Page 202 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

196 CULTURAL STUDIES

In her last chapter on the question of cultural studies, when Spivak racily
concludes The proof of the pudding is in the classroom’ (274), one returns to
her opening interview where she offers a way of providing productive critique to
students who, forgetting the female subaltern in the post-colony, might claim
marginality for themselves:

[I]t seems to me that one can make a strategy of taking away from [students]
the authority of their marginality, the centrality of their marginality, through
the strategy of careful teaching, so that they come to prove that that authority
will not take them very far because the world is a large place.
(p.18)

Beyond the dodging of attributions of marginality, Spivak’s interest in catachreses
seems also tied to a critical practice that can always gesture at an elsewhere—so
much so that even history enters ‘as catachresis, rather than as the real nitty-gritty
about materiality’ (1990:157). This ‘elsewhere’ could be the ‘outside’ of Spivak’s
title, but, at another level, it also provides an alibi for the persistence of ‘failure’,
the failure of readings, of texts, and of the possibility of attaining the ‘purity’ of
beginnings or ends. Spivak should interest us, finally, as a reader of failed texts.
Inhabiting a general postcolonial paradigm, like C.L.R.James who recognized
that it was impossible to abstract his own history or the history of his peoples from
the deep entanglement with the culture of the colonizer, Spivak produces in this
book readings that are motivated, in her case, by the Derridean insistence that
something can serve as both medicine and poison. While the stricter guardians of
leftist cultural politics might fault such an approach for its eclecticism, Spivak’s
point might well be that eclecticism, redefined as the irreducible impurity of culture
and its influences, is inescapable. In her engagement with Mahasweta Devi’s
fiction, Spivak negotiates ‘failure’ in a more immediately visible, political context.
It is not so much as the limit where the text reveals its radical heterogeneity but
the site where the narrative of postcolonial liberation reaches a crisis. Spivak writes
of the displacement of the subaltern, gendered body on to, quite literally, the
national map in Devi’s story ‘Douloti the Bountiful’; even in her recording of the
less-than-ordered postcolonial space, the division of interests is not in the least
obscured:
Where everything works by the ruthless and visible calculus of super-
exploitation by caste-class domination, the logic of democracy is thoroughly
counter-intuitive, its rituals absurd. Yet here too, the line between those who
run and those who give chase is kept intact.
(p. 87)

Yet, it is precisely in Spivak’s reading of Devi where, perhaps most impressively,
the encoding of a woman’s body by ‘usurer’s capital, imbricated, level by level,
in national industrial and transnational global capital’ is demonstrated; it is there