Papers by Pratistha "Sané" Bhattarai
Textual Practice, 2023
This essay examines how M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 poetry collection, Zong!, and Roshini Kempadoo’... more This essay examines how M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 poetry collection, Zong!, and Roshini Kempadoo’s 2004 multimedia installation, Ghosting, draw on the poetic affordances of digital media to undermine the coloniality of official archives. Philip and Kempadoo, I demonstrate, read colonial and national archives as notational diagrams, following patterns of marks rather than of semantic meaning. They progressively distort these diagrams through the geometric operations of transposition and projection, until the fragmented speech of black women inhabiting the archives is made visible. They do not make this speech visible in the present as much as they produce an opening to a future in which it can manifest itself. I draw on Philip and Kempadoo’s digital experiments to theorise the notion of a subaltern archive – an archive of the virtual, of the not yet archivable. These artists, I argue, add medium specificity to Gayatri Spivak’s original thesis on the subaltern: the subaltern woman in post/colonial archives cannot be read as text. Her agency can still be figured through the geometric, visual transformation of archival fragments.
Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2017
In this article, I provide a Spivakian analysis of computational algorithms. Building upon Gayatr... more In this article, I provide a Spivakian analysis of computational algorithms. Building upon Gayatri Spivak's claim that the value coding of late capitalism extends beyond the economic realm to the cultural and affective, I show that it seeps into the algorithmic as well. The recent proliferation of algorithmic applications has been met by an increased scholarly interest in their underlying mechanisms. Several critics of predictive algorithms, for instance, proceed as though the racial and gender discrimination that a given algorithm enacts upon execution can be positively attributed to -- and mitigated through a re-coding of – either its training data or its " source code. " There is little denying that the logic of computation undergirds much of our sociality. But, as I argue in this article, to concentrate the source of an algorithm's action in its semiotic representations is to hide and legitimize the value codings that lend these representations their efficacy. My aim in this article is twofold. First, to show how seemingly benign investments in algorithms can reproduce, in a larger network, the exploitative value systems that manage the worth of knowledge, labor, and bodies. Second, to raise a question of methodology: What antitechnocratic, nonhegemonic engagements with algorithms might feminists produce that do not privilege the algorithmic as a site of intervention?
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Papers by Pratistha "Sané" Bhattarai