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Literary TheoryDiscussion on Spivak (Can the Subaltern Speak?) and Spillers (Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe) May 19, 2011 In this week, please focus on Spivaks Can the Subaltern Speak? (Section A). After you think that you have a fair grasp of Spivaks problematic, proceed to discuss Section B on Spillers Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe. A summary of the latter is provided at the end of this handout. A. 1. On Representation: In Section I, Spivak discusses in details the different definitions or presumptions of class (here the shorthand for the proletariat class, later as the subaltern, later as the subaltern woman) in Deleuze/Foucault and in Marx. Her argument for Marxs unessentialist (artificial, p. 278) concept of class centers on the distinctions between Vertreten (used by Marx) and Darstellen (presumed by Foucault, Deleuze and other leftists). Please read the passages distinguishing the two senses of representation on p. 275 and p. 276 closely, including Marxs definition of the proletariat class. Explain why Marxs discussions 1) entail a social subject whose consciousness and Vertretung are dislocated and incoherent (p. 276); 2) imply a critique of the subject as individual agent [and] a critique even of the subjectivity of a collective agency (277); and 3) do not lead to the positivism (p. 277), positivist empiricism (p. 275), representationalist realism (p 274)the justifying foundation of advanced capitalist neocolonialism (p. 275)implicit in Foucault and Deleuzes philosophy of power and desire.. 2. On Subaltern Studies: The title of the essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? often gives the impression that Spivak is speaking from the perspective of subaltern studies, when in fact she is critical of it in this essay. Please read and explain her challenges on subaltern studies: First, explain how she problematizes and historicizes its formation on p. 282; Secondly, read her close analyses of Ranajit Guhas definitions of the subaltern on pp. 283-4, especially her reading of item #3 on pp. 284-4 and item #4 on p. 285. Finally, explain her critique of Ajit K. Chaudhury. Why, in the final analysis, are all three [European intellectuals, subaltern studies, and internationalist Marxism] united in the assumption that there is a pure form of consciousness (p. 286)? (This, then, is the springboard for her critique of the alliance politics, p. 289. You may also include this part to your discussion and show how Spivak counters this utopian alliance politics with the call for close analyses of worlding of the world (p. 286), of international division of labor.)

3. On sati/suttee: Against the benevolent imperialist discourse (p. 298) and Indian nativist argument that the women actually wanted to die (297), Spivak famously concocts a sentence (voice?)White men are saving brown women from brown men (p. 296). She examines, as in Freuds psychoanalysis, the history of repression that produces the final sentence (297). Her examination of the multi-layered history and discourse leads Spivak to connect widow sacrifice with martyrdom (p. 302) and to the suicide of the female revolutionary, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, at the end of the essay. Please discuss this complicated historical/discursive trajectory from the fabrication of repression to a constructed counternarrative of womans consciousness, thus womans being, thus womans being good, thus the good womans desire, thus womans desire (p. 299/p. 304). Explain specifically the following points: 1) the history and pre-history of Hindu widow sacrifice summarized by Spivak on p. 299 (tatvajnana, first category of sanctioned suicide), p. 300 (18th and 19th century Bengal according to Ashis Nandy), p. 302 (brahmacarya and satyagrah), p. 303 (jauhar), and p. 304 (Raghunandanas transpositions); 2) the irony of choice and free will in both the imperialists and nativist accounts after the British abolition in 1829; and 3) the ideological continuity or discontinuity in Bhuvaneswaris suicide, as the uncanny agency of the subaltern voice-consciousness. 4. A general question on the role of the intellectual: Throughout the essay, Spivak is concerned with the role of the intellectual (both First-world and postcolonial) in her (rhetorical) question, Can the Subaltern Speak? (to which she answers point-blank, The subaltern cannot speak, p. 308). While critical of Foucault and Deleuze to have bypassed the critiques of representation and ideology as well as the subaltern studies presumption of self-representation, Spivak nevertheless argues that there is no unpresentable subaltern subject that can know and speak itself; the intellectuals solution is not to abstain from representation (p. 285). The unsettling question, however, is how. Do you think Spivak offers a way for intellectuals to not abstain from representation? (You can also use her discussions of Derrida to explain whether you find her intellectual model sufficient.) B. 1. (Contd from A. 1) Please discuss the problems of representation in the Moynihan Report (Section I). 2. Both Spivak and Spillers react to the psychoanalytic foregrounding of the family and Lacans concept of The Name of the Father (Spivak: p. 278/ Spillers, Section III). Are there similarities in their critiques?

