Analysis Of Gayatri Spivak's Can The Subaltern Speak

If the ‘history from below’ of subaltern studies aims at this rereading ‘against the grain’ of the colonial (and postcolonial) history of India by highlighting the ‘daily forms of resistance’, it suggests above all a ‘redefinition’ of the archive itself: wherever the traditional archive is insufficient (particularly concerning women’s history), recourse to ‘different’ sources in which the ‘subaltern voice’ can be heard is necessary. It is through the alternative that feminist history is constructed; it is in the margins that is woven the history of this ‘silenced subaltern’ whom Gayatri Spivak seeks to expose in her seminal work “Can the Subaltern Speak”. Indeed, after independence power shifts to the male elite of the periphery …show more content…
The basic claim and opening statement of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Is that western academic thinking is produced in order to support Western interests, through questioning that produced western knowledge about “others” as it is not innocent and that it expresses the interests of its producers. For Spivak’s convoluted line of questioning: is a history of women as subjects possible? Can women speak, whether in history books or across historical …show more content…
Mohanty is specifically critical of the discursive production of the image of the “Third World woman” in writings on gender and development which tend to erase the historical as well as the geographical specificity. Therefore, the essay, "Under Western Eyes" draws attention to the dangers of looking at women as coherent group upon which political, social, economic, or cultural processes enable them to produce knowledge on the “Other” women as a case of study and analysis by the west. As her primary focus, Mohanty begins by pointing out the fact that even if the process of colonization may appear to be sophisticated, it includes a suppression of the heterogeneity of the