessness and statelessness is deeply connected with Islamophobia. This is what is terrifying. Islamophobia gives a certain kind of “-ization” because there’s alternative internationality. It goes back to the suppression of Byzantium—it has a very long history and it gets transformed. When we talk about when the Ottoman began to modernize, there was a genocide. So that conflictual coexistence disappeared, just as the conflictual coexistence in my neighborhood disappeared in murderous violence in 1946, when I was four. So this whole business of conflictual coexistence? We know it and it can break down. It can become politicized, because religion is such a dangerous thing. That’s my childhood experience, that transformation and the killing—with machetes, not guns. Therefore, I would say yes, Islamophobia. It’s not something that we can elaborate on without going into a lot of history.
ILAN PAPPÉ: I’m totally persuaded that part of the treatment— the coverage and the discourse—of the Palestinians in the West, especially in the United Kingdom, is marred by Islamophobia. Let’s move to modes of resistance in Palestine. We were all shocked by the Israeli assassination of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, whom some of us knew very well. Reporting on the Israeli crimes is one mode of resistance in Palestine, but there are many others. Let me get us both into trouble and talk about suicide bombers, or any young men and women (sometimes teenagers) in Palestine who use their bodies in the struggle in the most tragic way imaginable.
You wrote, “Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed in the body where no other means will get through. It is both execution and mourning, for both self and other, where you die with me for the same cause, no matter which side you are on.”2 From my experience, this issue is one of the most challenging concerns when publicly defending the Palestinian anticolonialist struggle. I fully understand why the Palestinians are using every means at their disposal to stop the destruction of their homeland and their lives.
Do you still feel that way about this mode of resistance? Because I know that people find it unacceptable when you and I write these kinds of things. How do you feel about this or your engagement with the modes of resistance that cannot all be peaceful against a very violent, intent program of destruction, ethnic cleansing, and, at times, genocide?
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: Of course, it’s unacceptable if you are just sitting and being reasonable. We are not talking about reasonableness. We are talking about the limits of reasonableness when there is no response from the other side. When the evaluation of human worth turns, we should see who and what produces this conviction. That’s the way the subaltern speaks. That’s why Mohamed Bouazizi burnt himself in Tunis—there was something that could happen, there was a response. He did speak, didn’t he? I certainly still think that this is a response in extremis, when no response has been forthcoming, forever. What produces this change, which is completely against reason?
When saying it’s “unreasonable,” you need to ask, who is judging? Anyone like me, who gets such a response where people have read my work, who am I to say it’s unreasonable? Of course, from my little corner, it is unreasonable. But I must try to efface myself and go to that place—that’s the literary. When I wrote that piece, I won a prize given by George Bush for the most absurd academic piece and I wear it like a crown. It wasn’t Noam Chomsky, it wasn’t Edward Said, it was me, Gayatri Spivak, because I had tried to understand suicide bombing rather than just dismiss it as unreasonable. So that’s what I would say, when no response has been forthcoming. I’m still there.
ILAN PAPPÉ: My final question is about an issue that I know bothers our community of activists and scholars who deal with Palestine in the university. Many of us support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, and we include the idea of an academic boycott. The counterargument, used even by my good friend Noam Chomsky, is that including a boycott of academic institutions as part of our wish to show solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is a violation of academic freedom. How do you feel about this idea of an attempt by academics who cannot join a liberation army, but feel they are sending a tough message to Israeli academia? It’s a dialogue saying, “No, we are not going to have a normal conversation because you are complicit in what’s happening in your name, or sometimes collaborating directly with the oppression of the Palestinians.”
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: I would say, you cannot buy freedom at any price. And I would also say that when you begin the history of academic freedom with Kant, then you are making a mistake. Look at the academic freedom of the Brahmins. Look at the academic freedom of the Imperial Civil Service in China. Look at a much broader example of how academic freedom is bought, how the academy is put in its place where freedom can be bought at any price. I’m with you there. Develop some rage and undo the academy.
In 1899, when Du Bois saw that Sam Hose’s knuckles were going to be sold, he stopped and said, “I cannot teach the way I’ve been teaching. My teaching is now going to be called propaganda.” He said this, and then Gramsci says, “The new intellectual must be a permanent persuader.” They are already saying, “Forget academic freedom.” And yours is a position against the state of Israel, its policies and practices. It is not against a religion or race. If you’re talking about reasonableness, be reasonable. It’s against the policy of a state. I’ll be damned if I’m called an antisemite! It’s absolutely incorrect to call it antisemitic—it’s against a state. These are obvious answers that you would also give.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes, but we need to hear it.
GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: We need to say it. And we need to make it heard.