SOURCE: Ferrell, Tracy J. Prince. “Transformation, Myth, and Ritual in Paula Gunn Allen's Grandmothers of the Light.” NDQ: North Dakota Quarterly 63, no. 1 (winter 1996): 77-88.

[In the following essay, Ferrell contends that Grandmothers of the Light provides insight into a “personal and empowering transformation” and examines the complexities involved with identity formation and cultures in conflict.]

[Spider Grandmother] thought to the power once and knew a rippling, a wrinkling within. … She thought in her power to each of her bundles and continued singing. She sang and sang. She sang the power that was in her heart, the movement that is the multiverse and its dancing. The power that is everywhere and has no name or body, but that is just the power, the mystery. She sang, and the bundles began to move. They began to sing, to echo her song, to join it. They sang their heart's song, that was the same as Spider's heart song, that was the heart song of the great mystery, the power that moves. The song seemed to deepen as she heard other hearts singing … in each bundle the life of the universe rested, waiting until it was sung into life … they were the song and the mystery.

(35-36)

Many died in the transformation, but most survived to wake to that first morning's brilliant light and find themselves changed.

(51)

Subtitled A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook, Paula Gunn Allen's Grandmothers of the Light guides the reader into the “void”—the Great Mystery—where the power of female thought is essential to creativity. This assertion of Native American myths concerning the origin and processes of life, a metaphoric return to the womb, is, for Allen, an affirmation of gender and cultural identity, a reclamation of personal and cultural self-awareness which results in a transforming energy.

She finds that in the void there is energy, and it is an energy that is self-aware.

(107)

Evidence of this awareness is apparent in Allen's reinstatement of female significance into Native American myths and rituals, what she describes in “Kochinnenako in Academe” as a “feminist-tribal” exploration of gynocentric principles. Despite its, at times, didactic and contradictory qualities, Grandmothers [Grandmothers of the Light] is a significant guidebook providing insight into a personal and empowering transformation and suggests the many complications which arise with identity formation and colliding cultures. Allen's writing evidences the impact of this collision as she sifts through the cultural rubble to attempt to claim an identity of her own.

In this study I will quote from her previous works of poetry, fiction, and critical essays as well as quotes from interviews so that Allen may continue to speak for herself, in effect, conducting us through her transforming process. I want to emphasize that I do not think it is possible to “get” Paula Gunn Allen because Allen's elusive self-definition continues to evolve. I believe that she is still working on “getting” herself and therefore resists being pinned down. Heidegger spoke of the human quest as always “becoming” and, until the day we die, never “being.” Allen, much like the rest of us, is still in the process of “becoming,” and with her vision of narrative literature, she illuminates the journey, both to the reader and to herself.

While Allen's work has focused primarily on the position of women in Native American cultures, she has also explored Native cultures in America and her own status as, what she calls, a “breed”—Lebanese, Laguna/Sioux, and Scotch. In her published works, Allen seems to move from uncertainty of her placement in the Indian world toward firmly claiming her birthright. With Grandmothers her voice is stronger, more confident, perhaps a result of the earlier writings in which she “talked out” some of her questions concerning the role of Native women. Through interwoven metaphors of various tribal legends, she celebrates goddess creators, female sexuality free from Puritanical constraints, and traditions of strong, resourceful, thinking women. Allen's confident voice establishes a book of myths (to misquote Adrienne Rich) in which her name does appear.

According to Allen, myths and rituals (central to the formation of identity and culture) have been appropriated and realigned by the dominating Eurocentric culture. In the section “Myth, Magic, and Medicine in the Modern World” this usurpation is detailed:

With the arrival of the Europeans, certain shifts in the traditions that had been occurring over the preceding three or four centuries became pronounced, setting off a flurry of adjustments … [including] the slow shift from feminine orderings to masculine arrangements … The transformation of Icístsíity (Uretsete) from a female to male supernatural, from mother to father of the Keres people; the shift of Xmucane' and Xpiyacoc from female partners to elderly married couple among the Quiche' Maya; the adaption of Kanati the Hunter to husband of Selu, a seeming replacement of her polygynous relationship with him and Long Man; reification of the goddesses Cihuacoatl and Coatlicue—these are all evidence of the profound change in Native America resulting from its patriarchalization under Christian mercantilism.

