spivak subaltern transnationality annotation by prerna
prerna_srigyanSpivak's text helps us read against methodological nationalism. I understand methodological nationalism as a problem of containment, or reading a place/scale as containers of an analytic. Arjun Appadurai has the inverse notion of "theoretical metonymy", or analytics as containers of place (if you had to study caste, you would go to India; or to study segementation, you would go to an African country). Spivak's tactic of "reading against the grain" (which questions the author and the text as authorities) of the works by Subaltern Studies tells us that even though their project comes out of a particular history of the Indian subcontinent, the figure of the voracious subaltern they build accidentally has the potential to build solidarity in similar contexts, for example, the independent peasant movement in Mexico:
"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.”
I think Spivak's point is that such solidarities might not be collective consciousness in the way Marxist thought writes about class consciousness. Rather they would be based on "practical exigencies", allowing people to move in and out of scholarly and activist projects and to not mobilize subalternity for scholarly and activist gatekeeping. It not only allows for shifting goals and shifting subject formations, but sees this non-closure, this complicity which does not halt at the closure of an essay, as strategic to political organization.