Subalterity and Feminism in the Moment of the (Post)modern: The Materialist Re-Turn

Teresa L. Ebert

Revision History
• Spring 1994	Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students.
The Alternative Orange: Vol. 3, No. 3 (pp. 22-27).
• October 1, 2000	Webpage: .
DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original.

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Several years ago, in the course of a discussion on what has happened to the political left in the West, especially in the United States, Robert Fitch observed that one of most visible changes has been the left’s preoccupation with questions of the “Third World” or (post)coloniality. The left, as he said, “having gotten rid of those 19th century heirlooms” of socialism,

needed to replace them with something to avoid the embarrassment of empty space—preferably something without sharp edges. Third World workers and peasants fit in quite well. Didn’t they deserve our attention more than the workers in our own society? In absolute terms, weren’t they even poorer and even more oppressed? Besides, relationships with them were easier to maintain. They were located in convenient out-of-the-way places so you hardly ever saw them. And if asked why we didn’t support workers in our own communities, we could always answer that we were anti-imperialists and that the truly deserving workers were outside our reach. So the new internationalism of the left meant that support for Third World struggles gradually tended to replace, rather than reinforce involvement in struggles at home. (Robert Fitch, "What's Left to Write?" VLS: Voice Literary Supplement, May 1989, pp. 18-19)

In fact, Fitch goes on to say that,

by and large, special concern with labor, class and the transformation of society has been displaced intellectually by the ‘posts-.’ With the advent of postindustrialism, postmodernism, post-Marxism or whatever, the assumption appears to be that here in the U.S. we are all bourgeois, or could be with suitable government programs and affirmative action. (19)

This shift and the “pleasure” the “other” often generates for the left as an escape from the “home” difficulties of labor and class is vividly demonstrated by New York City’s 1993 Labor Day parade. According to The New York Times, the parade

celebrated cross dressing and Caribbean ethnicity with much more gusto than it showed for working men and women or union solidarity.

At a time when wages are stagnant or falling and when practically every politician recognizes the big issue to be jobs, jobs, jobs, what does the perfunctory marching mean? Is class struggle truly over?… Or is it simply a case that drag queens and West Indians throw much better parties? (Michael T. Kaufman, "Of Marching and Labor and a Few Onlookers," The New York Times.)

In the face of such contradictions we need to ask whether the growing interest in the academy at the present time with issues of coloniality/postcoloniality[1] is a mark of international activism and a global retheorization of the understanding of exploitation or is it merely a means of running away from the problems at home? This is a question of what Foucault has called power/knowledge and the politics of truth—however, it is articulated largely as a matter of discourse. The issue for us at this moment is whether we should attend to the (discursive) politics of truth and explore the axes of power/knowledge relations—particularly regarding the “Other”—or whether, as Marx argued, we should engage the economics of untruth involving ourselves?

In other words, at the present time there are, to my mind, two fundamentally different ways of understanding postcoloniality. The first, and by far most prevalent, mode engages postcoloniality as a regime of power/knowledge relations and foregrounds the problems of representation; it is, therefore, part of the project exploring the discursive politics of truth.[2] In contrast, the second mode does not take postcoloniality to be simply a problem of cultural politics, as Foucauldian genealogy proposes, but instead understands it as basically an economic issue that has to be explored in the context of the international division of labor and poses the problem of the economics of untruth in the relations of metropolitan and periphery.[3]

While postcoloniality understood as cultural politics is necessary, it is, to my mind, a very limited project. The more productive and politically effective undertaking is, I believe, one that sees postcoloniality as the articulation of the international division of labor. To say this does not mean I am dispensing with the problems of representation, knowledge or truth, but rather I am arguing that these cannot be understood separate from the political economy of labor. This is an especially pressing issue for feminism, since feminist theory in postmodernity is increasingly substituting discourse for political economy. Such a move is all the more problematic when we note that not only is feminism one of the primary sites for inquiry into postcoloniality but that issues of “Third World Women,” “Women of Color” and postcoloniality are becoming one of the predominant arenas of Western feminist concerns. Prominent feminist theorists—from Donna Haraway and Elizabeth Meese to Gayatri Spivak—increasingly focus their recent work on issues of postcoloniality.[4] The major anthologies of feminist theory in the last few years—such as Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller’s, Conflicts in Feminism, Elizabeth Weed’s collection from the Pembroke Center, Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, and Judith Butler and Joan Scott’s Feminists Theorize [Politics/the Political], all have significant discussions of Third World women, and a number of anthologies such as Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres’s Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s De/Colonizing the Subject (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1992) are entirely devoted to these issues.

