The Possibilities of Cultural Movement Today

Spivak gained her first reputation through her translation and preface writing on Jacques Derridas Of Gramatology (1976), and since then implemented deconstructive strategies to various theoretical approaches and textual analysis range from Feminism, Marxism, and Literature critics, to the recent Postcolonialism. She is currently professor at the Columbia University, United States.

Kuan-Hsing Chen is now a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Currently he is board member Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, as well as lecturer at Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He has been involved in the editorial team of several books such as Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, published by Routledge, London/New York, 1998). His forthcoming book entitled Asia as Method.

Hilmar Farid is cultural activist and historian, co-founder of Jaringan Kerja Budaya/JKB [Cultural Network] and Institut Sejarah Sosial Indonesia/ISSI [the Indonesian Institue of Social History]. He taught at University of Indonesia in Jakarta.

B. Public Lecture
The Possibilities of Cultural Movement Today

In 1985, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, published her writing entitled Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice. Through her study on the Indian widow sacrifice (sati)which then became an influential writing among the postcolonialism scholarsshe spoke about the colonialism tendency on the postcolonialism theory. Spivak questioned the role of the postcolonialism intellectual that often exclaim to speak on behalf of the oppressed people, the voices of the subaltern. Can the subaltern really speak?

The idea of subaltern was initially used by Antonio Gramsci to refer to the inferior groups, the groups in the society, who are continuously being the hegemony subject of the authority groups. Farmers, labors, and other groups, who dont have access to the hegemonic power, can be identified as subaltern class. On his notes on Italian history published in 1934 (Notes on Italian History), he said that the history should contain the history of the subaltern classes. He argued that the history of subaltern class is as complex as the history of dominant class. The later is often to be formally acknowledged as the official history. The subaltern class never has enough access to the history, to their own representation, and to the other social and cultural institutions. Only the permanent victory (class revolution) that could clear cut the subordination pattern.

Ranajit Guha, an Indian historian from Subaltern Studies Group, adopted Gramscis idea to encourage rewriting action of India history. On the On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India (1982), Guha said that the dominant history on India nationalism doesnt involve the role of subaltern groups, workers, and middle class people living in the cities or villages. To speak it briefly, what Guha meant by subaltern is the non-elite people. And what meant by the elite people is the dominant groups, either come from indigenous people or foreigners. The foreigners are the British state authorities, the corporate owners, traders, plantation owners, land masters, and missionaries. While the indigenous people can be divided into those who work at the national level (feudalist entrepreneurs, indigenous employee in higher bureaucracy) and those who work at the local and regional level (members of dominant groups).

Guhas adoption of Gramscis subaltern is interesting. Mostly because he gives a clearer framework to analyze who is our friend, who is our enemy and forces us to recheck and reanalyze the dichotomies of oppression. Guhas idea shifts the dichotomies between colonial-anti colonial, labor-master, civil-military, etc., and turns them into the dichotomies of elite-subaltern. Our attention on the issues of oppression that have only been focused on the outsider actors, nowadays must be broadened towards the insider actors. Those who consider themselves as an anti colonial person can perform more colonizing than the real colonizer.

In Indonesian context, the translation of Guhas idea would be: a labor oppresses other labor, a civil person oppresses other civil person, a democratic defender party could be more fascistic than a fascist party, or those who claim themselves as marginalized group defenders could act as oppressor to the marginalized groups, and so on.

Gayatri Spivak, in her writing about sati mentioned above, put a strong note towards the postcolonialism intellectuals movement on the danger of their claim of speaking on behalf of the subaltern groups. Spivak made a conclusive statement that the subaltern groups or the oppressed ones are indeed voiceless. That is why an intellectual can never either make any claim or romanticize their ability on exploring and searching for the subaltern groups voices. In contrary, such claims are very colonialist bias, because it tends to generalize the diversity values of the subaltern groups, and eventually it forms an epistemology of violence towards the subaltern groups. Thus the relations created between the intellectual and the subaltern groups are as the relations between the slaves and their master.

The voices of the subaltern groups are unsearchable, because they are never able to speak, they are voiceless. Instead of searching such voices, the intellectuals have to be present as the representation of the subaltern groups. To quote Gramsci, the intellectuals should then provide themselves with the consciousness of an intellectual pessimism and an optimistic will: philosophical skepticism to cure the subaltern groups agency along with the political commitment to show their marginalized position.

Several important issues for postcolonialism cultural movement that could be expressed here are: who is the real profile of the marginalized people that needs to be empowered? Whose voice that we are going to speak out? How are we going to speak about the intellectual and artists roles in the social changes? And lastly, is there any possibility forwhat so called cultural movement?

