For education purpose

1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's
Concept of Subaltern

2. Prepared by Gayatri Nimavat
Roll No. :6
M.A. semester 3 Batch : 2022-24
Paper 205: Cultural Studies
Email id : gayatrinimavat128@gmail.com
Enrollment no. : 4069206420220019
Submitted to the Department of English, MKBU

3. Table of Contents
● Introduction
● Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
● What is Cultural Studies?
● What is Subaltern?
● Concept of Subaltern from Gramsci to Spivak
● Subaltern Theory
● Cultural Studies and Subaltern
● Conclusion
● References

4. Introduction
Imagine a world where your voice is silenced. Where your story
is never heard. Where you are invisible. This is the world of the
subaltern.
In the essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Gayatri Spivak
delves into the plight of those relegated to the margins of
society. The subaltern is not merely the oppressed or the
marginalized, but those whose very existence is denied by the
dominant discourse. They are the ones who have no history,
no voice, and no place in the grand narrative of progress.
Spivak's question is not simply a matter whether the subaltern
can speak, but how they can speak. For in a world where their
voices are already spoken for by the dominant culture, how can
they ever truly articulate their own subjectivity?

5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (born February 24, 1942, Calcutta [now
Kolkata], India), Indian literary theorist, feminist critic, postcolonial
theorist, and professor of comparative literature noted for her
personal brand of deconstructive criticism, which she called
“interventionist.” (Britannica)
She is a founding member of the historic Subaltern Studies Collective,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a central voice in postcolonial and
globalization studies, with a strong influence as well on international
feminism and poststructuralist thought.
She realizes herself sometimes as Third-world woman, as a marginal
awkward special guest, a American Professor , a Bengali middle-class
exile and sometimes as a successful American academician. She has
been taken for granted in the positioning of the subject as a Third
World subject. (Ambesange)

6. What is Cultural Studies
Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field of studies,
which means that it draws from many different subject
areas including sociology, anthropology, political science
and history.
Cultural studies is in fact the study of the way in which
culture is constructed and organized and the ways in which
it evolves and changes over time. (Györke)

7. What is Subaltern?
People consider Subaltern as the unrepresented group
of people in the society, people of inferior race, not fit for
making any real contribution to the society and therefore
they cannot speak, but in reality subaltern can speak but
others do not have the patience to listen to them.
The ‘Subaltern’ is a military term which means ‘of lower
rank’. The subaltern has become the major issue of
discussion in postcolonial studies. It tries to explore the
unjust representation of the third world women and
men, working class or black people in literature.
(Ambesange)

8. Concept of Subaltern from Gramsci to Spivak
The notion of the subaltern was first referred to by the Italian Marxist
political activist Antonio Gramsci in his article “Notes on Italian History”
which appeared later on as part of his most widely known book Prison
Notebooks written between 1929 and 1935.
The subaltern classes refer fundamentally in Gramsci’s words to any “low
rank” person or group of people in a particular society suffering under
hegemonic domination of a ruling elite class that denies them the basic
rights of participation in the making of local history and culture as active
individuals of the same nation. (Louai)
“The subaltern classes by definition, are not unified and cannot unite
until they are able to become a "State”: their history, therefore, is
intertwined with that of civil society, and thereby with the history of
States and groups of States” (Gramsci)

9. These scholars led by Ranajit Guha came to be known as the
Subaltern Studies Group. With the emergence of the Subaltern
Studies Group or Subaltern Studies Collective, as it is also called, in
India back in the early 1980s, the subalternity as a concept, gained
a worldwide currency. This group was founded by Ranajit Guha.
(Louai)
In the Preface to ‘Subaltern Studies I’ (1982), Guha writes:
“The word subaltern stands for ‘of inferior rank’. It will be used in
these pages as a general attribute of subordination in South Asian
society expressed in terms of caste, class, gender and office.”
(Guha)

10. The concept of the subaltern moved to a further more complex theoretical debate with the
intervention of the Indian-American postcolonial feminist critic, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
who was criticized in her groundbreaking essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) the
assumptions were projected by the Subaltern Studies Group. (Louai)
She stands for women as a differentiated gender because of the outrageous exclusion of their
participation in anti-colonial history. Spivak contends, “The question is not of female
participation in insurgency, or the ground rules of the sexual division of labor, for both of
which there is „evidence‟; rather, both were used as object of colonialist historiography
and as a subject of insurgency, though the ideological construction of gender keeps the male
dominant. If in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot
speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow” (Spivak)

