Subalternity by definition marks a space that resists being directly witnessed

Evidence

In the essay I made it clear that I was talking about the space as defined by Ranajit Guha, the space that is cut off from the lines of mobility in a colonized country. You have the foreign elite and the indigenous elite. Below that you will have the vectors of upward, downward, sideward, backward mobility. But then there is a space which is for all practical purposes outside those lines. Now, if I understand the work of the Subalternists right, every moment of insurgency that they have fastened onto has been a moment when subalternity has been brought to a point of crisis: the cultural constructions that are allowed to exist within subalternity, removed as it is from other lines of mobility, are changed into militancy. In other words, every moment that is noticed as a case of subalternity is undermined. We are never looking at the pure subaltern. There is, then, something of a not-speakingness in the very notion of subalternity. I think people also go wrong, and this is very much a United States phenomenon, in thinking that we have any interest in preserving subalternity. There is for us no feeling of romantic attachment to pure subalternity as such. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2293

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Every observable moment of subalternity is already a crisis that undermines pure subalternity — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2293; Working for the subaltern means their insertion into citizenship and loss of subaltern space — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2430; A subaltern who becomes audible thereby ceases to be subaltern. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 43 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Working for the subaltern means their insertion into citizenship and loss of subaltern space #expands (0.90) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 2430
• A subaltern who becomes audible thereby ceases to be subaltern. #corroborates (0.85) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 43
• Subaltern speech becomes agency only within responsive resistance #expands (0.80)
• The space of appearance is an encounter of un-collapsed plurality. #complicates (0.75)
• The power to not-see is constitutive of seeing itself #complicates (0.70)