C. Outputs
1. Rethinking on the cultural movement in Indonesia, and comparing them to the cultural movements in other Asian countries.
2. Putting cultural movements as a part of critical challenge to the globalization.
3. Looking for Indonesian historiography that rooted in local problems.
4. Manifesting postcolonial perspectives to Indonesian current affairs.
5. As a meeting point for cultural activist, academia, artist, and the communities.

D. Activities

Sunday, March 5, 2006
10.00 : Public Lecture, The Possibilities of Cultural Movement Today, Sanata Dharma University, Yogyakarta.

E. Target Audience

Public lecture will be attended by approximately 150 people, 30 of them are the sponsors and invited guests from educational institutions, formal and non formal organizations related to the topic discussed at the forum.

F. Biography

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Spivak is best known as a para-disciplinary philosopher, postcolonial theorist, Her reputation was first made for her translation and preface to Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) and she has since applied deconstructive strategies to various theoretical engagements and textual analyses: Feminism, Marxism, and literary criticism.

She is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, teaches English and the Politics of Culture. Professor Spivak has also taught at Brown, Texas-Austin, UC-Santa Cruz, Université Paul Valéry, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Stanford, University of British Columbia, Goethe Universität in Frankfurt, Riyadh University, and Emory.

Spivak was born in Calcutta, West Bengal, 24 February 1942. She thus belonged to the "first generation of Indian intellectuals after independence. She did her educations in English at the University of Calcutta (B.A., 1959) and Cornell University (M.A., 1962 and Ph.D, 1967) where she was Paul de Mans student.

Before coming to Columbia in 1991, she was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She has been a Fellow of the National Humanities Institute, the Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan, the Humanities Research Center at the Australian National University, the Center for the Study of Social Sciences (Calcutta), the Davis Center for Historical Studies (Princeton), the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio). She has been a Kent Fellow and a Guggenheim Fellow. Among her many Distinguished Faculty Fellowships is the Tagore Fellowship at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (India). She has been a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective.

Among her many invited lectures may be mentioned the Davie Memorial Lecture at Cape Town, the Walker-Ames lecture at the University of Washington, the Linguisticulture Conference at The University of Osaka, the steirische Herbst in Graz (Austria), the Lancaster University (UK) Conference on Transformation through Feminism, the documenta X (Germany), the Johannesburg and Kwangju (Korea) biennales, the inaugural Mary Levin Goldschmidt -Bollag Memorial lecture in the projected series on Flüchtlings- und-Migrationspolitik in Zurich, the National Women's Studies Association Annual Convention, the seventh annual International Womens Conference in Tromso (Norway), the Wellek Library Lectures at the University of California.

She is on the editorial Board of many journals, among them Cultural Critique, boundary 2, New Formations, Diaspora, ARIEL, Re-thinking Marxism, Public Culture, Parallax, Interventions, The Year's Work in Critical & Cultural Theory. Spivak is also active in international women movement, ecological justice movement, and rural literacy teacher training on the grassroots level in Aboriginal India and Bangladesh.

Spivaks Major Publications
Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1974), "Displacement and the Discourse of Woman" (in Mark Krupnik, ed. Displacement: Derrida and After, 1983), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (in Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, eds. Marxism and the interpretation of Culture, 1988), Selected Subaltern Studies (co-eds. with Ranajit Guha, 1988), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (ed. Sarah Harasym, 1990), Outside In the Teaching Machine (1993), The Spivak Reader (ed. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, 1996), A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003).
Among her numerous projects is translating (with critical introduction) the works of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) and Mahasweta Devi Imaginary Maps (1994), Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999), and Chotti Munda and his Arrow (2002).

Kuan-Hsing Chen
Kuan-Hsing Chen has been the coordinator of the Center for Asia-Pacific/Cultural Studies, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. Founding President of the Cultural Studies Association, Taiwan, he has held visiting professorships at universities in Korea, China, Japan, and the U.S. At the moment he is fellow of Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore. A core member of the Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies, he is a co-executive editor of the journal and books series of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies: Movements.

Chens Major Publications
Media/Cultural Criticism: A Popular-Democratic Line of Flight (1992), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies (1996), Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (1998), Cultural Studies in Taiwan (2000), Locating Political Society: Modernity, State Violence and Postcolonial Democracies (2000), The Imperialist Eye (2003).

A Collaboration Project of:
KUNCI cultural studies center, Kedai Kebun Forum, Cemeti Art Foundation, and
the Graduate Program in Religious and Cultural Studies (IRB) Sanata Dharma University
Secretariat: c/o Cemeti Art Foundation, Jalan Patehan Tengah No. 37, Yogyakarta, 55133
Tel. 0274-375 247, Tel./Fax. 0274-372 095 Email: artysc@indosat.net.id