A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination

Author(s): Jenny Sharpe and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Source: Signs, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 2003), pp. 609-624
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175806
Accessed: 06/10/2010 23:47

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Signs.

http://www.jstor.org
 Jenny Sharpe
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

A Conversation with Gayatri ChakravortySpivak: Politics

and the Imagination

ayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been instrumentalin introducing a fem-

inist agenda to the field of postcolonial studies and, in doing so, forcing
women's studies to interrogate the underlying principles traditionally
relied on for gender analysis.Whether addressing the language of feminist
individualismor the surreptitioussubject of power and desire, she has never
lost sight of the women on the other side of the international division of
labor, while at the same time refusing an all-too-easy recuperation of their
subjectivities.
I first met Spivakin Austin, Texas, a little more than twenty years ago.
As an entering freshmanat the University of Texas, I was instructed to take
a class with a new English professor, who, like me, was from India. I,
resenting the assumption behind the recommendation, avoided studying
with Spivak. But her reputation as a Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist(as
she was known at the time) soon caught up with me, and I decided to
pursue a graduate degree and write a dissertation under her direction. It
was the early 1980s, when the now-familiarterms postcolonialand colonial
discourseanalysis were beginning to enter an academic vocabulary, and
Spivak was at the forefront of defining the emergent field. Since she left
the University of Texas shortly thereafter, I continued working with her
only by traveling to places as scattered as Urbana-Champaign, Toronto,
London, Houston, Middletown, and Ithaca. I still remember sitting in a
classroom at Cornell University,where she was a senior fellow at the Society
for the Humanities, and being transfixedby the most remarkablecritique
of the subject of knowledge and semiosis of woman in Foucault and Hindu
law. Little did I know that she was working through the argument that
would become "Can the SubalternSpeak?"(1988)-perhaps the most well-
known, if misunderstood, of her writings.
Spivak'scritics took her phrasing of "the subaltern cannot speak" to be
a definitive statement rather than an interrogation of the academic effort
to give the gendered subaltern a voice in history. On revising the essay for

[Signs: Journal of Womenin Culture and Society2002, vol. 28, no. 2]

? 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2802-0008$10.00
610 I Sharpe and Spivak

her book, A Critique of PostcolonialReason (1999), she characterizesher

"passionatelament: the subalterncannot speak!"as "an inadvisableremark"
(308). But she also notes that so many of the examples her critics gave of
the subaltern speaking tended to equate subalternitywith women in the
third world or ethnic minorities in the United States, a conflation that her
essay was intended, in part, to critique. Indeed, one of the concerns of her
recent work is to show the complicity of diasporic South Asians with a
corporate globalization that maintains subaltern women in a position of
subalternity.
I asked Spivakto return to the problem of speaking about the gendered
subalternthat she firstintroduced in "Can the SubalternSpeak?"She spoke
to me of a need to attend to "intranational"cultural differences between
an elite South Asian bourgeoisie and the ruralpoor who have been bypassed
by decolonization. She described what it meant to engage the everyday
lives of subalterns, characterizingfieldwork as the only model for such an
engagement. As Spivak spoke, it became clear to me that what is often
identified as her pessimism about social change is intended to offset the
euphoria of the political activist who thinks that she is transforming rural
women's everyday lives. Spivak's deconstructive thinking is evident in her
characterizationof social change as being more provisionalthan one would
like to believe. But it is an affirmativedeconstruction that finds value in the
need for the ongoing work of a constant critique.
This conversation took place in Los Angeles in June 2001, while Spivak
was en route to her home in New York from Hong Kong via Sonoma,
California,where she had just attended the "Crossing Borders Initiative,"
a Ford Foundation meeting to consider the future of area studies. The
imprint of her travels is clearlyvisible in the discussion we had. As Spivak
described to me her interaction with small farmers in rural Bengal, post-
doctoral Chinese students at the Hong Kong University of Science and
Technology, and her students at Columbia University, her strategic use of
what one might call a "politics of the imagination" started to emerge. The
Signs editors and I decided to call this conversation "Politics and the Imag-
ination" because we wanted to emphasize the argument that Spivakis mak-
it
ing about the imaginative power of corporate globalization and how
requires an equally forceful appeal to the imagination for contestation.

