"Thus Spake the Subaltern…": Postcolonial Criticism and the Scene of Desire

Abstract

If we are sure today that the subaltern cannot speak, can we be as sure that her ghost does not, especially when criticism seems to re-present the discourse of that ghost? I situate what follows at the limits of this haunted discourse by reopening the now familiar question of who speaks for the subaltern subject; my essay considers the relationship between the postcolonial and the force of memory within that criticism. I contend that criticism can usefully articulate Lacanian psychoanalysis and Foucauldian discourse analysis from within the field of cultural memory. However, this articulation is obliged to mark, as rigorously as possible, the structural lures that can lead us down some false trails. My itinerary therefore follows the stakes of the example in texts by Homi К Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Noting the melancholia that haunts these texts, I consider the genealogy of

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