A Voice Sweeter than Salt: Toyin Falola and the Construction of Subaltern Narrative Space

Gayatrl Spivak is arguably most recognized for her 1988 intervention in the dialogue of Subaltern Studies. It is within the intellectual rift of Spiva k's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" that I explore the narrative of Toyin Falola's memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt. While Spivak concludes that the subaltern cannot speak be­cause of the subaltern's placement within existing knowledge production, Fa­lola's "Mouth" articulates a formation that says otherwise. Indeed, in A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, Falola's status In the subalternlty of a decolonlzlng Nigeria depicts a powerful subaltern voice with deep implications for knowledge, rep­resentation, authorial location, multifaceted identity paradox, and most of all, the tendrils of modernity. Fundamentally, this piece argues against Spivak by constructing a case for the relative authenticity of Falola's voice, despite its incorporation into Western intellectualism. Spivak claims that the subaltern cannot speak so long as the Western academy can only relate to the other within its own investigative par­adigm of the non-Western object. Here, I frame A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, not as a Western co-opting of an indigenous voice, but rather, as an invitation to explore Falola's memoir from the position of the non-Western subject. The work also allows us to move beyond the categories of the Western and non-Western subject to seriously engage the paradox of postcolonial existence. In granting credence to the idea of identity paradox, a close analysis of A Mouth Sweeter than Salt reveals the complexities of African subaltern voice and its dialectic with the forces of modernity. While Spivak might argue that this formulation is tainted by the motives of the West, such an interpretation of Fa­lola's memoir also builds ground to discuss alternatives to the Western archive in the development of African intellectualism. Falola's memoir stands as a tes­tament to the legitimization of oral history, micro-historical storytelling, and the disintegration of Western disciplinary divisions between history, literature, sociology, philosophy, and a host of other imported intellectual categories. By outlining the critical duality of Falola's act of subaltern speech, I hope to build a realm in which the African intellectual voice is not artificially segmented from the historical influence of modernity, but can also open discursive space to stand on its own ground.

Historiografía de los movimientos sociales en las independencias. Los pueblos indígenas en el Reino de Guatemala

Las protestas de la gente común en los pueblos del Reino de Guatemala, a principios del siglo XIX, se han estudiado poco. En este artículo se sigue el curso de la historiografía centroamericana, desde las primeras obras que se ocuparon de tales movimientos, influidos por el positivismo liberal, el nacionalismo o el marxismo, hasta los trabajos recientes que armonizan con corrientes como los Subaltern Studies, la nueva historia política o los que buscan una nueva integración de estos distintos enfoques. Se da especial atención a sus propuestas metodológicas, para analizar la acción política de los indígenas, y, en general, a las nuevas rutas de investigación que proponen.

The Citizen sive the Subaltern

The subaltern has frequently been understood as a figure of exclusion, and as the specular opposite of the figure of the citizen. This understanding derives from the Subaltern Studies collective’s creative reading of partial English translations of Antonio Gramsci’s carceral writings. In this article, I argue that a contextualist and diachronic study of the development of the notion of subaltern classes in Gramsci’s full Prison Notebooks reveals a very different understanding of the constitution of subalternity. In particular, the notion of “subaltern capacity”, the dialectical nexus of hegemony and subalternity, and the figure of the “citizen sive subaltern” are proposed as ways of comprehending the contradictions that define the modern citizenship itself as a process of “subalternization”.

Unholy Matrimony: Forced Marriage in New Zealand

<p>This study explores the issue of forced and underage marriage in Aotearoa New Zealand. It documents the stories of survivors of actual and threatened forced marriage. It also records the survivors‟ analyses of their experiences and their recommendations for changes that may deter the practice in New Zealand. This study postulates that forced marriage is not a cultural issue per se, but a form of violence against women, shaped by socio-political forces and practised by some. It examines notions of „honour‟ and „shame‟ which are often inextricably linked to the issue of forced marriage. The study goes on to provide an overview of genderbased violence in Asia, Africa and the Middle East as well as diaspora communities internationally and in New Zealand. This research study is heavily influenced by GAD thought and by various epistemologies including postcolonial feminism, subaltern studies and participatory action research. As such, it emphasises self-reflexivity and focuses on „gender relations‟ than „women‟ as the category of analysis. The views and potential contributions of eleven stakeholder agency participants in terms of addressing the issue of forced marriage are also included in this study. The study also examines relevant existing New Zealand legislation in light of the country‟s international obligations regarding marriage. Specific recommendations on both social and legislative reforms are provided in an attempt to promote a collaborative, multi-sector response to address the issue from the perspectives of both intervention and prevention. In conclusion, this study, which is the first of its kind in New Zealand, hopes to shed light on an issue that is a human rights violation. It aims to promote action to deter the practice and to progress the rights of ethnic minority women in New Zealand without fuelling an anti-minority discourse. Finally, it attempts to fill a number of knowledge gaps in academic, policy and legislative literatures.</p>

