SOURCE: Bernard-Donals, Michael. “Knowing the Subaltern: Bakhtin, Carnival, and the Other Voice of the Human Sciences.” In Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words, edited by Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner, pp. 112-27. London: SAGE Publications, 1998.

In the following essay, Bernard-Donals draws upon Bakhtin's notions of carnival and subversion to explore “the impossible contradiction of writing what cannot be written” in postcolonial literature by historically marginalized and disempowered voices, and demonstrates the influence of Bakhtin's work on postcolonial theorists such as Gayatri Spivak and Kwame Anthony Appiah.

After turning the pieces of the puzzle around and around many times and shuffling them this way and that, I see they fit. They outline a more or less coherent story, as long as one sticks strictly to anecdote and does not begin pondering what Fray Luis de Leon called ‘the inherent hidden principle of things’. … Where I find...