{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.026604068857589983, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.585152838427947, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Sublime in Feminist Politics and Ethics

When there are stories that are remembered and passed down, there can be witnesses. As brutal as it is, a story that can be told can be engaged, recreated, and struggled with. But what if there are no records and no stories because they have been buried under the legacy of imperialism? What if, when one looks for the story, there is only the story the colonizer tells of “them”? How does a writer present such silence so that it can actually echo? What does it mean to witness? Gayatri Spivak addresses some of these questions in her extraordinary chapter on history in The Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Spivak returns to the question she asked some years ago in her well-known essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak deepens our understanding of feminist witnessing by tracking the  gure of the “Native Informant.” The Native Informant is not a  gure in the traditional sense, because she is a “trace,” and her story exists only “as a subliminal and discontinuous emergence.” Spivak uses psychoanalysis to explain how unlisted traces can remain as what is missing when we begin to measure silence, and pay heed to the signi cance in the cuts of the threads that should tie together a literary text or a historical narrative.