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Introduction
Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” (1988, revised in Spivak, 1999 and Morris, 2010) is one of the most influential and iconic essays not only in the field of postcolonial theory, but across many disciplines (Didur and Heffernan, 2003; Maggio, 2007). This is an essay that has endured a longevity and impact rarely seen in academe (Persram, 2011), inspiring fervent debates on conceptions of the subaltern and subalternity, subjectivity and subjectification and solidarity and political agency (de Jong and Mascat, 2016). In her discussion over the possibilities and challenges of representing the subaltern voice, Spivak asserts that western scholars and researchers should not attempt to retrieve the silenced voices of the subaltern because such voices are irretrievable and because “such a move would subscribe once more to the humanist notion of the voice as the free expression of an ‘authentic individuality’” (Spivak as cited in Childs and Williams, 1997, p. 163). As Landry and McLean have also argued, on the basis of their interview with Spivak, when she said that the subaltern cannot speak, “she means that the subaltern as such cannot be heard by the privileged of either the First or Third Worlds. If the subaltern were able to make herself heard […] she would cease to be subaltern” (1996, pp. 5-6, added emphasis; see also Spivak, 1996).
Spivak’s influential essay exposes the ambiguities and misappropriations made by scholars and researchers, who, in spite of their good intentions, pretend to give voice to the oppressed (Michaud, 2013). Spivak (1988) asserts that all claims to subjectivity are at their foundation a form of neo-colonialism; in this sense, “research informants”, as Maggio (2007) explains, are simultaneously created and destroyed by researchers. While Spivak’s claims have raised fierce exchanges in subsequent years about the theoretical and political implications concerning the subaltern (see, e.g. Guha, 1988; Larsen, 2001; Morton, 2003; Parry, 2004), there has been little work to confront explicitly the methodological consequences of Spivak’s critique of representation in conducting qualitative research, especially in relation to emotion, feeling and affect as the object of scholarly inquiry.
The so-called “affective turn” (Clough, 2007) in the humanities and social sciences has developed in recent years some of the most innovative and productive theoretical and methodological ideas, bringing together psychoanalytically informed...