Approaching a Borderless World: Can the Subaltern Speak?

It starts with love. . . a love of learning. . .

Antonio Gramsci's (1891-1937) used the term "subaltern" to represent the oppressed.

Are the Silent Majority Forever Silent?

The Postcolonial Paradox: A Question to Ask

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" questions the claims of the Ranajit Guhas' Subaltern Studies in the 1980's and how it "speaks" for the Indian voices once silenced. Instead, its anti-imperialistic voice is merely a false voice.

Most of the writings of World Literature are written in European languages. Some critics attack those writers as being Western and not able to write about the Other. Even in our own country, ethnic writers like Alice Walker (African American), N. Scott Momaday (Native Indian), and Amy Tan (Asian American) have been attacked as being non-authentic and not representing the true voices of their ethnicities.

They win awards because they write what the critics and public want to hear about ethnicity. They have sold out.

Thus, for some, those who are submerged in the Subaltern, those of the third world (the majority of the earth's population), are forever silent. Those who have the chance to write and publish, often trained in the Western perspective, replicate Western values, Western literary forms and Western traditions.

They are not able to write about the reality of the silent majority: the true Subaltern.

White Man's Burden (1899) by Rudyard Kipling's

Take up the White Man's burden--

Send forth the best ye breed--

Go, bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait, in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild--

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half devil and half child.

Thank you for reading. . . .Are we truly reading the world ?

Or are we merely hearing the voices of the master narratives of writers like Kipling? You judge.

It starts with love. . . Love of reading. . .