Jenny Sharpe (JS): You have been most vocal against the tendency of
academics to equate globalization with migrancy and diaspora. You insist
that the rural is the new front of globalization through seed and fertilizer
control, population control, microloans to women, to name a few in-
stances. Can you elaborate some more on how you see the rural as the
 S IGNS Winter 2003 1 611

new front of globalization and what this says about the kind of face we
are giving to globalization in our critical discourse?
Gayatri Spivak (GS): Things have become more specific since I wrote
about globalization understood as or presented as the movement of peo-
ple. It seems to me that now there are four models of globalization that
are in circulation. First, that there is nothing new about it, in other words,
that globalization is simply a repetition. Second, that globalization as such
can be identified with the efforts of global governance signaled by the
Bretton Woods conference remotely inaugurating the postcolonial and
the postnational world. This is the more sophisticated face of the old
identifying-with-the-people movement. And the third model is that the
entire globe is in a common culture fix, and its signature is urbanism. It's
against this one that I bring up the question of the rural. Finally, I dis-
tinguish globalization from let's say "world trade." It is true that the
tendency towards expansion is as old as the hills, but information tech-
nology has given it a dimension which deserves a special name. The
"globe" signifies some more abstract, more virtual thing, distinguished
from "world systems" by relating to the ascendancy of specificallyfinance
capital, competitive marketsin negotiable instruments. This technological
phenomenon is the condition and effect of the fall of the Berlin wall. In
other words, at that point, globalization is seen as a rupture. In these four
models we have a view of globalization from repetition to rupture. In the
fourth one, we're not looking so much at the movement of money as the
movement of data. Given this, I point out the virtualization of the rural,
the conversion of the rural into data through the patenting of indigenous
knowledge and through pharmaceuticalinterests in seeds and population
control. Indigenous peoples, for example, are fined by trade-related in-
vestment and intellectual property measures, because they obviously had
not patented their knowledge over the last few thousand years and so
that's retroactivelyseen as an illegal trade practice. Through the conversion
of the phenomenon of the rural, not blue skies and green trees, into data,
the rural front is a real front of globalization. The urban phenomenon,
which is much more spectacular,is what is visible and instrumental. Donna
Landry has recently commented on the fact that-in Britain at least-the
countryside was recoded for consumption by the Game Act of 1681 (Lan-
dry 2001). What I'm talking about displaces the consumption/production
binary into a virtuality that can include consumption as tourism.'
JS: Is it the visibility of urban centers that accounts for ruralareasfalling
off the map of our critical discourse on globalization? I ask this because

1 See
Meyda Yegenoglu's work on Turkey (forthcoming).
612 I Sharpe and Spivak

if, as you indicate, the rural is a site of intensified globalization, it is what

we should be talking about.
GS:But you don't need them on an old-fashioned map, you need them
on geographical information systems. I've been talking about this for some
time, and it doesn't seem to register. This relates very strongly to women
because rural practices, especially at the grassroots level, were quite often
shared by women and men equally. Whereas field labor sometimes went
to men, though not exclusively, more of the conserving practices seems
to have gone to women. I'm not romanticizing the indigenous com-
munities, what one might call aboriginal communities; I'm just saying
that cultural conformity within those areas shows us patterns where
women are not necessarily inferior persons who are not active in what
one would call the "public sphere," even if it's not the public sphere as
we know it through European and colonial history. In that context, the
virtualization of the rural and its transformation into data within finance
capital involves and does indeed obliterate women's practices. As a major
phenomenon within globalization, this does not seem to ring a bell be-
cause it does not resemble the colloquial meaning of the word in the
dictionary, which is then translated into simply "immigration patterns."
And then of course you can move into the usual lines that have been in
place now for twenty-odd years for describing those patterns.
JS: It is well known that, as one of the largest developers of biotech-
nology, the Monsanto Company patents its genetically engineered seed
so that farmers who use it are prevented from holding back a few seeds
to plant the next year, which is a traditional practice. You have written
about how the incursion of biotechnology giants like Monsanto into South
Asia has affected women.
GS: After a certain flood incident in Bangladesh, the handing out of
loans was made incumbent upon accepting only these engineered seeds.
But that's just one instance. The way in which chemical fertilizers are
inserted into the life cycle of rural folks as reward is quite staggering.
JS: So what is transpiringunder the rubric of loans to rural areas is a
certainkind of traditionaldomain, to use that phrase,of women being taken
away from them.
GS: Well, it's been recoded into another kind of discourse. And ulti-
mately it's the transformation into data that interests me because it is not
only a source of human interest stories but an example of a much bigger
systemic change. And that's what I've been trying to say about the rural.
It's not just women as we understand them as human beings of a certain
kind but a kind of systematization of a certain way of being into this
 S IGNS Winter 2003 I 613

