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Introduction
In her complex and hugely influential essay “Can the subaltern speak?”[1] (1988), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak deals, inter alia, with three issues that I want to revisit in this paper: the notion of the subaltern woman as subject; the idea of representation as “Darstellung” and as “Vertretung”; and the position and obligations of the investigating subject. Thirty years on, the issue of the subaltern woman’s subject position, the distinction between “Vertretung” and “Darstellung,” and the position of the investigating subject in relation to these remains extremely important, not least in methodological considerations in cross-cultural contexts. A number of questions, however, may still be asked, such as: who is the subaltern woman? And in relation to representation: how distinct are its two meanings, “Vertretung” and “Darstellung,” in the interviewing context? And how do they relate to the notion of the co-production of knowledge, which has gained such traction in the past three decades? We might also ask, finally, but imbricated in these questions, how does the investigating subject stand in relation to the subaltern woman, to “Darstellung” and “Vertretung”? And, do those questions leave us with the conclusions drawn by Spivak 30 years ago: “The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with ‘woman’ as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish” (p. 104).
Starting from the seeming silence of illiterate rural women in a study conducted in Madhya Pradesh, India, in 2008 (Mohanraj, 2010), this paper also draws on the research experiences and projects reported on in Cross-Cultural Interviewing (Griffin, 2016a) to elucidate how one might re-think both subalternality and representation, as well as tackle the positionality of the researcher, in the contemporary globalized context.
In 2008, a PhD student of mine, Pranati Mohanraj, who was working on “Understanding Girls’ Absence from School in Madhya Pradesh, India” (2010), went back to her country for three months to conduct fieldwork in three villages in the form of interviews with out-of-school girls and their mothers, among others. Her purpose was to investigate why girls of school age were...