Can the Subaltern Speak? Quotes

“El marido vivo venga la muerte de su esposa, una transacción entre los grandes dioses machos culmina en la destrucción del cuerpo femenino e inscribe, por ello, la tierra como geografía sagrada.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea

“La contradicción no reconocida dentro de una posición que valora la experiencia de los oprimidos, mientras resulta tan acrítica en relación con el papel histórico del intelectual.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea

“Violencia epistemológica (...) pensar al Otro según un modelo que de ningún modo lo explica ni da cuenta de él.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea

“The two sentences go a long way to legitimize each other. One never encounters the testimony of the women’s voice consciousness. Such a testimony would not be ideology-transcendent or “fully” subjective, of course, but it would constitute the ingredients for producing a counter-sentence. As one goes down the grotesquely mistranscribed names of these women, the sacrificed widows, in the police reports included in the records of the East India Company, one cannot put together a “voice.” The most one can sense is the immense heterogeneity breaking through even such a skeletal and ignorant account (castes, for example, are regularly described as tribes). Faced with the dialectically interlocking sentences that are constructible as “White men are saving brown women from brown men” and “The women wanted to die,” the metropolitan feminist migrant (removed from the actual theater of decolonization) asks the question of simple semiosis— What does this signify?—and begins to plot a history.”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea

“Imperialism’s (or globalization’s) image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind. How should one examine this dissimulation of patriarchal strategy, which apparently grants the woman free choice as subject? In other words, how does one make the move from “Britain” to “Hinduism”?”
― Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Can the Subaltern Speak?: Reflections on the History of an Idea