abstract average knowledge power, if you like, which is data, which does
in fact signal a much bigger change than just women's oppression.
JS: If you consider data collecting to signal something largerthan simply
women's oppression, how would you respond to the argument that the
new electronic technology is giving third-world women a direct access to
global markets?
GS:Superficiallyof course it's true. Capitalin its newer formations seems
more sociallyproductive, but when people speak about this, they are speak-
ing very abstractly.They are not thinking about actual people. I'm now
going 180 degrees from inviting people to understand the virtualizationof
the rural as a huge systemic change, a recoding, a reterritorialization.But
at the same time, in order to understandthe terrifyingpower of the abstract
as such, one must supplement it with the human beings within these kinds
of situations. The enthusiasmfor these abstractgroups of women accessing
the marketplacethrough the Internet leaves completely untouched what
happens to these women on the ground. Even when you interview the
women, you are not getting the whole picture. First of all, the questions
produce the answers. Secondly, the subaltern is so disarmed by attention
that in fact the answersarepatheticallyuntrustworthy.If you actuallyinvolve
yourself into the life detail of these women who are accessing the market,
you would see that their access may superficiallybring in a better income,
but it does nothing else for the human quality of the woman's life. Then,
you come to the third point: have these people made a broad-range qual-
itative analysis of what group has access to global markets through the
Internet? What class stratum?Where? In what kinds of societies? Because
I can assureyou, I have had a good deal of experience over the last twelve
years with hundreds of women with whom it has been my good fortune
to associate myself; the bottom layers of the rural poor have no access to
the Internet. They don't even know what the Internet is. This is the largest
sector of the electorate in the global South. And to access the Internet
without infrastructuralaccompaniments does not lead to a just society.
JS: You have written that the problem of international feminism today
is the deployment of the upper-class hybrid female as a model for the
gender training of poor rural women. You have identified, as a defining
moment in this shift, a restructuring of the World Bank's "Women in
Development" programs as "Gender and Development," which you see
as coterminous with the Fourth World Women's Conference at Beijing
in 1995. We've been through the criticism of "Third World Woman" as
signifier and of the universalization of a certain kind of feminist model
through the idea of global feminism. The language of international fem-
614 I Sharpe and Spivak

inism has now shifted to terms like heterogeneity,multiplicity, decentering.

Yet it appears that there is still some kind of universalizing logic at work
in the "Gender and Development" programs. What kinds of problems
does such gender training pose for feminism as an intellectual discourse
and political movement?
GS: I would like to say that I don't have an unexamined opposition
to United Nations Women's Conferences. I'm quite sure that there are
things that get done there that are good things. My problem is that they
are so wasteful, since they are unenforceable.
JS: Wasteful?
GS:In terms of resources. A huge wanton expenditure of resources for
months and years in order to produce declarations that are unenforceable.
And really the enthusiasm that is generated is in a class that is not really
the class that we are thinking about. I was speaking to a wonderful young
woman in Hong Kong, involved in various projects, one of which is
schoolchildren teaching computers to older folks. So I said: "Well, how's
it going?" And she said something to me that was so wise. She said: "It's
going wonderfully well for the schoolchildren." Wow! I knew this one
had her head set right on her shoulders. People don't realize that even if
the euphoria and enthusiasm generated in the self-styled activists, the ones
who are organizing, can be shown in the subaltern women who have been
collected for the occasion, it does not mean what the more fortunate
women think it means. The euphoria belongs to the occasion rather than
to long-term consequences.
JS: Can you give an example of the kind of activist work you are
criticizing?
GS:Well, I'm actuallyfinishing a piece of writing for an Oxford Amnesty
collection where I talk about a case. When there are human rights inter-
ventions on the lowest social stratum, the poorest of the ruralpoor, there's
not much-and this is my basic critique in terms of all the questions you
have asked-there is not much trouble taken to actually engage with the
"structuresof feeling" of the groups who are supposedly being helped. It
is good to dismiss the concern to exhibit them-or to forget the needs of
the urban subproletariat-as a "politics of virtue," as Deborah Mindry does
in the Signs issue on globalization (2001). But for me the point has been,
what do we do with the rural poor, then?-with, not for. Since no effort
has been made to rearrangethe mental theater of the ones who have been
helped for a new production, the consequences of being helped out of a
violent situation do not last. They remain perennially in a place where
wrongs proliferateand have to be righted periodically.We who thought of
feminism as a movement that deals with awareness and gender sensitivity
 S IG N S Winter 2003 I 615

