For Speaking: Spivak’s Subaltern Ethics in the Field

In this paper I consider ethnographic data alongside the subaltern ethics we find in the writing of Gayatri Spivak. I present an ethnography of development workers in rural India engaged in gender education initiatives. The data is not at all light-weight. The data includes accounts of everyday gender-based discrimination, alongside one particularly harrowing case of serious violence: the rape, silencing and suicide of a young girl in the town where the research took place. This raises, I argue, two ethical issues. First, to do with the politics of intervention on the ground and the ways that development actors perceive and care for a Subaltern Other. Second, to do with the politics of representation and the ways that a development researcher might address grave injustice within the political and historical production of the South and gender relations. In discussion the paper distils three ethical injunctions in the writing of Spivak to do with: i) deconstruction towards an avowedly anti-foundationalist notion of subalternity; ii) the ‘hyper-self-reflexivity’ of an always-complicit investigating subject; iii) the imperative towards representation (not silence). By way of conclusion, I articulate the article’s main argument: Spivak’s work cannot implore us to further silencing, rather we must apply her work on the ground towards an ethical engagement with subalternity that rests on a mode of speaking for and about in an anti-foundationalist, and hyper self-reflexive manner.