Interesting parallel between Spivak's theory of the 'native informant', and more generally that of the subaltern, on the one hand, and the theory of the 'marginal man'.
It was a commonplace of race theory that the marginal man who was caught between two cultures was particularly pathological. Aspiring to Western standards, but hampered by native sensibilities the marginal man was supposed to be prone to excessive cunning and violence, as well as prey to self-loathing and pretension.
The 'marginal man' theory was that in trying to bridge the gap between the races, the marginal man was visited with a combination fo the worst of both worlds, and would be much better off if he did not aspire to Western standards of education and culture.
The marginal man theory was particularly directed at those mission educated African intellectuals who were inspired to promote national movements. The race implications of the theory are pointed - nothing but disaster can come through mixing the races.
Isn't this akin to what Spivak is saying about the 'native informant', or what Postcolonial studies says about the 'subaltern' - that those who cross the race line are especially pathological? In point of fact an entire generation of African political leaders were 'marginal men', or subalterns, even. The second and decisive pan-African conference was, after all, held not in Africa at all, but in Manchester, in the North of England.
Attendees like Nkrumah, Padmore and others were western educated Africans who aspired to freedom and independence. They were denounced as 'jumped up Negroes' who, because of the foolish intervention of missionaries, aspired to democratic rights. Even today leaders like Mugabe were educated in mission schools. Does that make them 'native informants' or 'subalterns'?
In message <v03130300b42c512382aa@[140.254.113.158]>, Yoshie Furuhashi
<furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> writes
>From Spivak's _A Critique of Postcolonial Reason_:
>
>***** I think of the "native informant" as a name for that mark of
>expulsion from the name of Man -- a mark crossing out the impossibility of
>the ethical relation.
>
>I borrow the term from ethnography, of course. In that discipline, the
>native informant, although denied autobiography as it is understood in the
>Northwestern European tradition (codenamed "West"), is taken with utmost
>seriousness. He (and occasionally she) _is_ a blank, though generative of
>a text of cultural identity that only the West (or a Western-model
>discipline) could inscribe. The practice of some benevolent cultural
>nativists today can be compared to this, although the cover story there is
>of a fully self-present voice-consciousness. Increasingly, there is the
>self-marginalizing or self-consolidating migrant or postcolonial
>masquerading as "native informant."...The texts I read are not ethnographic
>and therefore do not celebrate this figure. They take for granted that the
>"European" is the human norm and offer us descriptions and/or
>prescriptions. And yet, even here, the native informant is needed and
>foreclosed. In Kant he is needed as the example for the heteronomy of the
>determinant, to set off the autonomy of the reflective judgment, which
>allows freedom for the rational will; in Hegel as evidence for the spirit's
>movement from the unconscious to consciousness; in Marx as that which
>bestows normativity upon the narrative of the modes of production. These
>moves, in various guises, still inhabit and inhibit our attempts to
>overcome the limitations imposed on us by the newest division of the world,
>to the extent that, as the North continues ostensibly to "aid" the South --
>as formerly imperialism "civilized" the New World -- the South's crucial
>assistance to the North in keeping up its resource-hungry lifestyle is
>forever foreclosed. In the pores of this book will be the suggestion that,
>the typecase of the foreclosed native informant today is the poorest
>_woman_ of the South. But the period and texts under our consideration in
>this chapter will produce -- to cite Gramsci's uncanny insight -- the
>native informant(s) as a site of unlisted traces. To steer ourselves
>through the Scylla of cultural relativism and the Charybdis of native
>culturalism regarding this period, we need a commitment not only to
>narrative and counternarrative, but also to the rendering (im)possible of
>(another) narrative.
>
>As my opening quotation from [Carl] Pletsch betrays, our sense of critique
>is too thoroughly determined by Kant, Hegel, and Marx for us to be able to
>reject them as "motivated imperialists," although this is too often the
>vain gesture performed by critics of imperialism. A deconstructive
>politics of reading would acknowledge the determination as well as the
>imperialism and see if the magisterial texts can now be our servants, as
>the new magisterium constructs itself in the name of the Other....
>
>The field of philosophy as such, whose model was the merging of science and
>truth, remained untouched by the comparative impulse. In this area,
>Germany produced authoritative "universal" narratives where the subject
>remained unmistakably European. These narratives -- Kant's cosmopolitheia,
>Hegel's itinerary of the Idea, Marx's socialist homeopathy -- neither
>inaugurated nor consolidated a specifically scholarly control of the matter
>of imperialism.
>
>Carl Pletsch's admonition to us to be Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxist in our
>dismantling of third-worldist talk is yet another example of their
>influence in the formation of the European ethico-political subject. In my
>estimation, these source texts of European ethico-political
>selfrepresentation are also complicitous with what is today a self-styled
>postcolonial discourse. On the margins of my reading is the imagined and
>(im)possible perspective I have called the native informant.
>Ostentatiously to turn one's back on, say, this trio, when so much of one's
>critique is clearly if sometimes unwittingly copied from them, is to
>disavow agency, declare kingdom come by a denial of history. (6-9)*****
>
>
-- Jim heartfield