What determines your ability to speak? Your ability to participate in community or politics? What determines your status as a subject? What if you cannot “speak” in such spaces but must instead be spoken of by those who are given the status or role of “subject”?
With so much discussion recently about freedom of speech, and how to speak, in the face of verbal and physical and epistemic violence, it seems fitting to turn to Spivak.
In our last discussion, we came to question how the extremely marginalized could be able to speak out and change their circumstances. How can the voiceless be a part of Haraway’s or Irigaray’s feminist/cyborg/poly-vocal epistemology? How can they create new values under Deleuze’s understanding of the “will to power”? How can the disenfranchised participate? Should they?
To continue this discussion, we turn to Spivak on the “subaltern.”
Please Read:
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture.
This extremely influential essay addresses Foucault and Deleuze as thinkers working to conserve the “West as Subject.” What is this Subject? How was it created? And what does this mean for those on the fringes of this? Spivak is well known for her postcolonial and feminists critiques as well as her translation of and introduction to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology.
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See you at:
Harold Washington Library
5th Fl. North Study Room
6pm
August 2nd, 2016
Related Listening
Always Already Podcast on Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony:
“The white philosophers are also the colonizers!” She says with surprise. It’s worth a listen.
