Gender, Subalternity, and Silence: Recovering Convict Women’s Experiences From Histories of Transportation, c. 1780–1857

Abstract

Ann Laura Stoler and Frederick Cooper have provided another reminder that one cannot simply ‘do’ colonial history. What constitutes the archive—what is included and what is excluded from it—reflects the cultural politics of colonialism itself.² Nicholas B. Dirks has made a similar observation, describing the archive as a discursive formation that reflects the categories and operations of the colonial state.³ Few postcolonial historians or anthropologists would find these claims controversial now, but the question remains: if we accept them, how can historical research proceed, particularly the recovery of non-elite histories and experiences like those of subaltern women? Since the 1980s, scholars in the Subaltern Studies collective have been providing imaginative readings of colonial sources to trace the emergence of subaltern consciousness and experiences. The problem is, of course, that subalterns are far from autonomous social actors, but emerge from traces in the archives that define them in relation to elites.⁴ Perhaps for this reason, some post-colonial theorists, notably Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, question whether subaltern consciousness can be recovered at all. For Spivak, the best historians can do is to point to the silences in the archives, and trace the production of what she terms ‘the subaltern subject-effect’, for the subaltern is never produced in and through him or herself, but through the knotting together of particular, and contingent, historical strands.⁵

This research has been generously supported by the British Academy, British Academy Committee for South East Asian Studies, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Economic and Social Research Council, and Faculty of the Social Sciences, University of Leicester. I would also like to thank Indrani Chatterjee,Anindita Ghosh, Durba Ghosh, and Anoma Pieris for constructive suggestions on the ideas presented here.