Here I am sharing my presentation of paper no- 8. It is a part of my academic activity. it is submitted to department of English MKBU.

1. Cultural studies and the subaltern
Name: Raval Mital M.
Roll no: 19
Bach Year: 2016 – 2018
M.A. Sem: 2
Paper name: Cultural Study
Presentation Topic: Cultural studies and subaltern
Submited to: Dr. Dilip Barad
Smt.S.B.Gardi
Department of English
M.K.Bhavnagar University

2. Introduction
 Gayatri Chakravorty spivak is an
Indian scholar, literary theorist and
feminist critic.
 She is university professor at
Columbia university.
 She is best known for her essay
“Can the subaltern speak?”
 Spivak was awarded by the ‘Kyoto
prize in Arts and philosophy’ and in
2013 she also received the ‘padma
bhushan’ award.

3. 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.

4. What is subaltern?
 A subaltern is someone with a low ranking in a social,
political or other hierarchy. It can also mean someone
who has been marginalized or oppressed.
 The subaltern is a technical term
for a certain kind of dispossessed
person.
• It is person who fits within the
model of the oppressed as the
being so marginalized as to not
even have the ‘voice’ of the oppress.

5. Gayatri spivak and The Subaltern
 The term spivak borrows from the Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci to signify the oppressed class.
 Spivak’s well-known argument is that the subaltern
cannot speak for himself because the very structure of
colonial power prevents the speaking.
 For the colonized woman speaking is even more
impossible because both colonialism and patriarchy
ensure that she keeps quiet.

6. The Fakeer of Jungheera The purpuse

8. Can subaltern speak?
• It relates to the manner in which western
cultures investigate other cultures.
 Spivak uses the example of the ‘Indian
sati practice of window suicide’.
 the main significance of this essay is in
its first part which presents the ethical
problems of investigating a different
culture base on “Universal” concepts and
frameworks.

9. Continue…..
• In the second part of essay she criticizing the intellectual
west’s desire of subjectivity”.
 Spivak points to the fact that the west is talking to itself, and
in its own language about the other.
 She hardly impressed with western effects to speak for the
other or try to “present his own voice”.

10. Cultural study and Subaltern
 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.

11. Reference
 Wikipedia
 Agnes gyorke cultural studies and the subaltern:
theory and practice