3. (Contd from A. 2) Both Spivak and Spillers resist a positivist and essentialist definition of the subaltern/the negro. Both of them critique the first-world (feminist) intellectuals account of desire. Against desire and identity, Spivak highlights interests and differends while Spillers proposes to substitute the interest in negros body (or skin) with the concept of flesh (387). Please discuss and compare their strategies and agendas. 4. (Contd from A. 3) Both Spivak and Spillers emphasize history. Compare the way they re-introduce the palimpsestic historiography (Spivak: Section IV/ Spillers: Section II): what are the texts they re-examine and what interventions does this historical reading make?

Mamas Baby, Papas Maybe by Hortense J. Spillers PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. The Namethe African American Woman & the Personal Pronoun Remember Austins example: I name this ship the Queen Elizabeh, Lacans Nom/Non du Pre, and Butlers Hey! You! or Hey! Nigger
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Peaches and Brown Sugar, Sapphire and Earth Mother, Aunty: a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. (384)

* contrary to psychoanalysis, for which signification operates on or is generated by the (signifier of the) lack, the names by which I am called in the public render an example of signifying property plus. -- the black woman: telegraphic coding, mythical prepossession 2. Spillers responses to the Moynihan Report
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Check: http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm The Moynihan Report was conducted in 1965 and supported by the Office of Policy Planning and Research of the United States Department of Labor. It states that with the wins on civil rights, racial problems in American have got worse, not better. The problem, the report states, lies in the Negro family. The four chapters explore the pathology of Negro family and community:: Chapter I. The Negro American Revolution, Chapter II. The Negro American Family, Chapter III. The Roots of the Problem, Chapter IV. The Tangle of Pathology, and Chapter V. The Case for National Action.

quote from the Moynihan Report, which states that the retardation of the Negro race is to blame on the matriarchal kinship structure. (384) [According to Daniel Patrick] The Negro Family has no Father to speak of. (385)

Under the Moynihan rule, ethinicity itself identifies a total objectification of human and cultural motivesthe white family and the Negro Family, by outright assertion, in a constant opposition of binary opposition. p 386 the Other= pathological

the absence of the Negro Father, and the outlaw of the Daughterdoubles they transport us to a common historical ground, the socio-political order of the New World. (386)

3. Reading and Challenges of the Symbolic Law and the Name of the Father
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The notorious bastard has no official female equivalent. (384) p. 385)

(why?-

The stunning reversal of the castration thematic becomes an aspect of the African-American females misnaming. (385)

4. History (of the New World) = Flesh/Body of the African American Slave
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theft of the body, ungendering of the African American Body (386) The effect: the Captive Body without a subject position: it becomes purely thingness; it becomes pornographic

Therefore, besides the Body is also the Flesh Why Flesh instead of the Body?: (386-7) 1) it is where history of African American subjects is written on by the whips; 2) slavery is therefore high crimes against the flesh, in both senses of the word 3) its historicity indicates that race is no longer skin deep * the danger of forgetting the fleshp. 387 African American female body is not only raped; it is whipped. (not just a sexuality thing when the power un-genders)
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The Charleton Mercury ad: human laboratory of the atomized body (parts) in 1838: the language of capitivity and mutilation in the ruling episteme of naming and multilation: Does history happens? (387)

PART II: ANTHROPOLOGY, NARRATIVES OF CONTACT/CONQUEST

1. Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavuv Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789)
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Visual shock on both sides: what does this shock mean to Equiano? His subsequent journey across the Atlantic is a fall, a veritable descent into the loss of communicative force (398) The aphasia of the slave: the loss of the symbolic (398) The captive is renamed by the capitivating party. (398) Violence of the symbolic: no point of initiation; no direct reference, esp. on African American women, but violence prevails in the structure of dehumanized naming (the 4 volumes of Elizabeth Donnans documents do not contain direct references to slave women) (390) See: http://openlibrary.org/a/OL2213199A/Elizabeth-Donnan

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2. Gomes Eannes de Azuraras Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, 1441-1448) (in Elizabeth Donnan)
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Geography is fiction (p. 390) Description of types of black people: reducing a spectrum of dark skin to black as Ethiops (390-1)) Declension (391): it begins with a narrative self, in an apparent unity of feeling, and unlike Equiano, who also saw ugly when he looked out, this collective self uncovers the means by which to subjugate the foreign code of the conscience, whose most easily remarkable and irremediable difference is perceived in skin color.

