Le voci delle intersezioni. Postcolonialism and feminism

when the subaltern can speak out

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1980s, a group of scholars met at the University of Delhi to reflect on the relationship between the West and the East. The collective created by the historian Ranajit Guha takes the name of Subaltern Studies, recalling the Gramscian theories on subordination. The analysis of the relationships of domination and subjection between settlers and colonized people is central to the development of new postcolonial theories.  The protagonists of this fervent debate do not circumscribe postcolonialism within precise geographical boundaries: the postcolonial condition is mainly ideological since it arises as a product of the historical relations and processes of colonization. Within Subaltern Studies, the scholar Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak questions the absence of the female subject in the discourse of her colleagues, asking a fundamental question for postcolonial theory and for feminist theory: "Can the subaltern speak?". The woman appears to be a ventriloquized subject and constantly represented and defined by the gaze of the other. Spivak focuses on the female subject's need for self-determination. The voice of the Indian philosopher is echoed by the Chicanas and African American feminists who from the United States demand a feminism that takes into account all the subalternities that act on the female body, first of all the race. The declination of the intersection between sex, race and class plays a central role in both postcolonial and feminist theory. In the present work we observe some moments of confrontation and encounter between feminism and postcolonialism, the main demands and the strategies of resistance used by the voices of the subalterns.