Page 108 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE POLITICS OF DIFFERENCE

Paying her dues simultaneously to both the post-structuralist
academy and post-colonialist politics, Spivak suggested to her colleagues
in the Subaltern Studies group: “strategically adhering to the essentialist
notion of consciousness, that would fall prey to an anti-humanist
critique, within a historiographic practice that draws many of its
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strengths from that very critique”. Which means, in short, that
whatever deconstruction’s theoretical purchase when directed at
European, white, male, bourgeois humanism, post-colonial theorists
must nonetheless proceed as if humanism were still valid, as if the
subject had still not been decentred, as if deconstruction had failed, if
ever they are adequately to represent insurgent, or “subaltern”,
consciousness itself. As Spivak continues: “the Subaltern Studies
group…must remain committed to the subaltern as the subject of
history. As they chose this strategy, they reveal the limits of the critique
of humanism as produced in the West”. 95
This resort to a kind “strategic” humanism is neither so shocking
nor so original as Spivak believes. It is reminiscent, at one level, of
Derrida’s own decision to exempt Marxism from deconstructive critique
and of his deliberate refusal to join in the “anti-Marxist concert” of
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the post–1968 period in France. At another, it even rehearses something
of Thompson’s older socialist humanist argument against structuralism,
an argument which Spivak herself cursorily dismisses as “trivializing”. 97
For what made Thompson’s humanism distinctively socialist was
precisely its own sense of the strategic importance of a kind of class
essentialism: this was in fact one of the important matters at issue
between Thompson and Williams in the debate over The Long
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Revolution. The necessity for this resort to strategic essentialism—
not only in Spivak, but also in Derrida and in the feminist theorist,
Elaine Showalter —surely casts doubt on the entire anti-humanist
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theoretical enterprise. For what use is a theory which requires for its
effective application that we pretend not to believe in it?
Post-colonial theory was initially very much the creation of “Third
World” intellectuals working in literary studies within “First World”
universities. Edward Said is Palestinian and Gayatri Spivak Indian,
and both teach in English and comparative literature at Columbia
University. One could easily add to the list: Homi Bhabha is an Indian
in English at the University of Sussex, Dipesh Chakrabarty an Indian
in critical theory at the University of Melbourne. The resultant
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combination of Third Worldist cultural politics and French

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