(165)

Her work purports to reclaim this oral tradition for Native Americans, especially Native American women. She speaks of the importance of the tradition and the effects of its loss in her book of critical essays The Sacred Hoop: “more than the record of a people's culture, it is the creative source of their collective and individual selves. When that well-spring of identity is tampered with, the sense of self is also tampered with” (86).

In Allen's reappropriation of the sense of self, she leaves behind the tentative questioning of her first novel, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. Struggling against imposed expectations from the beginning, Paula Gunn Allen's status as a “breed” insured that she would be in the margins of Native American and “mainstream” communities. Similar to her sister Laguna writer, Leslie Marmon Silko, Allen's earlier works of poetry and first novel deal with conflicting emotions arising from this status. Her picture of the West is, therefore, one of disharmonious existence as two communities meet and are baffled by differences in ideology, language, and thought structures—a place, as she says in an earlier poem, “where understanding hangs in the balance, precariously” (Shadow Country 18).

Semi-autobiographical, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows focuses on this precarious balance a “breed” is expected to maintain. Although Allen moves away from preoccupation with the “breed” in Grandmothers, her characteristic non-linear writing style and personal explorations are echoed in this novel printed eight years earlier. Reviews of the book seem to contain an equal distribution of criticism and praise, and many of the comments could also be applied to Grandmothers. The difference seems to be that Allen rejects her earlier emphasis on victimization. As one critic pronounces:

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows is most successful when it explores women's traditions within the Keres Pueblo for their ritual significance. Elements of pueblo “thought singing” form the novel's theme, imagery, narrative method, and whatever its unity of design. … The episodic, uneven, seemingly unedited novel … slips into a personal narrative of melodramatic victimization … [However,] a magical woman … breaks the boundaries within which her society restricts her … reveal[ing] how limited are the lives of women and how vulnerable.

(Hanson 34-36)

These feelings of vulnerability and restriction are articulated in the character of Ephanie, also a “breed.” Like Ephanie, Allen never fit societal images of the mythical Indian maiden; in fact, the description of Ephanie might also apply to her author:

She was not the Indian maiden she was supposed to be. She knew that. Not the Indian they imagined and took her to be. Then felt angry when she wasn't what they wanted. She was not noble, not wise, not exotic. She was just an ordinary woman.

(Woman [The Woman Who Owned the Shadows] 66)

Again like Allen, Ephanie's life is spent searching for an alternate definition of herself as a woman and as an Indian. Her “epiphany” occurs when she understands:

the measure of her life, of all their lives, was discovering what she, they were made of. What she, they could do.

(212)

Allen has spent most of her life learning what she and her Native American sisters have done and are capable of doing. As a chronicle of these discoveries, Grandmothers is the expression of a more confident Ephanie who continues to explore “what she, they are made of.”

In a recent interview, Allen describes her function in this process as she speaks of the poet's responsibilities for “forming the community's consciousness” (Aal 154), and she details a current movement among tribal women writers toward recovering traditional cultures. The destruction resulting from “cultural genocide” compels the storytellers to become catalysts for regeneration. In Grandmothers she calls these tribal women storytellers “Spider Woman's Granddaughters”:

[those who carry out] time-honored tradition … in which the teller reminds us of our responsibilities, our gifts, and our right place in the interplay of energies that are at once sacred and frightening, ordinary and transcendent.

(21)

During the seventies, Allen unknowingly prepared for a career as one of Spider Woman's most vocal Granddaughters, a writer who would reinvigorate the “community's consciousness” by reinvigorating her own. She refined her writing style and authorial voice through poetry readings in San Francisco and considered this decade of readings a valuable time spent perfecting skills. However, these early writings were, as she said:

pretty incoherent … because I was trying frantically to make sense to an audience who couldn't listen to me, who just couldn't. And so I was, you know, shoving my work around, my thoughts around, my language around, my structure around, trying to find a way to get this group of people to hear me; but of course they couldn't … they were quite quiet and not entirely sure what to do with themselves when the Indians were reading.

