Thoughts on Spivak. Analyses and Questions

First, the first sentence. “If by our old-fashioned reckoning philosophy concentrates and literature figures, feminist historiography excavates.” I had no idea where she was going this until I returned to it after reading substantial parts of the chapter. I think what she is driving at here is that “feminist historiography” has cannot work in the general terms (“concentrative” and “figural”) that philosophy and literature have worked in. This makes some sense: since feminist historiography as a “new” field would need to “extract” data about women from the strata of historicized material, which will of course be a rather masculine substance (i.e. history is made up of men’s stories, we have to go digging for women’s stories beneath the surface.)

            Nevertheless, I am struggling to understand this first sentence as a rhetorical move. She writes “old-fashioned” pejoratively—presumably because these are overgeneralizations—yet she inscribes (what I’m assuming to be) her own work within this class of over-generalizations. As if she says “well these fields have over-generalized themselves, I’ll overgeneralize myself too!” Odd move, I think, especially when what I understood from the piece is that she wants to bring attention to the fact that discourses come predetermined with their own damning sets of overgeneralizations which efface local discourse. (On this note, I’m curious if anyone knows how she is different than Foucault in this sense.)

Next, a suggestion for looking at two pages which seemed fairly central to me, 238 and 239. I think this complicated piece can be fairly well summed up with a quote from 238: “Of what is history made as it happens? Of the differed-deferred “identity” of people in the deferred-differed “unity” of actions?” I find this quote insightful. History has to operate by means of a generalized cause and effect that is always specious, i.e. Hitler caused World War II. Furthermore, history erroneously lumps together people’s as well: “All Germans wanted to exterminate the Jews.” Still, I want to identify a potential paradox that which embodies my general critique of this kind of post-colonial thinking. Essentially, I don’t see the post-colonial space as a special locus for this kind of historical discourse violence. What would be a case where the historicizing of collected information not constructed in this way? I find it good that we are discussing these third-world, post-colonial spaces, especially the minorities therein, such as women, but I have trouble seeing them as special cases.