Let the Subaltern Speak

In October of 1957—when many of the graduates attending their 50th reunion this week were beginning their senior year of college—the Faculty Committee on Regional Studies at Harvard established the Center for East Asian Studies in order to give “cohesion and stimulus” to graduate training and research associated with East Asia. The Crimson ran a short article covering the Center’s formation, noting that its plans called for “more intensive study of Japan, Korea, and other potential trouble areas.”

Fifty years later, in the fall of 2007, Harvard undergraduates beginning their studies of the humanities or social sciences cracked open the works of Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, and Michel de Montaigne. Bending the spines of heavy books purchased from the Coop or checked out of Lamont library, students learned about the working-class struggle through the words of Karl Marx, and perused Niall Ferguson’s “Empire” and Christopher A. Bayly’s “Birth of the Modern World” in order to understand the reality of imperialism. We students of the 21st century closed our books this spring having swallowed Michel Foucault’s philosophies of ethics and power, content that our comfort with social theory extends beyond “supply and demand” and into the realm of “discourse,” “alterity,” “postcolonialism,” and other rhetoric that strikes our parents’ generation as silly and our contemporaries as cutting-edge.

The autumn of 1957 and the Harvard experience of today are two historical moments—separated by half a century—that share an unfortunate thematic link. Both have a progressive face masking a regressive mindset that has shifted in the past five decades but has not disappeared. Although the academic left scored a victory in the latter half of the 20th century by making “ethnic” and “regional” studies mainstream, the creation of venues of study for non-Western disciplines or topics is only half the battle. While the 1957 establishment of the Center for East Asian Studies surely led to a greater understanding of East Asian cultures on Harvard’s campus, it is impossible to escape the exoticism the region was subject to by the College’s press. By labeling Japan and Korea “potential trouble areas,” The Crimson pigeonholed these Asian countries into the realm of the unfamiliar and dangerous, volatile entities exiled by their vulnerability to the pull of communism. This tag validates these nations as objects of interest and simultaneously denies them their rich cultural history in favor of shoving them under the heading of potential “bad guys.”

Today, Harvard students study Asia, Africa, and South America not because of these regions’ potential to create “trouble” (oh, those pesky non-whites!) or to be used as communist pawns, but because the University recognizes the inherent value in understanding “non-Western” cultures and histories. The class of 2008’s graduates had the option to concentrate in African and African American studies, East Asian languages and civilizations, Near Eastern languages and civilizations, and Sanskrit and Indian studies. But what is still missing from Harvard’s academic offerings is the opportunity to study these fields as integrated pieces of history, literature, and social theory. While it is possible to be a history major and devote much of your studies to the history of Africa, for example, the introductory courses in history are exclusively Western. A deep investigation of African history necessitates dipping heavily into the anthropology and African and African American studies departments. It is worth pausing and asking why the histories of non-white regions are still largely relegated to the arena of ethnic studies when French and German are as much categories of ethnicity as are Indian, Egyptian, or Ghanaian.

The syllabi for the mandatory introductory courses for concentrators in history and social studies (the “interdisciplinary concentration in the social sciences at Harvard College”) are confined to Western authors and theorists. While no longer mandated (the history department’s current requirements are one course in pre-modern history, one course in Western history, one course in non-Western history, and six additional half-courses in the department or related fields), the traditional survey courses that are so fundamental to a background in historical study have a Western bias. The measly two weeks spent on European expansion and imperialism in History 10b: Western Economies, Societies and Polities from 1648 to the Present (this seems a little sparse considering the extreme force with which European “expansion” impacted the economics and politics of the modern world), require no readings from non-Western authors. Therefore, while students are free to study the works of colonized writers in departmental or upper-level history courses, their introduction to “history” must be on the terms of the imperialists. It is a shame that in the age of the free flow of information, history at Harvard is still a tale told by the victors.

By granting autonomy to departments of regional and ethnic studies, academics may think they are allowing marginalized historical characters to have voice in their own domain. But as literary critic and social theorist Gayatri Spivak writes in her article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”(1988), post-colonial initiatives such as these may in fact be complicit in the task of imperialism. In creating a forum outside of the discipline of history that forces non-Western histories into anthropological molds, the ideal of collective speech may in fact silence the individual voices of the formerly colonized and those without access to imperial resources or the imperial language. Even efforts such as the postcolonial field of study offered by the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature may be ultimately harmful: The notion that there can be some sort of cultural solidarity among incredibly diverse peoples simply by virtue of the sad, shared historical fact of Western domination threatens to muffle unique histories and re-deposit historiographic agency in the hands of Western intellectuals and Western institutions.

When Spivak asked if the subaltern could speak, she should have asked if the subaltern could speak for itself—or better yet, themselves. At Harvard, the answer is still “no.” Harvard can take pride in its status as a progressive university when it begins to treat non-Western nations just as Western countries are treated in the formation of curricula in fields such as history, literature, and social studies.

Emma M. Lind ’09, a Crimson editorial chair, is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House.