1488 Gyan Prakash
knowledge. 39 It is impossible to retrieve the woman ' s voice when she was not given a subject-position from which to speak. This argument appears to run counter to the historiographical convention of retrieval to recover the histories of the traditionally ignored-women, workers, peasants, and minorities. Spivak ' s point, however, is not that such retrievals should not be undertaken but that the very project of recovery depends on the historical erasure of the subaltern " voice." The possibility of retrieval, therefore, is also a sign of its impossibility. Recognition of the aporetic condition of the subaltern ' s silence is necessary in order to subject the intervention of the historian-critic to persistent interrogation, to prevent the refraction of " what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other." 40
These directions of postcolonial criticism make it an ambivalent practice, perched between traditional historiography and its failures, within the folds of dominant discourses and seeking to rearticulate their pregnant silence-sketching " an invisible design covered over in the palimpsest." This should not be mistaken for the postmodern pastiche, although the present currency of concepts such as decentered subjects and parodic texts may provide a receptive and appropriative frame for postcolonial criticism. Postcolonial criticism seizes on discourse ' s silences and aporetic moments neither to celebrate the polyphony of native voices nor to privilege multiplicity. Rather, its point is that the functioning of colonial power was heterogeneous with its founding oppositions. The " native " was at once an other and entirely knowable; the Hindu widow was a silenced subaltern who was nonetheless sought as a sovereign subject asked to declare whether or not her immolation was voluntary. Clearly, colonial discourses operated as the structure of writing, with the structure of their enunciation remaining heterogeneous with the binary oppositions they instituted.
This perspective on history and the position within it that the postcolonial critic occupies keeps an eye on both the conditions of historical knowledge and the possibility of its reinscription. It is precisely this double vision that allows Shahid Amin to use the limits of historical knowledge for its reinscription. His monograph on the 1922 peasant violence in Chauri Chaura is at once scrupulously " local " and " general." It offers a " thick description " of a local event set on a larger stage by nationalism and historiographical practice. Amin seizes on this general( national) staging of the local not only to show that the Indian nation emerged in its narration but also to mark the tension between the two as the point at which the subaltern memory of 1922 can enter history. This memory, recalled for the author during his field work, is not invoked either to present a more " complete " account of the event or to recover the subaltern. In fact, treating gaps, contradictions, and ambivalences as constitutive, necessary components of the nationalist narrative, Amin inserts memory as a device that both dislocates and reinscribes the historical record. The result is not an archaeology of nationalism that yields
39For more on this argument about the colonized woman caught between indigenous patriarchy and the politics of archival production, see Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak, " The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives," Histo? y and Theoiy, 24( 1985): 247-72.
40 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, " Three Women ' s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism," Critical
Inquiry, 12( 1985): 253.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW DECEMBER 1994