as well as material solutions find these solutions hardly feminist, except

insofar as they involve people who can be physically diagnosed as female.
There is a difference between the two things: between woman-centered
philanthropyand democraticpedagogic involvement. That's what I'm talk-
ing about.
JS: So, what you're talking about is a real need for infrastructural
changes, for instance? Or something that is more than simply the quick
fix?
GS: Yes, involvement with broader infrastructuralchanges. You and I
both teach in the humanities. If one thinks about humanities education
as a sustained, uncoercive rearrangement of desires with no guarantees,
that is what I'm talking about. If we reallyfeel that we are in our profession
because we want to do what we're doing, then our engagement with the
world's disenfranchisedwomen has to be as thick as the engagement with
our students.
JS: You have said on severaloccasions that you are "only a literarycritic"
and are very clear about intellectual work not being the same as political
activism.Yet you seem to be describing a kind of political activismthat has
a paucity of imagination. Would you say that there is a need for work to
be done not only on the political front but also on the imagination?
GS: One not without the other. My friend gave me a name, which is
"Miss Supplementarity." And this is quite appropriate! I truly feel the
moment one emphasizes the one over the other, it is a bad scene. And I
think one of the problems with Marxism was that quite often one would,
in a kind of doctrinaire way, emphasize or dismiss anything that seemed
not to be amenable to that adjective. Let me give you an example that
relates to pharmaceutical dumping. When one is speaking to a group of
grassroots farmers, one finds oneself using a very bad concept metaphor
that has been thoroughly criticized by bourgeois feminism. This is the
metaphor of the land or the soil as mother, which is an extremely powerful
and strategic instrument if it works completely through the imagination.
On the one side are the seed and fertilizer companies with their ferocious
push upon the rural poor. And on the other side is a metaphor that says,
if you buy this fertilizer and put it in the soil, next year you cannot raise
anything in the soil if you don't use it again. The soil is our mother, your
mother and mine. We are making our mother addicted. This metaphor
is used in an area where, by drinking urea-contaminated cheap liquor,
people die quite often. And urea is a big ingredient in chemical fertilizers.
JS: This metaphor is used by?
GS: I use it! I've never heard anyone else use it! For ecological agri-
culture, you know. What am I doing there? I'm being disingenuous, using
616 I Sharpe and Spivak

this powerful politically incorrect metaphor. I'm not someone who be-
lieves in the sanctity of truth. For me, an appeal to the imagination is
material practice. I knowingly use a metaphor completely disapproved of
by mainstream feminism. I knowingly use some kind of attitude from
temperance movements. I knowingly use the notion of family values
among the rural poor; you know the notion of sin against the mother, et
cetera. I knowingly use these strategically.This is the kind of thing whereby
rather than use fear of punishment, you use a certain kind of imaginative
terror in terms of the consequences of putting foreign seeds and fertilizers
in the soil. I also detail exactly what happens: the hardening of the soil,
the dying of the insects, the dying of all the things that actually help keep
the soil alive, the loss of taste, the poisoning of products, the fact that we
in the affluent countries now choose to buy organic materials, et cetera.
I mean you can give them a lot of hard information but to make the very
poor turn away from high-yield grain, you have to use a certain kind of
imaginative discourse. I don't want people to think that when I use the
word imagination, I mean some kind of incredibly pure, holier-than-thou
effort. No, I'm not Martha Nussbaum. I'm not reading Dickens with
them.
JS: Your use of imaginative discourse is especially contaminated because
you say you knowingly use a metaphor that is disapproved of by main-
stream feminism. That statement shows a disjuncture between knowledge
and strategy. It would be interesting to place your deployment of a con-
taminated metaphor alongside a gender training that is intended to render
such metaphors useless.
GS:I am an education person, you know; I'm a teacher. Just as sitting
here in the Signs office at UCLA I've been talking about hiring, about
departmental styles and teaching, when you sit among farmers, you talk
about agriculture. And so, one year, when it became clear to some of
these farming friends of mine that I knew something about the other side
of ecological agriculture, I was asked to address a larger group of farmers.
I was very nervous at first, thinking I'm not really an ecological agriculture
activist. But then I thought that if asked one should speak, because nobody
comes to these areas. I should make clear that among my audience are
women. I shouldn't really even say "audience"; I should say interlocutors
because they do speak themselves about farming practices. So, it's not as
though I'm addressing a group of men with this contaminated metaphor.
What I'm trying to say is that the association of certain kinds of tenors
and certain kinds of vehicles-we are literary folks and so refer to the
textbook definition of tenor and vehicle, "underlying idea" or "principal
subject," and the "figure," which is the way metaphors seem to work-is
 S IG N S Winter 2003 I 617