(Aal 156-58)

It is because of these experiences, perhaps, that Allen has developed a distinctive, emphatic, and didactic style, although at times she seems to be frantically trying to make sense of her writing to herself as well. The exploratory style is an example of Allen's continuing efforts to emancipate her own thinking and writing—claiming the healing which she believes to be possible in the words of Native American myth and ritual.

Allen's focus began to shift to the ideology represented in Grandmothers with the introduction to The Sacred Hoop. Hanson refers to the tone as “a shift in Allen's ‘breed’ persona” in which she aligns herself with “women of color and women of aggressively feminist sources, purposes, and obsessions” (14). While Allen describes her first novel as “about the reality of Indianness” (“All the Good Indians” 229), recent comments seem to indicate that she has become much more secure in her definition of Indianness and has, in the later works, moved to the “healing process … [of] returning to the consciousness of [the] people.” Observing the marked changes she and other Indian writers have undergone over the last decade, she says:

the alienation of the seventies has moved to the spiritual, powerful voice of the eighties. … The Woman Who Owned the Shadows … stops where the healing process begins, and The Sacred Hoop is about recovery, of our selves.

(Eysturoy 101)

With Grandmothers Allen begins the emancipation in the preface, immediately subverting European constructs (as she sees them) and reclaiming her own. By using images such as “the magical power of woman and water,” she sabotages traditional Western images where women and water are often represented as evil, tempting, and terrifying. She intended to “testify to the great power women have possessed, and how that power when exercised within the life circumstances common to women everywhere can reshape (terraform) the earth” (xvi).

Describing the Indian “cosmogyny” as “an ordered universe arranged in harmony with gynocratic principles … [i.e.] egalitarianism, personal autonomy, and communal harmony … [with] the good of the individual and the good of the society mutually reinforcing rather than divisive,” Allen presents the Goddess Creator, T'ts'tsi'naku, as not simply a verdant Mother Nature but the omnipotent Mother Creator, known in various tribes as Thinking Woman, Grandmother Spider, Xmucane'/Grandmother of the Light, Sky Woman, Changing Woman, Iyatiku, Ic'sts'ity, and Nau'ts'ity(xiii-xiv). Celebrating the power of women thinking, creating, birthing, and expressing sexuality, the Goddess Creator is Allen's assertive reinstatement of Native American myths—subverting Judeo/Christian precepts and reinserting women into the cosmos.

As she maintains the oral tradition, she carries out her idea of the duty to “[form] the community's consciousness.” As a by-product of these interpretations, she also provides her directions for understanding the myths and rituals. Recognizing that most of the readers are still “not entirely sure what to do with themselves when the Indians [are writing],” her work often seems intended as instructional. And while dealing with those who are “not entirely sure” Allen chides them as “rationalists” who insist on distinguishing between real and imaginary worlds:

What are called “myths” in the white world, and are thought of as primitive spiritual stories that articulate psychological realities, are in the native world the accounts of actual interchanges. … Accordingly the stories in this collection are not to be taken primarily as metaphors … they are factual accounts … [myth] is more accurately defined as “ritual verbalization,” that is, a language construct that wields the power to transform something (or someone) from one state or condition to another.

(Grandmothers 6-7)

Like Allen, the contemporary Cherokee poet Awiakta suggests that readers must learn to open their minds to modes of thinking fundamentally different from their own:

The linear, Western, masculine mode of thought has been … intent on conquering nature … [the] Indian mode is virtually inverse to the standard Western method, which reasons from a collection of facts to a conclusion.

(qtd. in Ammons 93)

Up to this point, according to Gerald Vizenor, attempts at understanding Native American literature have simply been a process of learning to read (hear) the literature correctly, trying to “work out instructions on how to breathe beneath the surface of the written word because most of us have been trained to walk on top of these particular waters” (qtd. in Jahner 156). Speaking of “non-linear” narratives, Allen states that it is natural for the stories to “weave back and forth between the everyday and the supernatural without explanation, confusing the logical mind and compelling linear thought processes to chase their own tails, which of course is a major spiritual purpose behind the tradition's narrative form” (5). She believes this allows us to “contemplate the meaning of our existence … [through] the vastness that lies beyond linear understanding” (Grandmothers 8).

