In prepping to write a thesis on postcolonial literature, I keep encountering the word “subaltern.” Writing Analytically and “The Method” tell us to pay attention to repetition, and I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a solid definition of the term, so this is as good a keyword as any to begin.
Culler credits keywords to Raymond Williams, a scholar I first encountered in Professor Seiler’s course “The Generational.” This is coincidentally also the class that inspired this thesis project (I’ve been a bit of a Williams fangirl ever since). As part of the final project, we were tasked with assembling a generational anthology; I chose to try and chronicle “the Partitioned generation” in novels. When it comes to the historical record of Partition, and specifically that of chronicling violence, women’s’ voices are largely absent from the archives. Fiction seems to play a significant role in bridging this gap, leading one to ask where real-life women fit into the narrative. This is where the subaltern fits in.
In A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonialism by Robert J. C. Young, Young reiterates the views of Gayatri Spivak in regard to the subaltern, stating that “particularly in the case of women, especially working-class women or women of color, they are just absent: we do not find their voice because they were never able to be in a position to speak” (Young 24). The subaltern refers to those pushed to the margins of society because they do not have a platform or the ability to speak in the colonizer’s language. This explanation of “the subaltern” by Young echoes Culler’s description of keywords. According to Culler, Williams “sought to recover and explore a popular working-class culture that had been lost sight of as culture was identified with high literature” (Culler 45). Working class culture was lost in the creation of a literary canon, just as women’s voices were lost in the creation of a historical canon.
In the context of my own research, there is no equivalent word for rape in Urdu; works translated from Urdu into English (an attempt to translate the subaltern) are forced to use figurative language or visual representations of silence—things along the lines of ellipses and em dashes. To answer Spivak’s question in the context of women and Partition narratives, the subaltern definitely cannot speak on sexual violence if a word for rape does not exist.
Works Cited
Young, Robert J. C. A Very Short Introduction to Postcolonialism. Oxford University Press, 2020.