Subaltern voices? Finding the spaces between things and words

How can historical archaeology develop an understanding of resistance? How can historical archaeologists avoid mapping and remapping the material culture of domination — the houses, ceramics, glasswares and personal possessions of people in positions of power? ‘Small things forgotten’, the mundanities that make up the assemblages from many sites, have long been celebrated as the mark of the common people. But, more often than not, the collections with which we work were left by slave owners, masters, bourgeois householders and farmers. The underclasses, often so difficult to find in the documentary record, are equally elusive in their material traces as well. In this chapter, I argue that one way of changing the perspectives of historical archaeology, of finding what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called ‘subaltern voices’, is to concentrate on contradiction rather than consistency — to look for those areas of confusion where sources such as built form, probate records, ceramic sets, travellers’ accounts, glasswares and the like seem to defy interpretation as consistent, mutually reinforcing strands of evidence. My contention is that these could be points of vulnerability, places where the heavy, muffling shrouds of domination come unstitched, the point of disappearance of the subaltern; the aporia, the ‘blind-spot where understanding and knowledge is blocked’. But how can people who have been systematically denied a voice be ‘heard’ through a patchwork conglomerate of disparate sources? Here, again, recent writing in critical cultural theory is helpful. Homi Bhabha has shown how hegemonic forms of control require repetition and differentiation to be effective. But the very process of repetition introduces uncertainty and panic, while to establish difference is to emphasize contrast. The consequence is ambivalence: why does the ‘self-evident’ cultural superiority of the person with power constantly have to be repeated? For Bhabha, such ambivalence is diagnostic of a ‘third space’ between those with power and those subjected to power, an area of interaction where the ‘mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as an integrated, open, expanding code’ is destroyed. Unrepresentable in itself, the ‘third space’ sets the conditions for enunciation, ensuring ‘that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew’. In the rest of this chapter, I will expand these points through an extended example: the archaeology of colonialism at Africa’s southern tip, and the problem of the supply of women to ensure the continuity of colonial society.