Requiring the reader to acculturate herself to Allen's idea of Native American perspectives is, in itself, part of her process. Although writing in English, she thinks of her role as retrieving myths and rituals from the impositions of a foreign language and culture and eventual obfuscation, and she insists that the obligation of crossing cultures to attempt understanding rests on the reader. Allen revels in a stream-of-consciousness style of writing that allows her to explore whichever rabbit trail she happens upon, with the reader obliged to follow. It is supposed to be understood that weaving in and out of “reality” is precisely the point; that if we are somehow able to transcend the “logical” world we will see the “spiritual purpose.”

Allen's critics, however, often find her interpretations and world view problematic, pointing to her propensity towards broad generalizations and assumptions. Clear examples of these arguments are found in The Sacred Hoop where she implies that she has preferential access to truth because of her blood line—“my inner self, the self who knows what is true of American Indians because it is one, always warns me when something deceptive is going on” (6-7). Krupat terms this “religious” theorizing, and many critics point out that a Native heritage doesn't ipso facto lead to an originary truth-divining analysis. Furthermore, Allen suggests that she is somehow able to present an intrinsically Native, untainted view. She says with certainty:

[T]hese essays present a picture of American Indian life and literature unfiltered through the minds of western patriarchal colonizers.

(6)

This, of course, cannot be true since much of Allen's education and socialization occurred under “western patriarchal” influences. Grandmothers, in particular, contains clear links to and/or intentional rewrites of Biblical and Greek mythology. In “Out of the Blue,” the story of Sky Woman, evil is introduced into the world by a man, reversing the Genesis tale of Eve and evil. In “Strange Burning,” the story of Cherokee deity Six Killer/Sun Woman turns the Biblical “just and angry God” who threatens damnation by fire into a goddess with similar qualities, and the same story contains a male Medusa-like figure. These examples may be sheer coincidence, but the fact remains that although she is trying to unlearn “western patriarchal” influences, she will never be able to escape them entirely and present a cleaned slate, reinscribed with an originary Native nature.

Discussing Allen's disputable interpretations and generalizations in Keeping Slug Woman Alive, Greg Sarris also describes the difficulties of reading and recording Native literature. “The task is to read American Indian written literatures in a way that establishes a dialogue between readers and the text that works to explore the intermingling of the multiple voices within and between readers and what they read … a continuous opening of culturally diverse worlds in contact with one another” (131). He examines the reductiveness of trying to simply nail down what is Indian about a text, and while positioning Pomo rather than EuroAmerican theorizing at the center, he still manages a dialogue between the two. Similarly, Allen's writings function best as an example of the effects of a variety of cultures on her and the efforts to filter out an identity among all these influences. The importance of Grandmothers is, as Allen says, letting the myths help us “notic[e] what we already know” (Eysturoy 99) and having that noticing effect productive dialogue.

Allen demonstrates that the personal and cultural must necessarily be entwined. Jim Ruppert elaborates on the important interaction between personal and mythic (cultural) identity:

the fusion of personal and mythic space is essential for understanding ourselves and how we must act. … [Allen sees] the essential lack of mythic space in the twentieth century technological culture and feel[s] that the poet must penetrate to the mythic space and reveal it to the reader.

(27)

His understanding of Allen is that she makes “the connections for herself first, then write[s] so as to help others make them” (33). A reading of Allen's exploratory, introspective style supports Ruppert's conclusion. She denies the Eurocentric linear narrative, and through what appear to be randomly collected memories, analytical essays, reports of other Native women's memories, and descriptions of ritual and myth, she makes the connection for herself. Although this exploration is at times confusing and essentializing, the mythic space becomes a cause for signification and celebration. Ammons describes the effect of Native women's writing as “embarking on forbidden territory, on the buried or left-out story of western tradition: the unwritten female space” (95).

