Page 200 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

Catachresis is her middle name: the cautionary claims of Gayatri C.Spivak
Amitava Kumar
■ Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York and
London: Routledge, 1993), 350 pp.ISBN 0-415-90489-7 £12.99 Pbk
‘Akloo kursi par kyon nahin baitha?’ (Why didn’t Akloo sit on the chair?) This
question came at the end of an anecdote narrated by the veteran Indian Marxist
historian, Ram Sharan Sharma. In 1937, Sharma told me, he and some of his
friends, while they were students at Patna College, decided that they would no
longer subscribe to oppressive principles of hierarchy and would henceforth
consider Akloo, their low-caste hostel attendant, their equal. They agreed that
Akloo would now be asked to sit on a chair in their company.
Akloo was asked, but he refused. So, his enthusiastic well-wishers held him and
forcibly seated him. Akloo left the chair the moment he was released and never
appeared again.
Sharma’s largely rhetorical query, posed at the end of his tale, was designed to
make the point that social power is maintained both through economic and
ideological control. In some ways, Gayatri Spivak’s writing in the past decade has
been enormously influential in inserting the wedge of another answer to that
question, a response committed to the teasing out of complicities between those
who occupy different positions on the social map, divided and joined by lines of
oppression and the urge to freedom.
This deconstructive gesture has often been flatly interpreted by lit. crit.
practitioners in the American academy as nothing more than a mournful
declaration of despair. (In fact, ‘can the—speak?’ finds its hollow echo in the
fluorescent stillness of conference-rooms, in all those attempts to discover yet
again the silencing of the subaltern, though I’m happy to report its use at a recent
Duke University conference where the presenters, with a delicious sense of irony,
asked the audience to consider the question ‘can the suburban speak?’) In a more
energetic and complex sense, the collection of essays in Outside in the Teaching
Machine suggest that academic-cultural work is a modest but serious, political
enterprise. And that the scepticism of Spivak’s readings isn’t to be complacently
adopted (or, for that matter, dismissed) as a signature of ‘failure’ understood in
only one way; rather, it is to be read as a reminder that ‘whenever they bring out
the Ayatollah, remember the face that does not come on the screen, remember
Shahbano…. When the very well-known face is brought-out, remember the face
that you have not seen, the face that has disappeared from view, remember
Shahbano. Woman in difference, outside in the machine’ (241).
This raises another question: In remembering Shahbano, do I need to remember
Spivak?
Perhaps, yes. These essays, in particular the readings of Rushdie’s novel The
Satanic Verses and films like Genesis and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, re-cite the
formula for what Spivak terms ‘a new politics of reading’: ‘not to excuse, not to
accuse, establish critical intimacy, use (or ab-use) the seeming weak moments for