My concern here today is to ask some difficult and, for many, quite dis-comforting questions about the political and social effects of the way postmodern feminist theorists are engaging the postcolonial, specifically the “subaltern.” I will be carrying out this inquiry through a “critique” of several exemplary texts, notably Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (from Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, Urbana: U of Illinois, 1988, pp. 271-313)—which an interviewer in Socialist Review called her “most famous (or notorious) work” and a “major contribution to this discussion” (Howard Winant, "Gayatri Spivak on the Politics of the Postcolonial Subject" (Interview), Socialist Review, 90.3 (1990), 83)—as well as Elizabeth Meese’s turn from—or what she calls the “ex-tension” of—poststructuralism to postcoloniality in her recent book (Ex)Tensions: Re-figuring Feminist Criticism (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1990).

Feminist and postmodern encounters with the third world/postcolonial see themselves as post-imperialist but what is the status of this claim? I want to begin by situating the question in relation to a non-feminist text, but one that raises troubling issues for us. The essay, “Postcolonial Culture, Postimperial Criticism,” was recently published by W.J.T. Mitchell, the editor of Critical Inquiry, in what is one of the major journals of postcolonial discourse, Transition (No. 56, 1992, pp. 11-19). Even here the economic geo-politics of postcolonialism are at work. The journal, Transition, according to its frontispiece, “was founded thirty years ago in Uganda by Rajat Neogy.” However, the journal we are reading is a “new series” no longer from Uganda, but from the metropolitan heart where it is edited by two Harvard professors, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and published by Oxford University Press. In one of the leading “Position” papers opening issue No. 56, Mitchell claims that we are in “the process of ‘decolonization,’ a term that suggests as its necessary corollary some related transformations in the corresponding centers of empire, a ‘deimperialization’” (13). But such an assumption is little more than an ahistorical postulation of an automatic reflex and confuses the end of one specific stage of imperialism (19th century territorial colonialism) with the end of imperialism as a global system of exploitation. In fact, imperialism— that is, the international division of labor and appropriation of economic and natural resources benefiting First World countries at the expense of Third World societies—is thriving under new guises and by other means, such as the international debt structure, “free trade” or “export processing” zones and the practices of multi-national corporations, creating what Annette Fuentes and Barbara Ehrenreich have called the “global factory” (Women in the Global Factory, Boston: South End Press, 1984). Nor has the West abandoned direct military coercion and territorial occupation—witness the continued military occupation of both the Northern and Southern regions of Iraq. In fact, at one point in the post-War “peace,” the United States was carrying out such an intensive campaign of military overflights in Southern Iraq—one every four minutes—that the machinery (the jets and aircraft carriers) could not hold up under the strain.

The automatic assumption of the deimperialization of the Center is itself an act of concealed imperialism. However, beginning from this assumption, Mitchell goes on to argue that there is a “cultural reconfiguration...overwhelmingly evident in the global cultural relations of the First, Second and Third Worlds” (14): a “reconfiguration and relocation of cultural and critical energy, reversals of center and margin, production and consumption, dominant and emergent forces, reversals in traditional divisions of cultural labor such as ‘criticism’ and ‘creative writing’” (13). And what is this profound reversal? “The commonplace,” he says, which “is simply this: the most important literature is now emerging from the former colonies of the Western empires…the most provocative new criticism is emanating from research universities in the advanced industrial democracies, that is, from the former centers of the ‘Western empires’—Europe and the United States” (14). If this is “the commonplace,” as Mitchell claims, of current knowledges, that the creative energies and articulations of experience are to be found in the former colonies, but that the theories, interpretations and criticisms—the master knowledges—we use to make sense of them are the products of the research centers of the former Empire, then there is little if any de-imperialization going on. Instead, we have the concealed “commonplace” that the old power-knowledge relations of domination and exploitation are reproducing themselves in new forms.

