The alt is to reject the label---categorizing groups as “subaltern” is an act of epistemic domination and prevents acts of resistance against the Western academy

The Subaltern Studies project soon ran into a series of problems laid out most famously by Gayatri Spivak via an engagement with the figure of the subaltern woman.15 Spivak’s work posed a set of questions. Was it possible to recover the political consciousness of the subalterns as knowledge untainted by the exercise of power? To what extent was the notion of a ‘resisting subject’ itself a category born of European fantasies of their own mastery? And, in this respect, was the very attempt to represent the subaltern not also an act of epistemic domination akin to those undertaken by other elitist historians? In sum, did sympathetic ventriloquism induce the same affect as elitist silencing? Addressing these questions, Spivak carefully argued that Subaltern Studies was a politically necessary but necessarily irresolvable intellectual project.16 6 The Black Pacific Yet she went further than this. Because the subaltern could not appear ‘without the thought of the elite’, Spivak also proclaimed that the subaltern provided ‘the model for a general theory of consciousness’. Specifically, she argued that ‘the historical predicament of the colonial subaltern’ could be considered the ‘allegory of the predicament of all thought, all deliberative consciousness’.17 Philosophically, then, Spivak bade the subaltern to travel from the periphery to the centre, but only to become there the ‘recalcitrant difference’ that structured elite discourse.18 As the project was taken up in Western intellectual spaces, enabled by what I would call an opportunistic utilization of Spivak’s sympathetic critique, Subaltern Studies was made to proffer less an opportunity to decolonize knowledge regimes and more another faculty through which to deconstruct knowledge of the Western self. As such, Subaltern Studies could interface with – even be collapsed into – the post-structuralist project (broadly conceived), a project that was also decidedly post-Sartre in its singular obsession with the modern (read colonizing European) subject.19 With these movements the peripheral figures on the Graphic’s imperial world map, now encoded as subalterns, were once more emptied of epistemic authority so as to become the cipher through which to interpret the proclivities of Britannica – the self and master. Perhaps these incorporations were reflective of the general trajectories of the Western academy after the defeat of the Third World project and the apparent re-incorporation of troublesome populations back into neo-imperial orbits through neo-liberal governance. No doubt, the end of the Second World project (i.e. global communism) did nothing to arrest this movement; nor did the subsequent internationalization of the staff and student constituencies of Western universities through the globalization of elites rather than through the global democratization of life chances and the attendant decolonization of knowledge. Nevertheless, the originating democratic impulse has remained seminal to Subaltern Studies. Dipesh Chakrabarty still hopes for a ‘subaltern historiography that actually tries to learn from the subaltern’,20 although in his own work he marks the subaltern as Introduction 7 only an epistemic limit to historical knowledge.21 Spivak, meanwhile, has always read Subaltern Studies as a political intervention, that is, as ‘a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible interest’.22 More recently, however, Spivak has focused on pedagogy, a move honed through her practitioner work with marginalized communities. She has given up her ‘apologetic formula’ for Subaltern Studies as the strategic use of essentialism, and has found instead, ‘a different one emerging from my own subaltern study: learning to learn from below’. ‘This one’, Spivak suggests (and here I would recall the fate of Sartre’s intervention in the Western academy), ‘will have had few takers.’23 I want to dwell on these (somewhat slim) openings in Subaltern Studies because to my mind the transmogrification of Subaltern Studies from an engaged democratic project into postcolonial critique has (unintentionally) serviced the colonial ‘fatal impact’ thesis.24 This thesis rests on the assumption that indigenous cultures could not withstand or compete with the sophistication of European civilization: they would have to die or transform into substitute versions of the conquering culture. At the epistemic level I would argue that the category of the subaltern is part of this erasure. In his own way, even Gramsci, the immediate source of the category of the subaltern, is complicit in this erasure. He states that some social strata – especially the peasantry – seem to be incapable of developing their own intellectuals because in the very moment of their formation as intellectuals they cease to be ‘organic’ to that stratum.25 But what if, in the pursuit of ‘epistemic justice’,26 the democratic impulse of Subaltern Studies were to be separated from the very term ‘subaltern’? The seedbed of such a decolonial project would not, then, be found in academic discourse but in the living knowledge traditions of colonized peoples.27 Maligned, ridiculed, attacked and disavowed by colonial forces, these traditions have nevertheless retained a tenacious thread of vitality that provides for the possibility of a retrieval of thought and action that addresses global injustices in ways otherwise to the colonial science of the gaze. Crucially, these projects have refused – and more often than not ignored – the injunctions of the 8 The Black Pacific fatal impact thesis. Their ethos of living other-wise is expressed by Bob Marley in the following verse: ‘we refuse to be what you wanted us to be, we are what we are, that’s the way it’s going to be’.28 In light of these decolonial projects, the category of the subaltern becomes singularly unhelpful, if not meaningless. For the colonized figures on the periphery of the Graphic’s world map have always named and re-named themselves as, for example, ‘sufferers’,29 Black Israelites, Ethiopians, RasTafari, Tūhoe, Ngāti Kuri, Māori, Ham and Shem. And, heretically, these peoples have often determined the meaning of Britannica on her behalf as they cultivate useful understandings of their relationships to power. This is precisely what Reitu Harris, president of the predominantly Māori Black Power gang, does when he states that ‘to me the word “Pākehā” no longer stands for “European” … it stands for a type of person who … when it rains, will rush for shelter themselves and not care about others getting wet’.30