Gender and International Studies

Millenium

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 809-831

  Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 7744235326     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298980270041001     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Sir Hamilton Gibb, Area Studies Reconsidered (London: London University Press, 1963), p. 11. Edward Said's Orientalism contains an extensive study of Gibb. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1978).
2. Sir Hamilton Gibb, Area Studies Reconsidered (London: London University Press, 1963), p. 11. Edward Said's Orientalism contains an extensive study of Gibb. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1978).
3. Charles Wagley, Area Research and Training: A Conference Report on the Study of World Areas (New York, NY: Social Science Research Council, 1948), p. 1, emphasis added.
4. These words arc quoted from the front material of United States Government, Language & Area Centers: Title VI/National Defense Education Act (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1968). A shortened version of this account is included in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Arguments for A Deconstructive Cultural Studies,' in Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming).
5. These words arc quoted from the front material of United States Government, Language & Area Centers: Title VI/National Defense Education Act (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1968). A shortened version of this account is included in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Arguments for A Deconstructive Cultural Studies,' in Nicholas Royle (ed.), Deconstructions (Oxford: Blackwell, forthcoming).
6. See a report prepared by the External Research Staff, Office of Intelligence Research, Department of State. United States Government, Area Study Programs in American Universities (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1956).
7. Gabriel A. Almond, 'The Political Culture of Foreign Area Research: Methodological Reflections,' in Richard J. Samuels and Myron Weiner (eds.), The Political Culture of Foreign Area and International Studies (Washington, DC: Maxwell Macmillan, 1992), p. 205-206.
8. Immanuel Wallerstein, 'Post-America and the Collapse of Leninism', in Rethinking Marxism, (Vol. 5, No. 1, 1992), pp. 99-100.
9. Immanuel Wallerstein, 'The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,; in Noam Chomsky et al. (eds.), The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York, NY: New Press; 1997), pp. 195-231.
10. Bernard Williams, Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
11. Wallerstein, op. cit., in note 7, p. 227.
12. This is n received idea the most influential expression of which for the non-specialist has been, of course, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
13. My thanks to Nell Painter for first making me aware of this in our discussions of V.Y. Mudimbe; and to Brent Edwards and Nikhil Pal Singh for feeding my imagination with their research.
14. Cherrie Morngn and Gloria Anzaldua, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981).
15. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women Are White. All the Blacks Are Men But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982).
16. The groundbreaking energy of Orientalism tends to conllate Oriental Studies, Area Studies, Comparative Literature. Enabled by its initiating impulse, we now make these distinctions.
17. Said, op. cit., in note 1, p. 207. Gibb distinguishes 'Orientalism proper' from travel writing in that '[i]ts object was to acquire it [an understanding of the major cultures of mankind outside the boundaries of our own Western culture] from within'. See Gibb, op. cit., in note 1, p. 8).
18. Edward Said, 'Interview with Catherine David', documenta x (July 1997), available on the Internet.
19. Gayle Rubin, 'The Traffic in Women: On the "Political Economy" of Sex,' in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1975), p. 157-210.
20. See Hlortense Spillers, 'Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book', in Angelyn Mitchell, Within the Circle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), pp. 454-481.
21. See Farida Akhtcr's analysis of the Nairobi Forward-looking document in Farida Akhter, Depopulating Bangladesh: Essays on the Politics of Fertility (Dhaka: Narigrantha Prabartana, 1992).
22. Poverty, education and Training, Health, Violence, Armed Conflict, Economy, Decision-Making, Institutional Mechanisms, Human Rights, Media, Environment, The Girl-Child, and Institutional and Financial Arrangements are the twelve 'critical areas of concern' considered to represent the main obstacles to women's advancement. In order to understand how this is constitutive of 'woman' as a general equivalent, we must study carefully the actions recommended by the Platform to various governments, keeping in mind the peculiar diversity of the areas and their diversified relationship to restructuring in the interest of global isation. There is a great deal of documentation about the detail of aid. See, for one of many examples, Malini Bhattacharya, 'USAID: Aid to US', Economic and Political Weekly (Vol. 29,. No. 37, 10 September 1994), p. 2401, written while preparation for Bcijing was in full swing.
23. For a full theorizalion of the importance of rarefied formulations, see Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York, NY: Harper, 1972), pp. 118-125.
24. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents (New York, NY: New Press, 1998), is a brilliant example of original research presented through an infelicitous discursive vocabulary.
25. For oppositional and alternative emergents see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 121-126.
26. Samir Amin's idea, of rewriting the history of the world in terms of the movements of peoples rather than modes of production or dynastic changes, is useful here. Samir Amin, Unequal Development: An Essay on the Social Formations of Peripheral Capitalism, trans. B. Pearce, (New York, NY: Monthly Review Press, 1976).
27. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' in Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 271-313.
28. I made a his-and-hers analysis of this in 'French Feminism in An International Frame', in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, NY: Methuen, 1987), pp. 134-153, where the sign-character of the clitoris was not seriously investigated. These last paragraphs are an indication of the difficulty of self-education in this most intimate of the diversified materiality of gender semiotics.
29. I am ending the piece in the wake of a conference on aboriginal culture and history in Vadodara, India, under the auspices of the Bhasha Research Centre (August 20-28, 1998) where Professor Romila Thapar made this statement.
30. For these and related documents, see United Nations, The United Nations and the Advancement of Women: 1945-1995 (New York, NY: United Nations, 1995).
31. Some years ago, in 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', I had suggested that the subaltern cannot speak because we cannot attend to her. See Spivak, op. cit., in note 25. The last part of this suggestion was generally not read. The essay gave rise to a spate of assertions, by subalternists, that the subaltern could indeed speak. See, for two examples among many, Ramachandra Guha, 'Subaltern and Bhadralok Studies', Economic and Political Weekly (Vol. 30, No. 33, 19 August 1995), p. 2058, and Harish Trivedi, 'India and Postcolonial Discourse', in Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee (eds.), Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory. Text and Context (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1996), pp. 231-247.
32. Some years ago, in 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', I had suggested that the subaltern cannot speak because we cannot attend to her. See Spivak, op. cit., in note 25. The last part of this suggestion was generally not read. The essay gave rise to a spate of assertions, by subalternists, that the subaltern could indeed speak. See, for two examples among many, Ramachandra Guha, 'Subaltern and Bhadralok Studies', Economic and Political Weekly (Vol. 30, No. 33, 19 August 1995), p. 2058, and Harish Trivedi, 'India and Postcolonial Discourse', in Trivedi and Meenakshi Mukherjee (eds.), Interrogating Post-colonialism: Theory. Text and Context (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1996), pp. 231-247.
33. One way in would be through the work and documentation of a scholar such as Ramachandra Guha, especially such a text as David Arnold and Ramachandra Guha (eds.), Nature. Culture, Imperialism: Essays on the Environmental History of South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). Gordon Brotherston's work is groundbreaking for the Americas. My scholarship does not include Africa. The work of such young scholars as Mark Sanders and Nevil Hoad might be a way in. Touching the subject-ity of the woman is somewhere else, of course.
34. The aboriginal communities in India are not everywhere equally deprived. Making allowances for very much larger numbers, a different position upon the grid of the global economic system, the relatively autonomous difference in its geopolitical standing, and its different place in the cultural politics of the dominant historical mythology of the so-called civilised world, the trajectory of the exceptional Aboriginal has broad stroke similarities to the distance marked between the stories recounted in Kayano Shigeru, Our Land Was A Forest: An Ainu Memoir, trans. K. Selden and L. Selden (San Francisco, CA: Westview Press, 1994) at one end, and Richard Siddle, Race. Resistance and the Ainu of Japan, (New York, NY: Routlcdge, 1996) at the other - often a way for the exceptional Aboriginal(s) to reach the United Nations. The challenge of gender upon this terrain - the altogether exceptional Rigoberta Menchù distances herself from the common woman in her testimony - is imposed on my text. As for the narrative of liberation and identity, I can do no more than summarize in a few points what I said on 28 August 1998 to aboriginal 'leaders' from West-central India, in Vadodara: I. Difference is surely to be established. 2. Yet the struggle for civil rights must obliterate difference and pursue sameness. 3. At the moment this double front means constitutional demands, high level litigation, making the police afraid to break the law, repealing unjust laws. 4. To make these gains last, the children of the poor must not be just 'educated', but educated to think freely. 5. Otherwise aboriginal cultural and political leadership is wooed from and kept dependent upon, the top; separated, and progressively distanced from, the bottom. The exploiting countries teach their children the habits of exploitation as 'good citizenship', rather than merely facts to be memorised. We must fight with the same weapons. Otherwise 'indigenous knowledge' becomes 'intellectual property' worth millions of dollars, and the news does not reach the bottom. To resume now 'in my own voice', gender-consciousness here is in the detail of unglamorous teaching, not in directly confronting the challenge of history. This is an unpopular message. When I uttered this at an elite South African University, one reported response was, 'but we all do literacy!' The difference between 'doing literacy' and devising non-coercive ways of teaching the 'habits' of a parliamentary democratic culture to the poorest children is immense and diversified, not yet generalizable; and can only be shared in the rhythm of working together. It remains to me interesting that the vanguard of the Ainu have looked to European settler colonies - Native American and Australian - for forming a collectivity. In this they have duplicated the continental insularity of their dominant culture.