They are able to do so through two moves that have serious implications for postmodern feminist theory, which is often complicit in these strategies. The first is to read “contemporary criticism”—by which Mitchell means postmodern “antifoundationalist” discourses such as “pragmatism and deconstruction” that “come to the Third World from the First”—as “subvert(ing) the imperial economy that supports it, ‘decentering’ the very structure of discursive authority” (16). But this claim for the “postimperialist subversiveness” of anti-foundational discourses is itself an essentializing notion that erases their specific historical uses and effects. For instance, the deconstructive insistence on rhetorical indeterminacy is not postimperialist in its effect when it puts under erasure the certainty and truth-value of the political principles distinguishing the discourses of the African National Congress and those of Neo-Nazi and Apartheid White Supremacists. Second, such a concept of “postimperialist criticism” or knowledge can only be maintained by restricting the arena of subversive intervention to that of the discourses or representations of empire, in short, to cultural politics. This requires that we follow Mitchell’s injunction “to resist,” as he says, “the notion that this relationship”—”between First World Critical movements and literary developments in the Second and Third Worlds”—”reflects the traditional economic relations of imperial centers and colonial peripheries” (17). In short, what Mitchell calls a “rhetoric of decolonization from the imperial center” is only possible if we suppress the global economic realities of the international division of labor and its articulation through the construction of significations, representations and subjectivities.

Most feminist inquiries into postcolonialism and the subaltern, see themselves, like Mitchell, to be participating in postimperialist knowledges and producing a subversive “rhetoric of decolonization from the imperial center.” But in doing so, many feminists frequently participate in the same uncritical and ahistorical notion of de-imperialization both maintained by essentializing the political effects of discursive performances and, more importantly, at the cost of suppressing the economic relations—in short the labor relations—between center and periphery; between overdeveloped and underdeveloped countries,[5] and, not least, between Western feminists and the subalterns they study.

Gayatri Spivak seems well aware of this issue in her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in which she insists on situating the possibility/impossibility of postimperialist knowledges in the West within the international division of labor, for as she says, “Western intellectual production is, in many ways, complicit with Western international economic interests” (271). In current postcolonial discourses, particularly concerning the subaltern, “the first-world intellectual,” according to Spivak, “masquerad(es) as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves” (292). In other words, the seemingly compassionate gesture to let the subaltern speak, to give voice to the other, is not only paternalistic but relies on an illusory transparency that occludes the continuing historical privilege and economic collaboration of the “benevolent Western intellectual” in the international division of labor. Spivak’s concern in the essay is, thus, to deconstruct the way “the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of the Other as the Self’s shadow”—and by Self, with a capitalized “S,” she means the continued perpetuation of the sovereign subject of Western imperialism in which the Other, the subaltern, is repeatedly re-constituted as the different/the Other of US/Europe (280). “This S/subject,” according to Spivak, “belongs to the exploiter’s side of the international division of labor” (280). These efforts to give voice to subaltern subjects operate, Spivak argues, through a ruthless dislocation of “motives (desires), and power (of knowledge)” from the economic situation, which is put “under erasure” by Western intellectuals (280).

In developing this argument, Spivak devotes much of her critique to a deconstruction of the interview between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze called “Intellectuals and Power.”[6] Her interventions in this text are of considerable importance to feminist and postcolonial critics in the U.S. academy since most of their discourses on the empowerment of the Other are heavily indebted to this text. In the interview, Foucault and Deleuze propose what is, in effect, a new theoretical model for deconstructing the idea of theorist as universal intellectual—that is, for displacing the relationship between the intellectual, who traditionally would articulate theoretical knowledges for the masses, who would then follow these knowledges. As Foucault said, “the intellectual discovered that the masses no longer need him to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well, without illusion; they know far better than he” (Foucault and Deleuze 207). And Deleuze states, “a theorizing intellectual, for us, is no longer a subject, a representing or representative consciousness. Those who act and struggle are no longer represented…. Representation no longer exists; there’s only action” (Foucault and Deleuze 206). The point of this retheorization and the project of empowerment following from it tries to establish an equal relationship between the intellectual and the people, specifically, the subaltern.

But it is illusory. For, as Spivak argues, the intellectual’s rewriting of theory as a “relay of practice” in which “the oppressed can know and speak for themselves” reintroduces an irreducible “Subject [capital ‘S’] of desire and power” and a self-proximate, if not self-identical, subject of the oppressed. Further, the intellectuals who are neither of these S/subjects, become transparent in the relay race, for they merely report on the nonrepresented subject and analyze (without analyzing the workings of the unnamed Subject irreducibly presupposed by) power and desire” (Spivak, “Can the Subaltern” 279-280).