11. Subaltern Theory
Can the subaltern speak? What must the elite do to watch out for the continuing construction of the
subaltern? The question of 'woman' seems most problematic in this context. Clearly, if you are poor,
black and female you get it in three ways. If, however, this formulation is moved from the first-world
context into the postcolonial context, the description 'black' or 'of color' loses persuasive significance.
The necessary stratification of colonial subject-constitution in the first phase of capitalist imperialism
makes 'color' useless as an emancipatory signifier. (Spivak)
Gayatri Spivak forced us to evaluate our subjectivity by asking the question "Can the subaltern speak?"
In this essay she argues that the subaltern Hindu woman does not have the agency to speak for (her)
self and is always 'spoken for by different groups. Spivak critiques the discourse on sati (widow-
burning) in the early nineteenth-century India vis-à-vis the colonial discourse of "saving" Hindu
women from Hindu men. (Chincholkar)
Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the
woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced
figuration of the 'third-world woman' caught between tradition and modernization. (Spivak)

12. Spivak, faced with this difficulty of specifying the realm of subalternity, shifts to reconsider the
issues of the subaltern groups by dealing with the problems of gender and particularly Indian
women during colonial times. She reflected on the status of Indian women relying on her
analysis of a case of Sati women practices under the British colonial rule.
Spivak relates the fate of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a relative of Spivak’s who hanged herself in
1926 Calcutta. Bhuvaneswari’s story interests Spivak because while her staging of her suicide
exemplifies the “interventionist practice” that resistance entails, the absorption of her story into
the broader culture reveals the futility of such gestures in the face of the patriarchal order. This
patriarchy was instantiated clearly in the debate around widow immolation — known as sati — in
British India.
Bhuvaneswari, an unmarried woman, did not, of course, commit sati. But for Spivak, her act of
suicide was nevertheless significant because it was an instance of resistance against the
patriarchal ideology that generated sati (Majumdar)

13. Social formations and Subalterns they construct
Social Formation
Class
Empire
Subaltern Dominant Group Ideology
Working classes Capitalist/ Bourgeois Capitalism
Natives Europeans Colonialism
Patriarchy women Men Gender
Nation
Ethnic/ Cast
minorities
Majority
Homogenization
and Nationalism
(Nayar)

14. Cultural studies and Subaltern
Spivak uses theterm “double bind,” borrowed from Derrida to address the
question of the rupture between raceand class, body and mind, self and other,
among other opposites as well as affinitive categories.
Spivak defines culture as "a package of largely unacknowledged assumptions,
loosely held by a loosely outlined group of people mapping negotiation between
the sacred and the profane, and the relationship between the sexes".
Cultural studies scholar is able to perceive the complexities of culture in two ways:
(1) In the grip that exists between academic discourse and culture as practice.
(2) In the culture of the metro pole which he inhabits an insider. (Györke)

15. Conclusion
In short, the concept of the subaltern, initially introduced by Antonio
Gramsci and further explored by scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, has shed light on the marginalized and those of inferior rank in
society, often based on factors like caste, class, gender, and office. She
challenged assumptions within the subaltern discourse, emphasizing the
importance of gender and the struggles faced by subaltern women. Her
work highlights the need to recognize and amplify the voices of
marginalized individuals who have historically been silenced within
dominant narratives.

16. References
Ambesange, Praveen V. “Postcolonialism, Gayatri Spivak and the Subaltern: Struggle and Voices of the Disenfranchised.”
9 March 2019,
https://www.academia.edu/93080653/Postcolonialism_Gayatri_Spivak_and_the_Subaltern_Struggle_and_Voices
_of_the_Disenfranchised. Accessed 23 October 2023.
Britannica, "Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak". Encyclopedia Britannica, 20 Feb. 2023,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Gayatri-Spivak. Accessed 23 October 2023.
Chincholkar-Mandelia, Rujuta. “FIRE: A SUBALTERN EXISTENCE?” Journal of Third World Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, 2005,
pp. 197–209. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45194227. Accessed 22 Oct. 2023.
Guha, Ranjit. Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society. India, Oxford University Press, 1982.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. ElecBook, The Electric Book Company, 1999.
Györke, Ágnes. “Cultural Studies and the Subaltern: Theory and Practice.” ELOPE: English Language Overseas
Perspectives and Enquiries 9.2 (2012): 89–99. Web.

17. Louai, El Habib. “Retracing the concept of the subaltern from Gramsci to Spivak: Historical developments and new
applications.” Academia.edu,
https://www.academia.edu/6286304/Retracing_the_concept_of_the_subaltern_from_Gramsci_to_Spivak_Historic
al_developments_and_new_applications. Accessed 23 October 2023.
Majumdar, Nivedita. “Silencing the Subaltern: Resistance and Gender in Postcolonial Theory.” Catalyst Journal,
https://catalyst-journal.com/2017/11/silencing-the-subaltern. Accessed 23 October 2023.
Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. Pg 56 to 59 Viva Books, 2008.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Edited by Amber Husain, Afterall Books, 2020.

18. Thank You