not transcendental; it is historical. That's something that has to be un-

derstood. The particularline from specific tenor to specific vehicle is not
common to all cultural production, so one has to be able to distinguish
between things that have been coded one way for us and another way for
them. But for this you have to be patient. I think that's the universalization
that is really not much use in gender training. There is also an assumption
of bureaucraticegalitarianism-the assumption that people are units that
are mechanicallyequal. This is not a bad thing, but in a culturallydifferent
field it is counterproductive if not supplemented by other kinds of efforts.
Cultural difference is spoken of but, by enthusiasm or convenience, a
common human essence is assumed which denies the procedural impor-
tance of the difference. There is a related assumption: that the history of
a sharing of the public and the private is the same among all groups of
men and women as the one that follows through in terms of northwestern
Europe or sometimes even Britain. This is the problem it seems to me.
It's not so much a universalization as seeing one history as the inevitable
telos as well as the inevitable origin and past of all men and women
everywhere. That's the problem. Incidentally,I went to a Peoples' Alliance
office in Kolkata (Calcutta) before going, to get some tips, since they
have international publicity with ecological agriculture, and they too used
metaphors, but metaphors that would ring no bell with the farmers, such
as "natural balance," et cetera, in the most ornate Bengali prose. I left
them feeling altogether cheered up!
JS: But the assertion of things being coded one way for us and another
way for them risksreifyingculturaldifference. I am thinking about "cultural
defense" as a legal strategy for defending immigrant Asian men living in
the United States against charges of gender violence. This is an attention
to differencethat insidiouslyreinscribesan older colonial model ofothering.
GS:Of course it does. And the question that reallycomes up is: different
from what? I would say that the culture of the rich and the culture of the
poor in these countries are marked by a cultural difference that is larger
than the cultural difference we self-consciously invoke when we diasporics
speak to the metropolitan white folks. The question of cultural difference
for some years now has become exacerbated in other ways, by the dif-
ference between intellectual labor and manual labor. There is an extreme
difference in educational techniques used for the poor and the middle
class. And I'm now able to convince the ones who suffer from the con-
solidation of very bad educational techniques by using another metaphor,
which is a metaphor of class apartheid. That is to say, the ones who are
going to work their heads (in Bengali there is an expression) are taught
in one way, and the ones who are going to work their bodies are
taught
618 I Sharpe and Spivak

in another way. Metaphorically,this "cultural"difference, the cultures of

class, is much more significant than cultures identified by crudely defined
national difference. That's what the cultural difference question means to
me now, not just the heritage of colonialism.
JS: So in fact the national cultural difference is .
GS: Intra-national!
JS: Yes, there is a kind of ideological work being done by the concept
of cultural difference, one of eliding class.
GS: Intranational cultural difference, for me, is now as significant and
as important, as it works in the interest of international cultural difference.
And of course to make the big difficult statement, the international civil
society crosses borders in the name of woman. And this difference is now
fleshed out mostly in terms of violence against women, women's rights,
all that kind of stuff. That's how I understand it today. I'm much more
fixated, fixed on intranational cultural difference of class as it is at work
for and with the international cultural differences. There is an internal
line of cultural difference within the "same culture," apart from the usual
mechanisms of class formation. It is related to the formation of the new
global culture of management and finance and the families attached to it.
It marks access to the Internet. It also marks the new culture of inter-
national nongovernmental organizations, involved in development and
human rights, as they work upon the lowest stratain the developing world.
Before the advent of modernity, the country-to-town movement, the field-
to-court movement, the movement along the great trade routes operated
to create the kind of internal split of cultural difference within the same
culture that may be the real motor of cultural change. Across the spectrum
of change, it is the negotiation of sexual difference and the relationship
between the sacred and the profane that spell out the rhythms of culture,
rhythms that are always a step ahead of its definitions and descriptions.
JS: You have told the story of the only female member of the Lodha
tribe who managed to make it to university and who hanged herself for
reasons unknown. There were rumors of her involvement in illicit love
affairs. This story is clearly intended to resonate (and it does) with the
one you tell about BhuvaneswariBhaduri in "Can the Subaltern Speak?"
She hanged herself because she had been unable to carry out a political
assassination on behalf of the armed struggle for Indian independence.
The suicide was a mystery because people presumed that the reason was
an illicit pregnancy, but she was menstruating at the time. I found the
resemblance between the two scenes of female suicides separated by class,
caste, temporality, and space to be, and I use the Freudian term, uncanny.
Is there a story to be told in that resemblance?
 S IGNS Winter 2003 I 619