In short, the efforts to give voice to the subaltern, not only re-instate an essentialized Subject of power but also “romanticiz[e] the subaltern,” as she says in the Socialist Review interview, constituting them as “unified subjects” immune from “all of the complications of ‘subject production’ [that] apply to us” but do not “apply to them” (Winant 90). Moreover, this “transparency” of the intellectual marks for Spivak the place of economic “interest” and “is maintained by a vehement denegation”—by which she means the intellectual’s refusal to acknowledge his/her own economic interestedness.

This blindness is especially apparent in her critique of Foucault’s notion of power which underlies this postcolonial theory of empowering the Other. In his discussion with Deleuze, Foucault invokes a “geographical discontinuity” to displace the Marxist notion of “exploitation”—and the corresponding necessity of collective economic struggle—with his own notion of diffuse power that allows for multiple resistances based on alliance politics. But such a notion of decentralized power, Spivak quite rightly argues, not only erases “the real mark of ‘geographical (geopolitical) discontinuity’ (which) is the international division of labor,” but it is itself “made possible by a certain stage of exploitation…and is geopolitically specific to the First World” (“Can the Subaltern” 289). Foucault’s argument that a new mechanism of power emerges in the 17th and 18th centuries—one that he says is “absolutely incompatible with the relations of sovereignty…and is more dependent upon bodies and what they do than upon the Earth and its products” (Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, C. Gordon, ed., New York: Pantheon, 1980, 104)—is, Spivak contends, “secured by means of territorial imperialism—[of] the Earth and its products—’elsewhere’” (“Can the Subaltern” 290). In other words, the very ground of this new diffuse, asystematic mechanism of power put forth by Foucault and grounding most postcolonial politics of empowering the subaltern is, in fact, historically dependent on a sovereign and systematic exercise of economic and military coercion elsewhere and not just then but also now. For Foucault is blind, Spivak maintains, not only to the “first wave of ‘geographical discontinuity’”—and here she points out that the “real mark of ‘geographical (geopolitical) discontinuity’ is the international division of labor” (“Can the Subaltern” 289)—but Foucault also “remain[s] impervious to its second wave in the middle decades of our own century” (“Can the Subaltern” 290)—by which she means the global economic and military domination of American imperialism that ushered in, as she quotes Mike Davis, the “new era of commercial liberalism” (“Can the Subaltern” 290). It is this imperialist based commercial liberalism that supports contemporary bourgeois notions of discursive freedom.

Spivak’s deconstruction of the concealed, ongoing imperialist politics of Western representations of the subaltern is an important critique. The outcome of such a project is a necessary one for feminist/postcolonial critics: as Spivak says, “to confront (the subaltern) is not to represent…them but to learn to represent ourselves” (“Can the Subaltern” 288-289), or as she also says, “the task of the first-world subject of knowledge in our historical moment is to resist and critique ‘recognition’ of the Third World through ‘assimilation’” (“Can the Subaltern” 292).

But Spivak’s text also has its own blindspots or aporias, and I want to engage some of the more important ones for feminist theories of subalterity. First, for all her emphasis on the international division of labor, Spivak posits a crucial omission. In discussing the woman subaltern—”the woman…doubly in shadow”—she also raises the issue of the “heterogeneous Other,” which she claims is “Outside (though not completely so) the circuit of the international division of labor…. Here are subsistence farmers, unorganized peasant labor, the tribals, and the communities of zero workers on the street or in the countryside” (“Can the Subaltern” 288). According to her own logic this “outside” of subalterns should also include women’s subsistence labor—their unpaid domestic work. Spivak’s exclusion of subsistence workers and other subalterns from the circuit of the international division of labor derives from a rather orthodox Marxist notion of labor as only wage-labor—as the production of surplus value—and excludes all other forms of labor. But materialist-feminists, specifically the German School associated with Maria Mies, have radically retheorized the issue of labor.[7] For Mies subsistence labor—especially women’s production and reproduction of the means of life, that is, use value—is not outside the international division of labor and appropriation, but rather is the very basis of the historical accumulation of capital. In other words, as Mies argues, “the capitalist production process [is] one which comprises…the superexploitation of non-wage laborers (women, colonies, peasants) upon which wage labor exploitation is then possible” (Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, London and Atlantic Highlands NJ: Zed Books, 1986, 48). Extremely important for our analysis, Mies goes on to note that this superexploited, subsistence labor “is not compensated for by a wage…but is mainly determined by force or coercive institutions. This is the main reason for the growing poverty and starvation of Third World producers” (48). This relation of subsistence labor and capital accumulation is, in short, the basis of the difference constituting the subaltern as “different,” as “other.” Moreover, we need to recognize that the very privilege of the Western intellectual and feminist depends on, or rather is an economic effect of, the superexploitation of subsistence workers, even what Spivak calls the “zero communities of workers,” and women by global capitalism.