By talking out her recovery, Allen demonstrates the oral tradition on paper. The resulting message is convoluted and malleable, depending upon individual interpretations. As with all oral traditions, the legends are never relayed with precision, but necessarily convey the sentiments of the storyteller in the context of present-day concerns. According to Allen, “the stories, when used as ritual maps or guides, enable women to recover our path to the gynocosmos that is our spiritual home” (xv).

Grandmothers' strength is that it demands that America re-evaluate its concept of Native people and cultures. We are denied the comforting image of the noble savage and must face the reality of a people who are struggling to prevent further erosion of their culture and are often simply represented as victims. Most importantly, for Allen, we are forced to acknowledge the power and importance of Native American women. The position of the women who confront the dominant language is one in which the “woman's side” is not only untold but the textual voice is appropriated as well. Therefore, as Middlebrook writes, “[the] appropriation of textual voice … [is] the appropriation of power” (4). Allen is transfigured as she resists the appropriation of the physical and textual voice, thereby denying power. Like the title of a current blues album, Allen is insisting: “Damn Right I've Got the Blues.”

In the resulting transformation, Allen is able to embrace the newly designed adamantly unacculturated self. Making apologies to no one, in fact, often insisting that her world view is the only right view, Allen finds her voice, furthering her vision quest. No longer a “breed” or victim, Allen claims her role as a Native American woman and even decides to rewrite the script for the role. In The Sacred Hoop Allen asserts various ideas which are further explored in Grandmothers, including her pronouncements that tribal social systems were “never patriarchal” and were based on “ritual, spirit-centered woman-focused world views,” and included “free and easy sexuality” (2). These assumptions are not outlined in Allen's earlier works and are “supported by limited verifiable evidence … at variance with her own earlier and highly sophisticated definitions of Native American cultural dimensions … [and] at variance with the definitions of gifted and sensitive historians” (Hanson 16).

Allen acknowledges this change in basic ideology. However, she faults the system in which she received formal training for passing along ingrained ethnocentric and gender biases. “Most of what I have read—and some things I have said based on that reading—is upside-down and backward” (Hoop 6). Explaining her writing as a process, a “vision quest,” she says:

That's what I am searching for, to pull the vision out of me, because it is here, I know it is. It is a path, a road, and it is how I am that molecule that does the dance that makes up her being. Our job is to be conscious of our dance … that's what writers must do. That's why writers are important, as long as they are working toward consciousness.

(Eysturoy 99)

Since Allen has her fair share of detractors, I have briefly listed a few of the problems readers encounter in her writings. However, it seems that Allen's purpose was to consciously choose to be a medicine woman as she described in chapter one, in “the way of the Teacher.” Her intentions are to “enter into the life of the community to enrich and revitalize it”(14).

Annette Kolodny writes of earlier Native American women writers in The Lay of the Land. These women visualized the land, specifically the new world, as woman, and the conquest of the new world is characterized as a “settlement depend[ent] on the ability to master the land” (7). Kolodny also points out that some of the first Native women who came into contact with European men were described in journals of the time as “uniformly beautiful, gracious, cheerful, and friendly.” Approximately 100 years later, when relations had deteriorated considerably, they were to be described as “hag-like, ugly, and immoral” (5). Allen reverses the process and forcibly moves Native women back to “uniformly beautiful” in Grandmothers. For awhile the “land” (woman) was pillaged and mastered, but she is now being transformed through the power of the “word.”

An appropriate allegory, the myth of the Mayan Crystal Woman, titled “Someday Soon,” dreams of peace and communication coming to a world which could be paralleled to ours. Isolated and in conflict, the people are restored by prophecies of a coming age of peace and harmony.

In time, they fell into conflict. In time, the world was much changed. In time, they began to walk by themselves. Halting, stumbling, they took their first steps alone. …

It is said that at the time of the beginning, the Goddess will return in the fullness of her being. It is said that the Mother of All and Everything, the Grandmother of the Sun and the Dawn, will return to her children, and with her will come harmony, peace, and the healing of the world.

