Representation's Coup

Abstract

Some 25 years after its publication, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's “Can the Subaltern Speak?” continues to cause an ethical consternation not fully explicable by its apparent political claims. This article explores the grounds for that effect by elaborating the philosophical system of representation that the original essay only partially addresses in its reading of Marx's writings. It argues for the necessity of a critical understanding of the role of the intellectual as the agent of a system of representation that dialectically produces the subaltern. Without such a critical genealogy of the function of the intellectual as embedded within the system of representation, the subaltern becomes the object of melancholy postcolonial identifications and ethical distress. The essay concludes with a re-reading of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea as a novel that stages the crisis and failure of colonial identifications.

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