Quotes about Spivak's stated purpose in the essay
“The chain of complicity does not halt at the closure of an essay.”
“Throughout these pages it has been my purpose to show the complicity between subject and object of investigation—the Subaltern Studies group and subalternity”
Quotes on "reading against the grain"
"since a "reading against the grain" must forever remain strategic, it can never claim to have established the authoritative truth of a text, it must forever remain dependent upon practical exigencies, never legitimately lead to a theoretical orthodoxy.” [Spivak cautions against reading that leads to fixed ideas and that sees the author as authoritative]
“You can only read against the grain if misfits in the text signal the way.”
“I read Subaltern Studies against its grain and suggest that its own subalternity in claiming a positive subject-position for the subaltern might be reinscribed as a strategy for our times. What good does such a reinscription do? It acknowledges that the arena of the subaltern's persistent emergence into hegemony must always and by definition remain heterogeneous to the efforts of the disciplinary historian. The historian must persist in his efforts in this awareness that the subaltern is necessarily the absolute limit of the place where history is narrativized into logic” [Spivak argues that the collective has to recognize that they will never be able to come at a true “subaltern consciousness” nor is such a task desirable]
“Reading the work of Subaltern Studies from within but against the grain, I would suggest that elements in their text would warrant a reading of the project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness as the attempt to undo a massive historiographic metalepsis and "situate" the effect of the subject as subaltern. I would read it, then, as a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest" [Spivak interrogates the collective's political stakes in recovering the subaltern from the colonial archive]
Quotes where Spivak critiques the Subaltern Studies' citational practices
"poststructuralist theories of consciousness and language suggest that all possibility of expression, spoken or written, shares a common distancing from a self so that meaning can arise—not only meaning for others but also the meaning of the self to the self. I have advanced this idea in my discussion of "alienation." These theories suggest further that the "self" is itself always production rather than ground'"
“it would be interesting if, instead of finding their only internationalism in European history and African anthropology (an interesting disciplinary breakdown), they were also to find their lines of contact, let us say, with the political economy of the independent peasant movement in Mexico.”