Spivak’s blindness to this relation of subsistence labor and capital accumulation leads, I believe, to a serious slippage in her analysis of the representation of the subaltern woman—in which she herself occludes the political economy, the labor relations of representation by substituting a discursive politics that textualizes the subaltern.[8] Thus we find Spivak’s analysis of “suttee,” or widow burning in India, as, what she calls, the “exemplum of the woman-in-imperialism” almost entirely confined “within discursive practice” (“Can the Subaltern” 305). She posits the “other woman,” the subaltern as a silent, unrepresentable excess outside the labor relations and circulating instead in a discursive circuit in which “the figure of the woman disappears,” according to Spivak, “into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization” (“Can the Subaltern” 306) and concludes “there is no space from which the sexed subaltern can speak” (307); “the subaltern cannot speak” (308).

Such a conclusion, however, is the result of her reinscribing, in the end, the very discursive politics and problematic notion of empowerment that she effectively critiqued earlier in her text. For the question she asks, then answers in the negative, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” is itself a misplaced question for a materialist postcolonial critique. To pose the problem of the subaltern in the terms, “can she speak?” is simply to reify the project of giving a voice to the Other as the primary political agenda and to mistake a discursive empowerment for a social and economic enablement. This displacement, however, is widely shared in feminist and postcolonial discourses. As Bell Hooks writes, the process of gaining a voice is “a metaphor for self-transformation…for women of oppressed groups…coming to voice is an act of resistance. Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject. Only as subjects can we speak” (bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, Boston: South End P, 1989, 12; "Identities." Special issue of Critical Inquiry 18.4 [Summer 1992]). Without denying the importance of these struggles to speak, we need also to recognize that such an agenda reinscribes the autonomous, individual of bourgeois ideology in which “speaking,” “coming to voice,” is largely understood as a voluntaristic act of free will and consciousness, presupposing a coherent, self-identical subjectivity. The discourse of empowering voice, in short, reduces the struggles for emancipation and the end of exploitation to a discursive freedom that equates democracy with speaking, with free speech. In doing so, it displaces material democracy— the equal access of all to social and economic resources—and substitutes verbal empowerment for economic and social enablement; individual expression for collective social struggle to transform existing social relations.

The question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” blocks the more pressing questions for the subaltern: what are the historical, material conditions for “hearing” the subaltern and, more important, what are the effective knowledges and modes of collective subjectivity the subaltern needs to transform the economic and political conditions of her life—to intervene in the international division of labor? If we examine the “anecdote,” as Spivak calls it, that provoked her despairing conclusion, “the Subaltern cannot speak,” we find the subaltern speaking all along. The incident as originally described by Spivak is as follows:

A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, hanged herself in her father’s modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926. The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhuvaneswari was menstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy. Nearly a decade later, it was discovered that she was a member of one of the many groups involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence. She had finally been entrusted with a political assassination. Unable to confront the task and yet aware of the practical need for trust, she killed herself. (“Can the Subaltern” 307)

A crucial part of this answer, I believe, is the collective development of materialist “explanatory critiques”—by which I mean those practices and “struggle concepts” (the term is Maria Mies', Patriarchy 36) through which the subject develops historical knowledge of the social totality and her own subjectivities.[9] She acquires, in other words, an understanding of how the existing social institutions (such as, “motherhood,” “family,” “poverty”) have in fact come about and how they can be changed. Critique, in other words, is that knowledge-practice that historically situates the conditions of possibility of what empirically exists under patriarchal-imperialist-capitalist labor relations and, more importantly, points to what is suppressed by the empirically existing: what could be (instead of what actually is). Critique indicates that what “is” is not necessarily the real/true but rather only the existing actuality which is transformable. The role of critique in postcolonialism and, what I call, resistance postmodern feminism[10] is exactly this: the production of historical knowledges that mark the transformability of existing social arrangements and the possibility of a different social organization—an organization free from exploitation. Quite simply then, critique is a mode of knowing that inquires into what is not said, into the silences and the suppressed or missing, in order to uncover the concealed operations of power and underlying socio-economic relations connecting the myriad details and seemingly disparate events and representations of our lives. It shows how seemingly disconnected zones of culture—including the privileges of Western intellectuals and the suffering of subalterns—are in fact linked through the highly differentiated and dispersed operation of a systematic logic of exploitation and international division of labor informing all practices in societies globally under imperialist late-capitalism. In sum, materialist critique disrupts that which represents itself as what is, as natural, as inevitable, as the way things are, and exposes the way “what is” is historically and socially produced out of social contradictions and how it supports inequality. Critique enables us to not only explain how class, race, gender and imperialist oppression operate so we can change it, but also to collectively build the emancipatory subjectivities we need to carry out the revolutionary struggle.

