File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_2001/postcolonial.0111, message 164


From: "Margaret Trawick" <trawick-AT-clear.net.nz>
Subject: Re: for margaret re: spivak
Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2001 11:47:44 +1300


Dear Sangeeta -

Sorry to be so slow in answering.  I am hardly an expert on Spivak, and have
little if anything to teach this list about her.  It seems to me that she
has "triumphed" in the sense of getting a good job, being famous, and having
many admirers.  If she is not part of a frat or sorority, it is probably by
her own choice.  I really don't think it is because of gender difference
that people bitch more about her than about Bhabha - but this is just my
opinion. Spivak herself can be pretty bitchy at times. She has an annoying
habit of assuming victim status when it suits her, and another annoying
habit of dismissing as "bunk" any empirical work which happens to gainsay
her fanciful claims about so-called subalterns and conditions of
subalternity. She has appropriated to herself the "voice" of the subaltern,
the Third World Woman, and now the "native informant", while always
maintaining deniability in case someone challenges her competence to assume
these voices.   Spivak's bitchiness, or to use a gender-neutral term
arrogance, should be challenged more than it is.   But enough on this topic.


You write:

> What i also like about Spivak's
> arguments and methodology is the refusal to produce static categories for
> consumption--unlike say the manner in which mimicry has become a byword in
> poco and other fields--a packagable category that can travel--Spivak's
> terminologies are less mobile.

It is unclear to me what virtue there is in refusing to produce (what I
would call) ideas, or even words, that can travel.  Sure, in the process of
travelling, in passing from hand to hand and mind to mind, words and ideas
will change.  Sometimes they will be appropriated for destructive purposes.
They may become building bricks in evil hegemonies.  But the fact that one
cannot control the uses to which one's words will be put is no excuse for
vociferously refusing to communicate, and drawing a handsome salary for this
refusal.  And as you point out (in a paragraph not quoted here), Spivak's
categories have been used and abused anyway.  So what is the point of making
them *unnecessarily* elliptical and opaque?  Some theories - some conceptual
constructs - are going to be intrinsically difficult to follow, because of
their complexity, and because of the prior knowledge required even to get
started on them.  But even such ideas - the double helix, the special theory
of relativity - can be stated in simplified form without being distorted.
They should be able to withstand the sharpest criticism and efforts at
deconstruction. The idea of deconstruction itself - Derrida's idea before it
was Spivak's - is good and interesting and useful.  But Spivak has taken
that packagable category and made it into a circus, with herself as the mad
ringmaster.  The best that can be said about Spivak's work is that it is
"always already" a pile of rubble, in which a few vaguely interesting shards
and shiny pieces of glass may sometimes be found.  If anyone can prove to me
otherwise, feel free.

Margaret






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