Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on Colonialism, Development and Gender

Reading Gaytri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? radically changed my view on the gendered discourse found in postcolonial and development studies.

Spivak invites the reader to rethink how development is framed and utilised as a tool for subjugation within the colonies and in particular, her home of India. She suggests that our roles as radical critics or subaltern investigators, is to examine the ethics of representation: How do we ‘speak’ on behalf of the ‘Other?’

Poorly, and irresponsibly most often.

Even within critical circles, relaying the voice of the subaltern tends to entangle the (usually) Western academic who is themselves complicit in problematic institutional structures.

The answer, if there is (or needs to be) an answer to Spivak’s title if that yes the subaltern can speak, we, however, seem unable to hear them. In this way, Spivak frames the norms of neo-colonial, patriarchal and neoliberal structures as forming our approach to development work and as such, subaltern women, standing at the intersections of race, class, colonialism, and gender, tend to be dually silenced.

For example, in her review of the British Raj’s approach to Sati (self-immolation or widow sacrifice), Spivak highlights the West’s normativization of the life of a woman in a particular context without knowing the ‘ground-level’ value codings of her experience.

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