“It’s not just a matter of speaking…”: the vicissitudes of cross-cultural interviewing

Abstract

Purpose: In “Can the subaltern speak?,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak makes the important distinction between representation as “Vertretung” and “Darstellung.” She also produces a strong version of whom she regards as a subaltern woman. Thirty years on both the distinction between “Vertretung” and “Darstellung” and the question of who the subaltern woman is, remain extremely important, not least in methodological considerations in cross-cultural contexts. A number of questions may be asked in relation to representation, such as: how distinct are its two meanings in the interviewing context? And how do they relate to the notion of the co-production of knowledge which has gained such traction in the past three decades? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach: In this paper, I draw on cross-cultural interviewing experiences. Starting from the silence of illiterate rural women in a study conducted in Madhya Pradesh, India, in 2011 (Mohanraj), this paper draws on the research experiences of the author and a number of projects reported on in Cross-Cultural Interviewing (Griffin, 2016) to elucidate how one might re-think both representation and subalternality in the contemporary globalized context. Findings: The experiences of cross-cultural interviewing I draw on in this paper show that in the contemporary context subalternality may be more productively understood in terms of a continuum rather than as the radical state of unreachable, unspeaking alterity that Spivak proposes. Originality/value: The paper contributes new perspectives on Spivak’s notion of the unspeaking alterity of the subaltern in light of globalized developments over the past 30 years and specific experiences of cross-cultural interviewing, as these comment on Spivak’s insights.