Yesterday I returned from the annual convention of the Society of Classical Studies, a large and generally exhausting affair that allowed me to listen in on a number of different approaches to Classical studies. No doubt my gentle readers will not be surprised to learn that the panel that I most enjoyed was on the voices of slaves in antiquity (although I was surprised to find a familial reader of this blog in San Francisco; if you’re still reading, hello!).
One of the things that surprised me about the panel was the frequent reference to to the work of the anthropologist James C. Scott. Specifically, a number of the panelists undergirded their approach to ancient texts by evoking Scott’s theory of public and hidden scripts. Scott studies south-east Asia and developed this theory in order to explain the production and consumption of texts, rituals and other forms of communication under colonial rule. Scott fully articulates this theory in “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” in which he explains that the germ of the book first came to him after he realized how differently poor people in Malaysia talked about the rich when the rich were in listening distance than they did when the rich were in their enclaves.
This idea can be useful for approaching Classic texts. For example, in Plautus’ comedies, there are a number of scenes in which the comedian appears to represent speech that can best understood as how slaves complained to each other about their masters. Since comedy troops in Plautus’ time included slaves, the actors would have been quite aware of what that speech would have sounded like.
However, while listening to this panel talk about Scott, I kept thinking of another scholar of southern Asia, Gutyari Spivak. A literary scholar who helped shaped the (sub-(?))discipline of post-colonial studies, Spivak is most well known for her article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which is, in part, an investigation into how language and power operate in colonial India. Subaltern was a initially a military term used to refer to a particular kind of soldier, but in the twentieth century, mainly as the result of Gramsci, it became a term used by Marxist thinkers to theorize about oppressed people in a society; it is formed from the Latin “Sub”, meaning below, and “alternus”, meaning” every other one”. Spivak is a close reader of famously obscure thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, and she makes uses of these theorists frequently throughout that article. The sort-of case study around which her article focuses (or at least concludes with) is the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri in North Calcutta in 1926.
I kept on thinking of Spivak because her conclusion about the Badhuri’s suicide is “The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” (1988: 308) a position that is very much at odds with the optimism of the slavery panel that it was possible to read Classical texts, such as Plautus, in such a way that we can meaningfully reconstruct the voices of slaves.
One of the things that surprised me about the panel was the frequent reference to to the work of the anthropologist James C. Scott. Specifically, a number of the panelists undergirded their approach to ancient texts by evoking Scott’s theory of public and hidden scripts. Scott studies south-east Asia and developed this theory in order to explain the production and consumption of texts, rituals and other forms of communication under colonial rule. Scott fully articulates this theory in “Domination and the Arts of Resistance,” in which he explains that the germ of the book first came to him after he realized how differently poor people in Malaysia talked about the rich when the rich were in listening distance than they did when the rich were in their enclaves.
This idea can be useful for approaching Classic texts. For example, in Plautus’ comedies, there are a number of scenes in which the comedian appears to represent speech that can best understood as how slaves complained to each other about their masters. Since comedy troops in Plautus’ time included slaves, the actors would have been quite aware of what that speech would have sounded like.
However, while listening to this panel talk about Scott, I kept thinking of another scholar of southern Asia, Gutyari Spivak. A literary scholar who helped shaped the (sub-(?))discipline of post-colonial studies, Spivak is most well known for her article “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, which is, in part, an investigation into how language and power operate in colonial India. Subaltern was a initially a military term used to refer to a particular kind of soldier, but in the twentieth century, mainly as the result of Gramsci, it became a term used by Marxist thinkers to theorize about oppressed people in a society; it is formed from the Latin “Sub”, meaning below, and “alternus”, meaning” every other one”. Spivak is a close reader of famously obscure thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida, and she makes uses of these theorists frequently throughout that article. The sort-of case study around which her article focuses (or at least concludes with) is the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri in North Calcutta in 1926.
I kept on thinking of Spivak because her conclusion about the Badhuri’s suicide is “The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read” (1988: 308) a position that is very much at odds with the optimism of the slavery panel that it was possible to read Classical texts, such as Plautus, in such a way that we can meaningfully reconstruct the voices of slaves.