“Ye Be the Clear Morag Yourself” Spivak, a Global Marx, and Just Weather Talk

Abstract

This essay creates a heuristic homology between postcoloniality and strains of survivorship whose very contingency “de-humaniz[es] greed as the primum mobile . . . ​[and thereby composes] the dangerous supplement, one on one yet collective” (Spivak, “Marx” 281). Using Spivak’s attempt to globalize Marx by abjuring epistemological enterprises that privilege “a philosophically correct structural position” (281) at the expense of the subaltern’s “right to intellectual labor” (284), this essay reads the phantasms and afflictions of the Scottish diaspora in the 1940s coal-mining town of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, as represented by Sheldon Currie’s The Glace Bay Miners’ Museum (1996), for a postcoloniality that, in being attuned to what is left of communally viable forms of collective survival, especially as these remain inappropriable by capital, yields proliferative
subjectifications of traumatic experience that are capable of eluding the open “secret of the theft of surplus value” (279) by which global capitalism ruthlessly extracts the unraveling of the biosphere as normality.