(Grandmothers 200-01)

Allen's intriguing, contradictory, celebratory work illustrates the longing for harmony in the midst of conflict and the continued repositioning of self. Her writings prompt explorations of the need for understanding the symbols and metaphors that make up existence, how those symbols shape who we are, how cultures collide and become almost inextricable, how a silenced Other is recovered from the historical anonymity of this collision, and who speaks for this subaltern Other, or is subaltern agency ever possible.

Unlike Spivak, Allen suggests that the answer to the crucial question “Can the subaltern speak?” is, yes, if we listen hard enough.¹ But her listening and interpreting continues to make the question of agency problematic. Is she, as Derrida details in “Eating Well,” always only appropriating (injesting) the silenced Other rather than hearing them speak (or channeling their words as she claims to do in “Someday Soon”)?

Since the subaltern is impossible to recuperate yet impossible to exclude, Spivak calls this “project to retrieve the subaltern consciousness” a “strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (“Subaltern Studies” 13). Allen's strategic essentialism allows her to retrieve what she conceives of as an originary identity, but she does not make “scrupulously visible” her positioning within her politics. She gives a Whitmanesque shrug that says, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.” However, Grandmothers is a more fully developed explanation of herself to herself and to us. Like Wendy Rose, Hopi/Miwok writer, she may declare: “If I had grown up with a comfortable identity, I would not need to explain myself from one or another persona” (253). Allen's mixed-bag of cultural heritage makes for a convoluted but vital identity search in which she (consciously or unconsciously) incorporates Western influences even as she insists upon a return to native myths. Ania Loomba shows that the position of reviving native culture and Westernization are not necessarily incompatible and that “sites of resistance are far from clearly demarcated … particular subjects may contribute to diverse and even conflicting traditions of anti-colonialism, nativism and collaboration” (314). Paula Gunn Allen's position is sometimes problematic and difficult to pin down, but she presents a clear “site of resistance” which insures that if the subaltern can't speak she will at least be pulled into our consciousness.

Note

1. Spivak proposes that the “epistemic violence” of the colonization project insures that when we think we are hearing the subaltern Other we are only comforting our conscience because we're sure they should be heard although they can't be. We are always only reconstructing agency. At best we can “learn to speak to (rather than listen or speak for) the historically muted subject” (91).

Works Cited

Aal, Katharyn Machan. “Writing as an Indian Woman: An Interview with Paula Gunn Allen.” North Dakota Quarterly 57 (1989): 148-61.

Allen, Paula Gunn. “All the Good Indians.” The 60s without Apology. Ed. Sohnya Sayres, et al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

———. Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

———. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

———. Shadow Country. Los Angeles: UCLA Publications, 1982.

———. Introduction. Spider Woman's Granddaughters. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

———. The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1983.

Ammons, Elizabeth. Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991.

Derrida, Jacques. “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject.” Points … : Interviews, 1974-1994. Ed. Elisabeth Weber. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.

Eysturoy, Annie O. “Paula Gunn Allen.” This Is about Vision. Ed. William Balassi, John Crawford, and Annie Eysturoy. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1990.

Hanson, Elizabeth. Paula Gunn Allen. Boise: Boise State UP, 1990.

Jahner, Elaine. “A Critical Approach to American Indian Literature.” Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs. Ed. Paula Gunn Allen. New York: MLA, 1983.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1975.

Krupat, Arnold. The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon. Berkeley: U of California P, 1989.

Loomba, Ania. “Overworlding the Third World.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. Ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Middlebrook, Diane Wood, and Marilyn Yalom, eds. Coming to Light: American Women Poets in the Twentieth Century. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1985.

Rose, Wendy. Bone Dance: New and Selected Poems, 1965-1993. Tuscon: U of Arizona P, 1994.

Ruppert, Jim. “Paula Gunn Allen and Joy Harjo: Closing the Distance between Personal and Mythic Space.” American Indian Quarterly. 7 (1983): 27-40.

Sarris, Greg. Keeping Slug Woman Alive. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. Eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

———. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” Selected Subaltern Studies. Eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.