Authority of Discourse

Joshua Krueger #3042188

CRS/IDS 4910 – Conflict and the Construction of the Other

Richard McCutcheon; October 31, 2011

Think Piece #6: Authority of Discourse

Homi K. Bhabha discusses the power of the novel as cultural form of power for the colonizer. In his piece, he uses the example of the Bible to bring out the concept of hybridity. Using India as his backdrop, and proselytizing as the reason for the encounter, the question of authority quickly arises. In this case the Bible represents each, and at the same time, the authority of God distinct from humanity and the power of the English through the ability to present the word of God. This hybridity becomes apparent with the unconscious cultural associations that the English missionaries attach to their gospel that become nonsensical to the Indians. With such strange and foreign customs as the Eucharist, the coloniser is seen not only as other, but as cannibal. This is how the Indians can boldly respond with, “how can the word of God come from the flesh-eating mouths of the English?”[1] While the Bible is a special case because of its inherent impossibility to be claimed solely by the English as their own, this type of mixing happens within all forms of symbolic power and “other ‘denied’ knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority – its rules of recognition.”[2] Hybridity, a natural result of the collision of two different cultures, actually becomes the tool to dismantle cultural symbols of authority as authority, leaving the colonial authority in a place where it “must continually be re-presented in the production of terror or fear.”[3] It is from this place of acknowledged hybridity that allows the native to begin to carve out a new space of colonial discourse while still remaining within the civil boundaries of colonial sources of power. Instead of placing their resistance solely within the field of nationalism, the questioning of colonial authority – such as those questions directed at the divine authority of the English as gospel providers – become a defensive tactic for the native and a site of civil disobedience. Paradoxically, the symbols of power and authority for colonialism, once transposed into the native and its culture, eventually breed the sites for coercive resistance.

While Bubba brings forward how hybridity can bring another voice to the colonized, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in her aptly named piece “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, shows how the questions that are formed around a discourse can limit the voices that can be heard. As Spivak shows continuously in her piece, the subaltern can clearly speak and resist, but can they be heard? Bluntly, she states no, using Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide and the following misunderstanding of her actions as only the latest step in the ladder that post-colonial theorists have used to climb away from reality. Her meaning, like her style of rhetoric, is deeper than surface level though. Just as it is only possible to see Bhadrui’s act as “absurd, a case of delirium rather than sanity”[4] without the proper context, Spivak’s entire article can only be fully understood as a subaltern woman intentionally writing in a mode as difficult as those she commentates on. Spivak is demanding to be heard, not necessarily by everyone, but by those who claim to be working in the same field as her, as they simultaneously pass over her as an epistemological category that is unable to speak and unworthy to listen to.

These two intellectuals present the challenges and struggles that face such a simple and consuming task as attempting to work around and through the discourses of power around the issue of representations and authority.

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[1] Homi K. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817,” in Critical Inquiry 12 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 158.

[2] Ibid, 156.

[3] Ibid, 158.

[4] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Marxism and the Interpretations of Culture, Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 308.