Unholy Matrimony: Forced Marriage in New Zealand

<p>This study explores the issue of forced and underage marriage in Aotearoa New Zealand. It documents the stories of survivors of actual and threatened forced marriage. It also records the survivors‟ analyses of their experiences and their recommendations for changes that may deter the practice in New Zealand. This study postulates that forced marriage is not a cultural issue per se, but a form of violence against women, shaped by socio-political forces and practised by some. It examines notions of „honour‟ and „shame‟ which are often inextricably linked to the issue of forced marriage. The study goes on to provide an overview of genderbased violence in Asia, Africa and the Middle East as well as diaspora communities internationally and in New Zealand. This research study is heavily influenced by GAD thought and by various epistemologies including postcolonial feminism, subaltern studies and participatory action research. As such, it emphasises self-reflexivity and focuses on „gender relations‟ than „women‟ as the category of analysis. The views and potential contributions of eleven stakeholder agency participants in terms of addressing the issue of forced marriage are also included in this study. The study also examines relevant existing New Zealand legislation in light of the country‟s international obligations regarding marriage. Specific recommendations on both social and legislative reforms are provided in an attempt to promote a collaborative, multi-sector response to address the issue from the perspectives of both intervention and prevention. In conclusion, this study, which is the first of its kind in New Zealand, hopes to shed light on an issue that is a human rights violation. It aims to promote action to deter the practice and to progress the rights of ethnic minority women in New Zealand without fuelling an anti-minority discourse. Finally, it attempts to fill a number of knowledge gaps in academic, policy and legislative literatures.</p>

Gendered Subaltern in Abhi Subedi’s Dreams of Peach Blossoms

This paper examines the consciousness of gendered subaltern in Abhi Subedi’s poetic play Dreams of Peach Blossoms and looks at how Subedi deconstructs the existing historiography to bring forth the issue of gendered subaltern who have been subjected to the hegemony of the ruling class. Drawing on insights and postulations from Subaltern Studies theorists such as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Partha Chatterjee, Gautam Bhadra and others, this paper examines the pain and agonies of female characters that are glossed over in the grand narrative of the mainstream culture. This paper concludes that while exploring the painful experience of women erased from the pages of history, Subedi is focused on the Maiju culture that began since Bhrikuti’s marriage to a Tibetan King in the sixth century and reveals the injustice of patriarchy against women with an aim to make correction in such distortions of history.

War and the subaltern: Voice as power in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

In Africa, as in most other parts of the world, whenever there is war (or massive violence of any other hue), the common people are used as cannon fodder to protect the powerful upper class formulators of the letters of the war. Women and children are easily the most vulnerable. They are raped, tortured, murdered, starved, widowed, and exposed to all sorts of insecurity and depredation. In the end they are marginally characterized in upper class, male-centered war discourse. In this research, we locate the voice of the subaltern in Buchi Emecheta’s civil war novel, Destination Biafra (1982). We utilize Subaltern Studies in a qualitative approach to offer the needed agency to female subalterns as well as a few other marginalized groups. We map the trajectory of these voices and show that the subaltern woman and the other margins denounce colonial complicity in the androcentric war, and would rather the society eschewed violence as conflict resolution strategy. With this study we fill an existing gulf in the Nigerian Civil War narrative and create an alternative discourse against the largely upper class, male-centered voices that have hitherto characterized civil war novels.

Postcolonial Thought and the Emergence of Global Architectural Histories

In the last quarter of the 20th century theories of the postcolonial were usually closely tied to the experience of British and French colonialism in a band of North African, Middle Eastern, and South Asian colonies stretching from Morocco to Malaysia. During this period, Edward Said’s book Orientalism and the early work in subaltern studies both challenged the supposedly dispassionate character of Western scholarship on North Africa and Asia by demonstrating the degree to which it had been skewed by racial and class bias. Although architectural historians took more than a decade to fully absorb its implications, there are few humanities or social sciences disciplines that since the 1990s have been more thoroughly transformed by this once radical shift in perspective, which has changed how the architecture of almost all parts of the world is understood. Whether or not they fully engaged with the theories articulated in scholarship whose initial focus was the analysis of literature, in the case of Said, or of history, in that of subaltern studies, 21st-century architectural historians have paid unprecedented attention to the post-1500 architecture of the Global South, to colonial architecture and its relationship to economic exploitation, to post-independence architecture especially in relation to international modernisms, and to the impact that colonialism had on the architecture of the metropole. While the second and third of these had long been addressed in relation to British settler colonies, architectural history’s global turn meant that they could no longer be considered in isolation from new comprehensive histories of imperialism.

Women as Subalterns in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” and “A Real Durwan”

This paper aims to investigate the hysteric tendencies, inconsistent speeches and silences of woman in Jhumpa Lahiri’s two short stories “The Treatment of Bibi Haldar” and “The Real Durwan.” The paper addresses this objective through the application of subaltern perspective: subaltern cannot speak. More specifically, single, poor and helpless women’s position and their inability to speak in need are analyzed in the light of subaltern studies. These two stories expose the issue of hysteric woman and an elderly street woman with different stories, respectively. The disadvantaged women’s inability to speak – parallels the subaltern’s inability to speak. This paper analyses hysterical tendencies, inconsistent behavior of Lahiri’s protagonists as the outburst, thus, the subtle ways of resistance. Thus, the paper draws the conclusion that Lahiri’s stories demonstrate economically and socially marginalized woman who lack the act of protest as they cannot speak, tending to develop the different verbal and physical inconsistencies.