' … half-sick of shadows': figure and ground in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's imagination of the subaltern. Issue 5 (2nd September 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Varadharajan, Asha
• Is Part Of: Cultural studies. Volume 30:Issue 5(2016)
• Page Start: 730
• Page End: 753
• Publication Date: 2016-09-02
• Subjects: Subaltern -- globalization -- strategy -- agency -- ab-use -- parabasis; Culture -- Periodicals; Popular culture -- Periodicals; 306
• DOI: 10.1080/09502386.2016.1168110
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0950-2386

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay moves the category of the subaltern out of the exclusive domain of colonial historiography and resituates it in the context of contemporaneity. Taking my cue from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's insistence on the dream of postcoloniality in the realm of the global, I examine two 'empirical anomalies' that redefine subaltern insurgency, cultivate democratic reflexes, and defeat the expectations of their moment and milieu. Vivek Chibber's Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital serves as a framing device to elicit the still-persuasive dimensions of Spivak's landmark essay for our historical moment. While I remain unpersuaded by both his premises and his conclusions, his argument does throw Spivak's interventions in the project of Subaltern Studies into relief. My method throughout, in the manner of Spivak and Paul de Man, is one of interruption and undoing; my aim is to delineate what Spivak describes as 'the resistance fitting our time'.