While there were serious limits on the forms of historical critique available to the women in the “Telangana People’s Struggle,” especially regarding issues of gender, the social and political enablement of these women is deeply indebted to the knowledges and subjectivities made available to them through collective practices of critique, particularly as disseminated in political education classes. According to members of the feminist collective, Stree Shakti Sanghatana, which has written the history of these women and their resistance, “All the women refer to the (Communist) Party or the Sangham as the basis and the cause of their liberation” (Vasantha Kannabiran and K. Lalitha, "That Magic Time: Women in the Telangana People's Struggle," Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, K. Sangari and S. Vaid, eds., New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989, 186 [Rpt. Rutgers UP]).

They were taught to read and write and discuss political questions. Political classes were held for them…. The knowledge they gained as a result of these classes gave them the tools to understand their own social reality…the ideological framework provided by the Party helped the women to analyze their situation, process their knowledge and make sense of their surroundings…. The opportunity to act, the power to fight for control over their own lives gave the women an identity, a sense of enormous strength and wisdom. (Kannabiran and Lalitha 185)

As was the case for the subalterns in the “Telangana Uprising,” the Marxian tradition of materialist critique has been one of the most productive sites for developing an historical explanatory critique, but it is not necessarily the only site. If we resist romanticizing the subaltern, we find that the conditions of exploitation and their situation in the division of labor have led them to produce forms of materialist critique. This is quite evident in Rigoberta Menchu’s autobiographical history of the struggles of subalterns in Guatemala—the collective struggle of “Indians,” peasants, and Ladinos—against the landowners.[11] Menchu is a revolutionary leader of the CUC, the Peasant Unity Committee and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. In discussing the Indians’ tradition of centuries of resistance to the colonial domination of Whites (the Spanish) in Guatemala, she points to, at the very least, a nascent materialist critique informing that tradition: a fundamental understanding of the division of labor and colonial exploitation based on it. When an Indian child is forty days old, she/he is initiated into the community in a collective ceremony that locates her/him in the history and knowledges of the people. First, according to Menchu, the “parents make a commitment. They promise to teach the child to keep the secrets of our people,” then toward the end, the people say “Let no landowner extinguish all this, nor any rich man wipe out our customs. Let our children, be they workers or servants, respect and keep their secrets” (Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, ed., I...Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, London and New York: Verso, 1984, 12). And again when the child is ten years old, another ceremony, according to Menchu, “reminds them that our ancestors were dishonoured by the White Man, by colonization” (Burgos-Debray 13). Such traditions clearly mark not only a critique of the class and labor relations of colonialism, but also its cultural politics: for the subaltern to speak, to reveal the secrets of her identity to the colonizer, to us, is to make these vulnerable to the colonizers, to our, appropriation and assimilation, even commodification of them.

This critique was even more strongly developed out of the specific material conditions of exploitation of her family and village at the hands of the landowners, so that Menchu repeatedly tells how her father—an illiterate peasant who helped found and lead the CUC—would say, “my children there are rich people and there are poor. The rich have become rich because they took what our ancestors had away from them, and now they grow fat on the sweat of our labour. We know this is true because we live it every day, not because someone else tells us” (Burgos-Debray 121). But this is not a self-evident, transparent experience. What Menchu calls “seeing things more clearly” or having “clarity of thought” comes from the long painful struggle of what she specifically identifies as “criticism and self-criticism” (Burgos-Debray 166) from days and nights of discussion among the companeros. It is through such critique and discussion that she and other members of the CUC are able to overcome the historical barriers of racial oppression and discrimination between the Indians and ladinos (those of mixed Spanish and Indian blood) and to see as Menchu says that “our poverty united us…the root of our problems lay in the ownership of the land. All our country’s riches are in the hands of the few” (Burgos-Debray 166).