GS: I think it's the other side of the heterosexual reproductive norm
as family values, which is about as close as one comes to a universal.
Although it is not a universal because of what I have talked about in both
these situations. I saw Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri as a subaltern, and indeed
she was a subaltern, but if one is being very strict about the term, then
she was a lower-middle-class urban person, and therefore she was not
"really"subaltern. And as for Chuni Kotal, the woman from the Lodha
tribe, by going to university, she had become sort of upwardly mobile,
and therefore strictlyspeaking she too was not a subaltern. But one notices,
in many subalternized female societies, a certain phenomenon that I have
described as originary queerness, which is a thing different from the het-
erosexist reproductive norm. It may be that from which sexual difference
differs. It will not be disclosed in a subject elaboration that I know to
theorize. But when the heterosexist reproductive norm works, then it is
right from the positive articulation of family values. Now this should not
make us argue that therefore it's all right for international feminism to
go and interfere, because what we just talked about is the heterosexist
reproductive norm, not an entire cultural fabric. I've discussed in a recent
piece the way in which destitute widows in Vrindavan are terribly ironic
against the institution of marriage. So, while we are pointing at the op-
eration of a heterosexual reproductive norm, we can also locate critical
moments. A dominant that operates across divides does not sanction unex-
amined cultural interference in the name of international feminism.
JS: You said that neither of these women were subaltern in a strict use
of the term. But if we are talking of the subaltern in the strict sense, then,
what kinds of narrativescan we rely on? Or are we already bringing them
into a particularkind oflogic? Does subalternityhave to remainunnameable?
GS: When one thinks about subalternity in the sense of no lines of
mobility into upward social movement, it's still not unnameable. We must,
however, take a moratorium on naming too soon, if we manage to pen-
etrate there. There is no other way for you and me to penetrate there.
Whatever the hell else we are doing, we have to be earning trust. Un-
fortunately that's also the model of good fieldwork. That is why I say
fieldworkwithout transcoding to describe this other approach, a fieldwork
whose end is not producing discourse for our equals by bringing back
news. There's nothing particularly good about penetrating into subal-
ternity. I'm not in search of the primitive or anything. But if we are going
to talk about it, then I will say that if one manages to penetrate in there,
and it's not easy, then I think what we have to do is take a moratorium
on speaking too soon. I used to be against information retrievalyears
ago,
but now I've thought it through in greater detail. We hear a lot of talk
620 I Sharpe and Spivak

now-and I'm not particularlyhappy about it-about intellectual capital

and cultural capital.And it's a nice, trendy, sexy metaphor. If we are going
to use that metaphorology, then I would say that this is like mercantile
capitalism: buying cheap and selling dear because nobody can go there.
So that's something one really must be careful about. It's not unnameable.
In many ways, it's only too easily nameable!
JS: Well, I suppose I meant unnameable in the sense of avoiding a
transcoding and a quick conversion into a particular logic. But I am in-
terested in what you say about inevitably finding oneself doing fieldwork.
GS: There is no other model. You are a person who is clearly not a
subaltern person, who has moved into a group which clearly is subaltern
with no kind of mobility. And you are earning trust so that you can do
whatever it is that you are there to do. So I'm thinking of the best models
of fieldwork. One is tempted, when one is not an anthropologist oneself,
to equate anthropology with its worst examples. You know what I mean?
That patient effort to learn without the goal of transmitting that learning
to others like me, it seems to me, can be described by others as fieldwork,
and I would not have a way of saying no. My goal is not to produce well-
written texts about those experiences. If that were so, then I would not
be able to learn because my energies would be focused toward digesting
the material for production. It's as simple as that. There is nothing mys-
terious there. If your energies are focused toward that, you are constantly
processing, and you are processing it into what you already know. You're
not learning something. So this is why I say that you should perhaps call
it fieldwork, because "learning from below" is too pious sounding. And
today, I would accept the word fieldwork because it's less self-ennobling
than "learning from below."
JS: What about the teaching you have just finished in Hong Kong? Do
you consider that fieldwork?
GS: I think in a certain sense, everything, for me now, has become
fieldwork. So the word has lost its interest.
JS: Are you a "wild anthropologist"?
GS:Well, I have alwaysbeen; we have always been. That's how I talked
about colonial subjects and postcolonial subjects. And today it is very true
of the new immigrant. Very true indeed. We internalize the folkways of
the metropolis without disciplinary authorization. Hong Kong for me is
a very interesting case. As you know, I'm not really yet fully back. I've
been teaching for five months at the Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology, and I'm just on my way back to New York.This university
is among the top forty in science and technology in the world, and the
humanities component is much more old-fashioned, because it's clearly
 S IG N S Winter 2003 1 621

not a radicalhumanities university.I was asked to teach poststructuralism.

