Page 203 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

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too that I’d argue we should address the limits of that text. In other words, let’s
ask the same question which interests Spivak: what are the conditions that make
Outside in the Teaching Machine fail?
When Spivak points out that in Devi’s ‘Breast-Giver’ it is cancer rather than
clitoral orgasm that is the excess of the woman’s body, she illuminates the limits
of the more universalizing brands of Western feminism (90). The indifference of
capital to such scrupulous distinctions is pathetically in evidence in the continued
state of affairs reported by Spivak several years ago: ‘whereas Lehman Brothers,
thanks to computers, “earned about $2 million for…15 minutes of work”,…a
woman in Sri Lanka has to work 2,287 minutes to buy a t-shirt’ (1987:171). Rather
than denounce the role of theory, my point here is to foreground the variety of
ways in which such important work remains on the outside. In this book, Spivak
presents us with good reasons for taking seriously the slow task of teaching the
humanities. At the same time, the example of Mahasweta Devi that Spivak uses
so well also serves to provide another challenge to cultural activists and teachers.
That is the challenge of an irruption into the public sphere. It is the example of
what we might call a contemporary subaltern historiography, serving at once as
journalism and theory, sociological analysis and art, a manifesto and appeal.

References

Rushdie, Salman (1988) The Satanic Verses, New York: Viking.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1987) ‘Scattered speculations on the question of value’, in
her In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Methuen.
——(1990) ‘The new historicism: political commitment and the postmodern critic’,
interview with Harold Veeser in Spivak’s The Post-Colonial Critic, Ed. Sarah
Harasym. New York and London: Routledge.
——(1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York and London: Routledge.