End Date :
Second Floor Common Room,
The Heyman Center for the Humanities
Minata Koné writes:
Mahatma Ghandi wrote about Indian contribution to the Kenyan struggle in The Young India. The relationship between India and Kenya should be extended to the literary level. In that perspective, I have chosen to examine the work of radical thinker Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and acclaimed East African writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o. Spivak’s Can the subaltern Speak? and what I term Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s “Trilogy” will be my trumpets. There is a possibility of delineating a single prison personality from the Trilogy books which discuss a personal and collective Kenyan history of struggle.
In her interview with Leon De Kock (A Review of International English Literature, 23:3, July 1992), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls for a better understanding of the term “subaltern” transformed in many disciplines by returning to its meaning as used by Gramsci. Future works will hear her voice, and I am not pretending either to be the first to reactivate the term. The point today resides in this question: Why must one read or continue to read Antonio Gramsci today? The Gramsci-Spivak understanding of the subaltern concept is the tool that helps explore all the aspects of the Trilogy.