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Skin supersedes blood relations to become the divider the ugly becomes the pagan The ugly and the faithless becomes unhuman, bestial (391) Differences (in food, architecture, customs) are translated into a fundamental degradation or transcendence, which then is connected to skin color (392)

3. The Brookes & the Middle Passage See: http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/TheMiddlePassage.aspx http://negroartist.com/Slave%20Ships%20and%20the%20Atlantic%20C rossing%20Middle%20Passage/pages/Plan%20of%20the%20British%20Slave %20Ship%20Brookes,%201789_jpg.htm

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Seemingly gender difference in the space assigned to each slave on the lower deck of The Brookes: (male: 1.8m x o.4 m; female: 1.7m x 0.4 m) H.S.s argument: gendering takes place within the confines of the domestic. The human cargo of a slave vessel offers a counter-narrative to notions of the domestic. (393) Slaves in the Middle Passage are in a place that is nowhere; they lack identity. Gender does not apply. Female slave experiences are not recordedneither their oppressions (they perform the same kind of labor as male slaves), nor their insurrection (394). No record of pregnant or expecting mothers the patriarchalized female gender is the only female gender (394)

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PART THREE: KINSHIP: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMENS EXPERIENCES 1. Definition of enslavement as appropriation (property) and as
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kinlessness Robertson & Kleins Women and Slavery in Africa 395 Meillassoux: slavery creates an economic and social agent whose virtue lies in being outside the kinship system The Mother does not own her children; they belong to the Master patronymic, patrifocal, patrilineal, and patriarchal order (396) African American kinship loses meaning, since it can be invaded at any given and arbitrary moment by the property relations. 396 Family is the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community. 396 Slavery creates a community of memory and inspirationcommunity instead of family (397) This different connectedness challenges the symbolic order and offers an alternative kinship that does not have legal or social efficacy. 2. Frederick Douglasss Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) ( )

Kinship is coupled with property

Kinship relationships in slavery will endanger property relationships; ownership of the children has to be deprived and given to the master: femininity loses its sacredness; motherhood loses its sacredness (398) Feelings of estrangement from the mother, brother, sister every African American can be seen as an orphan because the mother is absent

3. Malcolm El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)

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Similar thematic, despite the century that separates it from Douglass: loss of the father, siblings dispersed, estrangement and disremembering (398) 4. Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1860)

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The role of Mrs. Flint (white female) in the oppression of the black female (399): she acts out his madness Since the gendered female exists for the male, we might suggest that the ungendered female might be invaded/raided by another woman or man.

PART FOUR: NEW GRAMMAR/AFRICAN AMERICAN TALE AS TALE BETWEEN THE LINES 1. Critique of Mainstream Feminism
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Female gender is an outcome of certain political, social-cultural empowerment. Dispossession of slaves= loss of gender (400) One treads dangerous ground in suggesting an equation between female gender and mothering. And there is no easy reversal of the fathers No to the maternal Yes. (401)

2. Critique of Legal/Liberal Politics

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Law and encodation (of slavery) often becomes the peak of narrative points but they are the effects of the system of slavery which demands that a human treats another as property. (401)

Therefore, the system of slavery forms a relationship which is no longer inter-subjective, human to human. It is beyond reach for human agency or civil disobedience (402).

3. Critique of Postmodern Misnaming

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The example of the legislative enactment of 1798 in Maryland, where slave is in the same clause as stock, furniture, plates, books, etc. This is not Borgess or Foucaults (post-)modern order of things (which turns to abstract, conceptual, systematic connections between objects); this (the misplacement of the proper noun, slave) is realism.

One cannot only fight to take slave out of the sentence where you have stock, animals, furniture. One has to fight the syntax (grammar) that makes such a sentence possible. One has to introduce a new semantic field/fold. (402)

4. African American tale as the intervening, intruding tale, or the tale between the lines
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Harriet Jcaobs garret space (403) The loss of mother/motherhood is the origin of African Americans loss of subjectivity/humanity. This is the precondition of the Moynihan Report. (403)

The absence/lack of the father is substituted by the line from mother to son, a line which is then equated to animality. Misnaming of African American as the matrilineal community (403) Even though we are not even talking about any of the matriarchal features of social production/reproductionmatrifocality, matrilinearity, matriarchywhen we speak of the enslaved person, we perceive that the dominant culture, in a fatal misunderstanding, assigns a matriarchist value where it does not belong; actually misnames the power of the female regarding the enslaved community. Such naming is false because the female could not, in fact, claim her child, and false, once again, because motherhood is not perceived in the prevailing social climate as a legitimate procedure of culture inheritance.

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The African American Woman as a masquerade (404): the African-American woman, the mother, the daughter, becomes historically the powerful and shadowy evocation of a cultural synthesis long evaporatedthe law of the Motheronly and precisely because legal enslavement removed the African-American male not so much from sight as from mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Fathers name, the Fathers law.

The African American male (cultural presence) becomes the site of representation of the African American woman (cultural absence)404 Sapphire enacts her Old Man in drag, just as her Old Man becomes Sapphire in outrageous caricature. 385

New representational potentiality: we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a
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female with the potential to name), which her culture imposes in blindness, Sapphire might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female enpo