35. The aboriginal communities in India are not everywhere equally deprived. Making allowances for very much larger numbers, a different position upon the grid of the global economic system, the relatively autonomous difference in its geopolitical standing, and its different place in the cultural politics of the dominant historical mythology of the so-called civilised world, the trajectory of the exceptional Aboriginal has broad stroke similarities to the distance marked between the stories recounted in Kayano Shigeru, Our Land Was A Forest: An Ainu Memoir, trans. K. Selden and L. Selden (San Francisco, CA: Westview Press, 1994) at one end, and Richard Siddle, Race. Resistance and the Ainu of Japan, (New York, NY: Routlcdge, 1996) at the other - often a way for the exceptional Aboriginal(s) to reach the United Nations. The challenge of gender upon this terrain - the altogether exceptional Rigoberta Menchù distances herself from the common woman in her testimony - is imposed on my text. As for the narrative of liberation and identity, I can do no more than summarize in a few points what I said on 28 August 1998 to aboriginal 'leaders' from West-central India, in Vadodara: I. Difference is surely to be established. 2. Yet the struggle for civil rights must obliterate difference and pursue sameness. 3. At the moment this double front means constitutional demands, high level litigation, making the police afraid to break the law, repealing unjust laws. 4. To make these gains last, the children of the poor must not be just 'educated', but educated to think freely. 5. Otherwise aboriginal cultural and political leadership is wooed from and kept dependent upon, the top; separated, and progressively distanced from, the bottom. The exploiting countries teach their children the habits of exploitation as 'good citizenship', rather than merely facts to be memorised. We must fight with the same weapons. Otherwise 'indigenous knowledge' becomes 'intellectual property' worth millions of dollars, and the news does not reach the bottom. To resume now 'in my own voice', gender-consciousness here is in the detail of unglamorous teaching, not in directly confronting the challenge of history. This is an unpopular message. When I uttered this at an elite South African University, one reported response was, 'but we all do literacy!' The difference between 'doing literacy' and devising non-coercive ways of teaching the 'habits' of a parliamentary democratic culture to the poorest children is immense and diversified, not yet generalizable; and can only be shared in the rhythm of working together. It remains to me interesting that the vanguard of the Ainu have looked to European settler colonies - Native American and Australian - for forming a collectivity. In this they have duplicated the continental insularity of their dominant culture.
36. Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters/Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in African Society (London: Zed Dooks, 1987).
37. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. M. Bergman Ramos (New York, NY: Continuum, 1986).
38. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. L.S. Roudiez (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 130. Norma Claire Moruzzi discusses this in 'National Abjects: Julia Kristeva on the Process of Political Self-Identification' in Kelly Oliver (ed.), Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writings (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), pp. 135-49. Kristeva uses the Montesquieu passage again in Julia Kristeva, Lettre ouverte a Harlem Désir (Paris: Editions Rivages, 1990), p. 35. For a piece that gives the background of why the timing of the passage in the letter to Désir is so significant, see Norma Claire Moruzzi, 'A Problem with Headscarves: Contemporary Complexities of Political and Social Identity', Political Theory (Vol. 22, No. 4, 1994), pp. 653-72, and 678-79.
39. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. L.S. Roudiez (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 130. Norma Claire Moruzzi discusses this in 'National Abjects: Julia Kristeva on the Process of Political Self-Identification' in Kelly Oliver (ed.), Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writings (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), pp. 135-49. Kristeva uses the Montesquieu passage again in Julia Kristeva, Lettre ouverte a Harlem Désir (Paris: Editions Rivages, 1990), p. 35. For a piece that gives the background of why the timing of the passage in the letter to Désir is so significant, see Norma Claire Moruzzi, 'A Problem with Headscarves: Contemporary Complexities of Political and Social Identity', Political Theory (Vol. 22, No. 4, 1994), pp. 653-72, and 678-79.
40. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. L.S. Roudiez (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 130. Norma Claire Moruzzi discusses this in 'National Abjects: Julia Kristeva on the Process of Political Self-Identification' in Kelly Oliver (ed.), Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writings (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), pp. 135-49. Kristeva uses the Montesquieu passage again in Julia Kristeva, Lettre ouverte a Harlem Désir (Paris: Editions Rivages, 1990), p. 35. For a piece that gives the background of why the timing of the passage in the letter to Désir is so significant, see Norma Claire Moruzzi, 'A Problem with Headscarves: Contemporary Complexities of Political and Social Identity', Political Theory (Vol. 22, No. 4, 1994), pp. 653-72, and 678-79.
41. Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. L.S. Roudiez (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 130. Norma Claire Moruzzi discusses this in 'National Abjects: Julia Kristeva on the Process of Political Self-Identification' in Kelly Oliver (ed.), Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writings (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993), pp. 135-49. Kristeva uses the Montesquieu passage again in Julia Kristeva, Lettre ouverte a Harlem Désir (Paris: Editions Rivages, 1990), p. 35. For a piece that gives the background of why the timing of the passage in the letter to Désir is so significant, see Norma Claire Moruzzi, 'A Problem with Headscarves: Contemporary Complexities of Political and Social Identity', Political Theory (Vol. 22, No. 4, 1994), pp. 653-72, and 678-79.
42. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Devi Moving', forthcoming in Hybrid Histories.
43. For the contrast between the 'readable' and the 'writable', sec Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. R. Miller (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1974). In my judgment, Miller's decision to translate lisible and scriptible as 'readerly' and 'writerly', is ill-advised. But this is not the place to discuss it.
44. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe and W.R. Roberts, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937), p. 35.
45. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Explanation and Culture: Marginalia', in Spivak, op. cit., in note 26, pp. 103-117.
46. For the power of the metaphor as the différance of logic, see not only Jacques Derrida, 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy' in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1982), pp. 207-257, but also, on another register, Colin McGinn, 'Hello, UAL', in The New York Times Book Review (3 January 1999), pp. 11-12), a review of three books on artificial intelligence. For earlier, more easily dismissable warnings, see Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'A Defence of Poetry' in Brucc R. McElderry, Jr., (ed.), Shelley's Critical Prose (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 29, where the cognitive impoverishment attendant upon capitalist social productivity is criticised; and Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck, where the destructive power of reason, when not in combination with the capacity to metaphorize oneself in relationship with the other, is staged. See Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler and Other Plays, trans. U. Ellis-Ferm (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
47. For the power of the metaphor as the différance of logic, see not only Jacques Derrida, 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy' in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1982), pp. 207-257, but also, on another register, Colin McGinn, 'Hello, UAL', in The New York Times Book Review (3 January 1999), pp. 11-12), a review of three books on artificial intelligence. For earlier, more easily dismissable warnings, see Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'A Defence of Poetry' in Brucc R. McElderry, Jr., (ed.), Shelley's Critical Prose (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 29, where the cognitive impoverishment attendant upon capitalist social productivity is criticised; and Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck, where the destructive power of reason, when not in combination with the capacity to metaphorize oneself in relationship with the other, is staged. See Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler and Other Plays, trans. U. Ellis-Ferm (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
48. For the power of the metaphor as the différance of logic, see not only Jacques Derrida, 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy' in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1982), pp. 207-257, but also, on another register, Colin McGinn, 'Hello, UAL', in The New York Times Book Review (3 January 1999), pp. 11-12), a review of three books on artificial intelligence. For earlier, more easily dismissable warnings, see Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'A Defence of Poetry' in Brucc R. McElderry, Jr., (ed.), Shelley's Critical Prose (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 29, where the cognitive impoverishment attendant upon capitalist social productivity is criticised; and Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck, where the destructive power of reason, when not in combination with the capacity to metaphorize oneself in relationship with the other, is staged. See Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler and Other Plays, trans. U. Ellis-Ferm (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
49. For the power of the metaphor as the différance of logic, see not only Jacques Derrida, 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy' in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1982), pp. 207-257, but also, on another register, Colin McGinn, 'Hello, UAL', in The New York Times Book Review (3 January 1999), pp. 11-12), a review of three books on artificial intelligence. For earlier, more easily dismissable warnings, see Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'A Defence of Poetry' in Brucc R. McElderry, Jr., (ed.), Shelley's Critical Prose (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 29, where the cognitive impoverishment attendant upon capitalist social productivity is criticised; and Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck, where the destructive power of reason, when not in combination with the capacity to metaphorize oneself in relationship with the other, is staged. See Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler and Other Plays, trans. U. Ellis-Ferm (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
50. For the power of the metaphor as the différance of logic, see not only Jacques Derrida, 'White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy' in Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1982), pp. 207-257, but also, on another register, Colin McGinn, 'Hello, UAL', in The New York Times Book Review (3 January 1999), pp. 11-12), a review of three books on artificial intelligence. For earlier, more easily dismissable warnings, see Percy Bysshe Shelley, 'A Defence of Poetry' in Brucc R. McElderry, Jr., (ed.), Shelley's Critical Prose (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 29, where the cognitive impoverishment attendant upon capitalist social productivity is criticised; and Henrik Ibsen's The Wild Duck, where the destructive power of reason, when not in combination with the capacity to metaphorize oneself in relationship with the other, is staged. See Henrik Ibsen, Hedda Gabler and Other Plays, trans. U. Ellis-Ferm (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961).
51. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'The Burden of English', in Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, (eds.), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. 147.
52. Walter Benjamin, 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken, 1968), p. 256.
53. Shannon Bell (ed.), Whore Carnival (New York, NY: Autonomedia, 1995), p. 287.
54. Spivak, op. cit., in note 35.