The regional conference on "The Postcolonial critique and the Understanding of the Balkans" organized by NGO "Kontrapunkt", held on 7 July 2003 in Skopje. We also include transcripts from the interview that the keynote address, Prof. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak from Columbia University gave to Margina. The conference aimed to bring to the Macedonian cultural audience a leading cultural discourse that may help to propose a workout scheme of possible terms and categories that would define the recent transitional nature of the cultural development in the wider region of the Balkans. It intended to provide a deeper analysis of the present conditions in the cultural field, through the discourses of West-East, Post-colonial, and Subaltern, stressing their importance as specific methodological tool for opening questions on the cultural behaviour, cultural production, and cultural exchange between the so called West, the third World and South East Europe. Gayatri Spivak is one of the most influential cultural and literary theorists writing in the United States and lecturing at various academic institutions throughout the world today. Her interventions into Marxist, Feminist, deconstructive, psychoanalitic and historiographic problematic are well known and thoroughly recirculated.
"No subaltern claims subalternity. The subaltern thinks either that this is normal to have no access to lines of mobility (I see enough of them feeling that), it is really frightening, or they want to get the hell out of subalternity. Whenever you hear someone claiming subalternity you know that this is all that it is, that they are speaking softly because somewhere they are carrying a big stick. Maybe not getting tenures, but they are carrying a big stick insofar as they are at the U.S. University, very far from subalternity. The attempt is not as I understand it now only to hear and understand subalternity; it is really to earn the rights which is a very effortful thing to be in subaltern normality in such a way that you can intervene in it and be heard yourself," Spivak said in the interview.