‘Becoming’ Subalterns: Writing and Scribbling in Early Modern Prisons
From Firenze University Press Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies (JEMS)
Anna Clara Basilicò, University of Padua/Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
After several years spent studying historical graffiti, more specifically, inquisitorial prison graffiti, I found myself questioning the common perception of graffiti as subaltern writing that emerges in public discourse (Basilicò 2023a). The application of the materialistic approach of Armando Petrucci to the graffiti of Palazzo Steri, used as the Inquisition prison in Palermo from 1604 to 1782, led me to take this form of graphic production as an exercise on the part of the victims of the Holy Office, whose condition could rightly be defined as one of subalternity. In contrast with the praxis of coeval secular prisons, the Holy Office did not make any distinction of class, confining in the same cell intellectuals, millers, slaves and merchants. We know this from the information about social relations between prisoners that is annotated in archival records. Nevertheless, on the walls of Palazzo Steri, I could only spot the words of some of them. How is that Agueda Azzolini,1 Baharàm,Zara, sor Juana Rosselli, Arabia, Hamete cannot be associated with any of the graffiti? The perhaps obvious idea of relativity as a prerogative of subalternity conflicted with both the idea of subaltern as a collective body and as singularity. Could the world ‘subaltern’ be accompanied with adverbs such as more or less? I struggled to find a way out of the idea of subalternity as a social product of hegemony, roughly wondering whether ‘ “popular culture exists outside the act that suppresses it” ’(Ginzburg 1992, xvii) — even though I do not agree with using ‘popular’ as a synonym of ‘subaltern’. I must admit that it was not scholarly literature that persuaded me of the contrary, but a fortunate encounter with the jineolojî, the science of women as described by the Kurdish women’s movement (Güneşer 2021). Thus, assuming for the subaltern an existence other than that defined by its contrary — and what defines its contrary? –, the problems relied on the ‘epistemological availability of subalternity’ (Warrior 2011, 86). This contribution aims to address the issue by comparing two different approaches towards subalternity — namely Antonio Gramsci’s legacy and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s formulation — and to show the lines of continuity between them.
2. Scattered Speculations on Subalternity
In an interview published in the appendix of The Postcolonial Gramsci (Srivastava and Bhatta-charya 2012, 221–232), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak described a ‘certain dilution’ (221)7 of the word ‘subaltern’ ensuing from her attempt to ‘make the work of Subaltern Studies more easily accessible’ (ibid.). As a result, ‘subaltern became a claim to a certain kind of undifferentiated victimage … “subaltern is anybody who feels inferior” ’ (221–222). This is far removed from her actual interpretation, which I will try to summarize for the benefit of my argument on prison graffiti and subaltern writings.The broad literature produced by Spivak provides the scholar with at least three features of the subaltern: s/he cannot speak, cannot be heard and is being silenced. She speaks of subaltern as ‘those removed from lines of social mobility’ (2004, 531), situated in a ‘position without identity’ where ‘social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognizable basis of action’ (2005, 476). The subaltern does not have consciousness of their condition, from which Spivak derives the difference between subalternity and class (ibid.). S/he occupies a place excluded from representation in both political and aesthetic senses, is a non-agent and a non-subject. What rightly seems to characterize the subaltern is the privation, the negation, insofar as the only possibility to define subalternity is via negativa. This is why, addressing historiography, Spivak feels the urge (and invitation) to read the silences of history, to measure them, instead of striving to find records. Such a statement might recall Foucault’s archaeology of silence (1961, ii), or even Le Roy Ladurie’s area of cultural silence (1978, 189), but Spivak’s outcomes substantially differ from both, rejecting both Foucault’s aesthetic attitude and the process of information retrieval as possible solutions to uncover the subaltern presence throughout history. For Spivak, one must assume the subaltern’s speech to be essentially inaudible and illegible for those who ‘achieved’ the space produced by patriarchy. Reporting the story of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, a young woman who hanged herself in Calcutta in 1926, Spivak demonstrated the extent to which historical circumstances and ideological structures colluded to remove any chance of her being heard (1988, 307–308). Shortly afterwards, she concludes her essay by stating that the ‘subaltern cannot speak’ (308). Subalternity is thus the structurally imposed position from which it is impossible to access the capacity to take power, substantially differing from the possibility adumbrated by Gramsci. If a subaltern escapes from this muting, then s/he ceases to be a subaltern — which is obviously a desirable switch. The sole act of speaking implies the shift from subalternity to something else, being thus the act of a formersubaltern. At this point, she is not too distant from Gramsci’s position, whereby ‘when the subaltern becomes leader and is in charge … there will be a revision of a whole mode of thinking because the mode of existence will have changed’. This is the most controversial argument, the already mentioned ‘epistemological availability’ of the subalterns. Luckily (for me), in her copious production, Spivak slightly mitigated her position, rowing back on this. ‘I said in a very violent and enraged rhetorical voice “The subaltern cannot speak” ’, she admits, but ‘that is not to be taken as an expository sentence’ (2014, 11). She eventually rejects the ‘totalizing character ascribed to the condition of subalternity’ (de Jong and Mascat 2016, 723) and it becomes a sort of space of transition between agency and non-agency, a fluid, temporary condition.The liminal rite seems to be the shift from a locutionary act to an interlocution, which according to Vahabzadeh might, under specific circumstances, lead to the ‘hegemonization of the subaltern-turned-subject’ (2007, 110).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/jems-2279-7149-15531
Read Full Text: https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/bsfm-jems/article/view/15531
