Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak The Rani of Sirmur An Essay in Reading the Archives英文清晰.pdf

THE RANI OF SIRMUR:AN ESSAYIN READING THE ARCHIVES* GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK Twoyearsago, when a conference with the title Europeand Its Otherswas proposedby the Sociologyof LiteratureGroupat Essex, I made some pious remarksabout an alternativetitle, namely,Europeas an Other.It has since then seemedto me that the in proposedrevisionwas ill-considered at leasttwo ways.First,it ignoredthe factthat the historyandthe theorythat sucha con- ferencewouldwantto expose are those of how had consoli- precisely Europe dateditself as sovereignsubjectby definingits coloniesas Others,evenas it constituted them, for purposes of administrationand the expansion of markets,into programmed near-imagesof thatverysovereignself. Second,the proposedrevisionnostalgically assumedthat a critiqueof imperialismwould restorea sovereigntyforthe lost self of the coloniesso thatEuropecould,once and for all, be put in the place of the otherthat it alwayswas. It now seems to me that it is this kind of revisionaryimpulsethat is allowingthe emergence of the Third Worldas a convenientsignifier. If insteadwe concentratedon documentingand theorizingthe itineraryof of the consolidation Europeas sovereignsubject,indeedsovereignandsubject, thenwe wouldproducean alternativehistoricalnarrativeof the of worlding whatis todaycalledtheThirdWorld.Tothinkof the ThirdWorldas distant cultures,exploitedbut with richintact to be inter- heritageswaiting recovered,