When I went there, I saw that in fact-well, the students themselves told
me in a preliminarymeeting-they didn't know the rest of Western literary
tradition. So, I scrapped my course immediately, and I started teaching
from Aristotle on down. What I was interested in doing was speaking as
an Asian to Asians, because the languages used in Hong Kong are Chinese
and English. So, with my miserable classical Greek, I'm pushing Aristotle
in Greek, with my miserable Italian, I'm pushing Dante in Italian. I kept
telling them-"You read the West not because everything Western is good,
so that you can theoretically apply it to your raw material. Do not read
the West because everything Western is bad, so that you can show how
Chinese was better. Both are the same thing. Read it because it is there
and, in certain respects, it won. Then you'll see that it's interesting." And
then, when we began to read all these other languages, and of course,
they didn't read these languages at all, I would try extremely hard to push
through. I would say to them, remember, it's not only Chinese that loses
by translation; these languages also lose by translation. There was no
English when Aristotle wrote. You have to think about that. And within
that, to always keep my head straight on gender. That was much more
difficult, because in a postgraduate seminar at a science and technology
university,you can't make the usual kinds of gender pronouncements. So
you have to think through the ways in which you are going to make this
gender analysisnot just relate to U.S. feminism and Hong Kong feminism,
or to Asia Labor Monitor. I remember the class where we did Hrotswitha
von Gandersheim; for me the question is why must we read a piece of
literature by a woman in order to get to the beginnings of feminist theory,
but the oral presentations related to a Filipinapointing at how Catholicism
oppresses women, and a Hong Kong Chinese woman doing character-
ology because her teachers are influenced by mainstream Euro-U.S. fem-
inism. I found, without planning, that I could only undo this by showing,
by example, that an Asian could take Europe as the object of investigation.
Is this to be "interpellated as an Asian?" This was, for me, an incredibly
interesting learning experience.
JS: In saying that you were an Asian teaching Asians about the Western
tradition, are you saying that you didn't teach the course the same way
you would at Columbia?
GS: It's not that I would not teach it differently-because I didn't go
in thinking I would teach it any different. But this was an unusual situation
of one kind of Asian teaching another kind of Asian the traditions of the
West, but in the original languages. I did not feel disenfranchised in the
way in which . . . It amuses me, I don't really feel disenfranchised at
622 I Sharpe and Spivak

Columbia, but you know metaphorically, as an Indian woman teaching

Aristotle to white Americans, there is a certain peculiarity.
JS: Although you can do it in the original language . . .
GS: But nonetheless! So it isn't that I would have taught the course
differentlyat Columbia, but I found myself reallyin a fully differentteaching
situation. I can say that while teaching at Columbia I have been trying
hardest to emphasize the imagination as an in-built instrument of othering
ourselves. Because I think the real problem at Columbia is that the student
is encouraged to think that he or she lives in the capital of the world. The
student is encouraged to think that he or she is there to help the rest of
the world. And he or she is also encouraged to think that to be from other
parts of the world is not to be fully global. And New York City can become
transparent.So therefore my biggest undertaking,my biggest task,is actively
to dramatizethe imagination as an instrument of othering. In other words,
to teach how to read in the most robust sense, that is to say, suspending
oneself and entering the text and the other. If indeed we are thinking about
othering as a good thing, it is a kind of chosen othering, as it were, the
chosen othering through the imagination. Strictlyspeaking,nothing is more
conducive to this than working on a cultural script that is not supposedly
yours. And that is one of the reasons why I admire the directions in which
your work has gone. And I've said this to many people. I consider this to
be altogether admirable.
JS: I am interested in juxtaposing the different sites of your teaching
in order to see how each location transforms your pedagogical practices.
You have already talked about teaching in Hong Kong and New York.
Correct me if my information is wrong, but I read somewhere that you
organized a teacher's training course in Bangladesh, and I would like you
to talk about this as a third site of your teaching.
GS:No, not in Bangladesh. I mean, yes, I did do it in Bangladesh, but
my general focus is in India. I hope in fact in some way to move away
from my own cultural inscription. I did try it for a little while in Algeria.
I have other plans about which I will say nothing. But the Indian stuff is
because my mother tongue is Bengali, and if you really want to involve
yourself with what I called-I've said it once already, but that is my
phrase-the largest sector of the electorate in the global South, then you
must know their native language well. I mean, I know Hindi, but not in
the way in which one can actually train extremely ill-trained teachers.
JS: When you say ill-trained, what do you mean?
GS: Badly educated, you know. Mostly not high school graduates.
JS: They are going to be teaching in rural schools?
 S IGNS Winter 2003 I 623