I want to return here to the problem of how Western feminists engage these discourses of the subaltern by critiquing Elizabeth Meese’s “benevolent” and “compassionate” reading of Rigoberta Menchu’s “story” in her book (Ex)tensions. Meese’s reading is located in what she calls “feminism’s double bind…that it cannot speak ‘for’ other women, nor can it speak ‘without’ or ‘apart from’ other women.” Instead, she says, “it must create a space where women who are not these white, middle-class Anglo-American or European feminists can speak or write” (98). The unsaid of this postmodern project of empowering the other, the subaltern to speak, is not to empower them to speak for themselves—for as Menchu makes clear, the subaltern already speaks for herself and to other subalterns—the hidden agenda is to empower the subaltern to speak to us. Is this just another form of imperialist appropriation masquerading as a decolonizing gesture? For all Meese’s thoughtful and compassionate care—and she is both caring and careful—the end result of her encounter with the subaltern is the reinscription of the Western feminist as the sovereign subject of imperialism. This is not a personal inadequacy of Meese, but rather the historical effect of the postmodern discourses of empowerment she employs: her project is firmly located in the discursive politics of desire and power, Spivak so severely critiqued in Foucault, and is thus subject to the same limitations.

Meese’s aim is to “recuperate the experience of the feminist project’s desire for writing the other woman” (101), or more specifically to write herself and Western feminism in a benevolent or, as she says, “compassionate” relation to the subaltern. She thus ends her writing by declaring “my own desire for feminism and (with) a Quiche Indian woman…if she can grow to love the ladino companero, might she someday learn to love the feminist theorist?” (128). But why should she? For as Meese, quickly acknowledges and passes over at the beginning of her text:

The undeniable complicity of the United States government in Guatemala’s ongoing regime of political murder and oppression cannot be separated from my position as writer and my production of the Quiche Indian as both the tragic victim and the courageous opponent of my country. (100)

In a deconstructive move Meese repeatedly tries to put under erasure the binary oppositions of Western/Third World feminism; self/other; feminism/machismo, Indian/ladino, rich/poor. She sees Menchu as exemplary in “crossing over the oppositions, contradicting the contradictions” (113). She is especially concerned with Menchu’s relation as an Indian/Indianist to the ladinos who have historically exploited and racially discriminated against Indians—the crossing over, in short, of barriers of racial discrimination. For Meese the “structural position (of the ladino) resembles (that of) the feminist theorist.” She thus enacts a textual transfer: if Menchu can “cross-over” and learn to “love the ladino,” she can learn to “love the feminist theorist”—Meese, you and me, thereby absolving us of our complicity and privilege in the concealed circuit of the imperialist division of labor and economic appropriation. Thus Meese claims that

Rigoberta Menchu’s struggles to liberate the racial or ethnic term from economic and moral connotations of the opposition are instructive to feminist criticism as it negotiates other (con)founding oppositions such as masculine/feminine, political/personal. Her contribution to the discussion of ladinos is the retrospective awareness (‘afterwards we realized’) that ladinos can be human (like Indians) good and bad depending on how they behave rather than on any essential (blood) nature. This is a profoundly un/settling awareness for the revolutionary who needs to be clear about who the enemy is. (116)

Where, then, does my critique leave those of us who seek to join in solidarity with the struggles of the subalterns—with those exploited by the international division of labor—and who do not wish to appropriate them for our own desires? By way of a partial answer I would like to recall the comments of Nawal El Saadawi, the Egyptian feminist, who has said:

As a writer, I am often invited to international conferences, and I must say that I hate this division between Eastern and Western feminists. Because, in fact, many women in the West are quite backward and many women in the East are very progressive, and vice versa, so the division between East and West is ambiguous and misleading. And when I attend such international meetings I am frequently asked a question by Western women that I know is well intentioned but, even so, is grounded in assumptions that are quite racist: ‘You have come from an impoverished, backward country. How can we help you?’ It is always assumed that we women of color need assistance and that so-called First World women must help us. And so we often hear, ‘How can we help you?’ We usually respond by saying, ‘Well, you can help us by fighting here in your country against the same system that is oppressing us all’. (Nawal El Saadawi, Untitled, Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing, Philomena Mariani, ed., Seattle: Bay P, 1991, 155)

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