University of Oregon Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" to Deepa Mehta's "Fire" Author(s): Rahul Gairola Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 307-324 Published by: University of Oregon Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4125368 Accessed: 22/10/2008 17:53 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uoregon. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. University of Oregon is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Literature. STOR ® http://www.jstor.org
RAHUL GAIROLA Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" to Deepa Mehta's Fire Postcolonial Theory and Economies of Identity Seventeen years ago Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published "Can the Subal- tern Speak?"-one of the most influential theoretical works in the field of post- colonial studies and an essay that continues to be a critical force in the evaluation of the epistemology of history and globalized capital (hence certain terrains of ideology) in the twenty-first century. Spivak has forced us to apprehend the dis- comforting (lack of) answers to the question "Can the subaltern speak? What must the elite do to watch out for the continuing construction of the subaltern?" (90). Specifically, she questions whether Indian women imbibed with the nonsecular ideologies of Hinduism have a say in their own existence (even death!) and what agency these women secure in the perpetual resurrection of the very roles that construct their gendered domination. Spivak goes on to argue that "in seeking to learn to speak to (rather than listen to or speak for) the historically muted subject of the subaltern woman, the postcolonial intellectual systemati- cally 'unlearns' female privilege. This systematic unlearning involves learning to critique postcolonial discourse with the best tools it can provide and not simply substituting the lost figure of the colonized" (91). Though it may be somewhat problematic to assume that a process of unlearning can truly occur, Spivak crucially demonstrates that to gain a rudimentary under- standing of the subaltern woman, the interlocutor must renounce the benefits of privilege. Spivak also writes: "When we come to the concomitant question