GS: They are not going to; they do teach. They teach in these schools
that I run. So, yes, I do train them how to teach. What else?
JS: Well, can you speak a little bit more about your schools in India,
because when you talked about your teaching in Hong Kong, you estab-
lished a whole scenario . . .
GS:Because the Hong Kong scene can be imagined. But if I talk about
these places, first of all, I think I would get the kind of approval from
your readershipwhich I would much ratherearn because of my theoretical
work. You know, there is a certain kind of benevolent approval which I
really resist. I'm being as honest as I can be.
JS: Well, I was thinking more theoretically, because you are a teacher.
GS: These are one-room schools, okay, so they are very different from
my own upbringing. Remember what I was saying about intranational
cultural difference? These people are generally aboriginal, whereas I'm a
metropolitan, middle-class caste Hindu. First of all, it took me the longest
time to learn what the nature of the bad teaching was. Believe me, Jenny,
that is a long process, because you cannot undo thousands of years of
oppressing the mind through these nice kinds of Montessori-style exper-
iments. So in fact, the real challenge is to be able to produce principles
of change in teaching that can be internalized by this ridiculously feeble
teaching corps. I'm not at all sure of anything that's happening or not
happening. When you see these things in pictures and posters and booklets
or television, the protofeudal, downwardly class mobile, liberallyoutraged
activists are always present. I'm sorry that this cynicism has come up in
the last ten or twelve years. The question is how long this education would
last if the activists were not at all present? How long? Two years? Two
months? Three years? Five years? Fifty years? Maybe seventy years, as in
the case of the Soviet Union? History is much longer. So that's the way
in which one learns how to teach with no guarantees.
JS: The undoing is the most difficult?
GS:Well, not anymore. I used to talk about the undoing before I had
started this stuff. If you get into it, it gets undone. You don't even know
how it's getting undone. You're surprised by it. You're surprised the
by
unexpected, and it affects your other kind of writing. So it's really a lot
of fun although it's so uncertain. There are absolutely no guarantees, so
one has to remember what that young woman said so
correctly-"It's
good for the schoolchildren." But the moment you feel it's reallyworking,
you have to stop and ask yourself, for whom is it working? Give it a try;
be absent. See. And you will see within the week . . it's not so
easy to
undo a thousand years.
624 I Sharpe and Spivak

JS: We've reached the end of the interview. I don't know if you want
to add anything else at this stage.
GS: I don't think so, except for what a pleasure this conversation has
been. We've known each other now for such a long time, and generally,
the interview session is with a relative stranger. It was fun to speak in the
presence of intimacy, past intimacy.

Department of English
University of California, Los Angeles (Sharpe)

Department of English
Columbia University (Spivak)

References
Landry,Donna. 2001. TheInventionof the Countryside: Hunting, Walking,and
Ecology in English 1671-1831.
Literature, New York:Palgrave.
Mindry,Deborah.2001. "Nongovernmental Organizations,'Grassroots,'andthe
Politics of Virtue." Signs:Journal of Womenin Cultureand Society26(4):
1187-1211.
Spivak,GayatriChakravorty. 1988. "Canthe SubalternSpeak?"In Marxismand
theInterpretationof Culture,ed. CaryNelson andLarryGrossberg,271-313.
Urbana:Universityof IllinoisPress.
Reason:Towarda Historyof theVanishing
. 1999. A CritiqueofPostcolonial
Present.Cambridge,Mass.:HarvardUniversityPress,1999.
Yegenoglu,Meyda.Forthcoming."InhabitingOtherSpaces:TouristsandMigrants
in the PostcolonialWorld."In Transactions:Tourismin theSouthernMediter-
ranean, ed. Kamran Asdar Ali and MartinaReiker.