The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic

Abstract

In a well-known argument, "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Marxist-deconstructionist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raises complex questions about the ways in which scholars, writers, and historians from the Western elite aspire to give "voice" to the colonial subjects, the third world subalterns, of their first world societies. Are there techniques by which such authors might allow subaltern subjects to represent themselves with maximum authenticity? Or must even well-meaning Western writers, no matter what their literary strategies, be doomed instead to reproduce simplistic versions of their own culture's "others"? Babouk, a 1934 work just republished in Monthly Review Press's "Voices of Resistance" series, is an early example of an effort to negotiate this tension in the form of an experimental novel. In this case, the Western author and colonial subject are positioned in the text to speak from distinct but complementary perspectives.

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