What were the significant contributions of Spivak and Bhabha to their schools of literary criticism? Also, what contributions to criticism have...

Gayatri Spivak has been an influential figure in rethinking Marxism, postmodernism, and feminism in the context of post-colonial, transnational capitalism. Her most often cited texts are the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Spivak’s notion of the “subaltern,” an underclass that exists independent of Marx’s proletariat, is an attempt to theorize classes of people, particularly women, who have been “erased” by the dominant culture and rendered unable to “speak,” or be heard in public discourse.

Homi Bhabha is best known for his books Nation and Narration and The Location of Culture. Bhabha argues that traditional European notions of nationhood (that a nation can be defined by a single, coherent historical narrative) cannot apply to post colonial nations, and that instead national identity is “imagined” or produced through the interaction and conflict of many different cultural experiences. In fact, colonial rule itself produces the conditions for resistance through “mimicry” – the idea that by trying to instill European language and values on native populations, colonial rulers actually invite indigenous co-optation and inversion of official language.

Trauma theory seeks to understand the significance of past catastrophes or traumas. It is based on a few basic principles: first, that the trauma did happen; second, that the totality of the trauma is inaccessible to representation; third, that testimony about the trauma is a legitimate way to understand the importance of the trauma; fourth, the collective narrative created by testimony about the trauma can, through its incompleteness, provide “spaces” in which the significance of the trauma can be understood. Trauma theory provides a theoretical framework within which personal experience can be used to understand or construct the “reality” of historical trauma.

Taken together, Spivak and Bhabha, along with the trauma theorists, can be understood to be engaged in the same project: understanding and articulating the colonial experience – finding a way, either through Bhabha’s notion of “mimicry” or the “testimony” of trauma victims, to allow Spivak’s subaltern to finally speak.

Sources:

Berger, James. “Trauma and Literary Theory”. Contemporary Literature 38.3 (1997): 569–582. Web.

Simon, Jon, ed. From Agamben to Zizek: Contemporary Critical Theorists. Edinburgh: Univ. of Edinburgh Press. 2010. Print.