John Chau’s fatal expedition to the remote island of North Sentinel invokes a crucial

debate for Postcolonial discourses (Chavez). The American missionary’s inclination to

interact with the Sentinelese, who have reportedly lived in complete isolation on the island

for tens of thousands of years (Chavez), led to Chau’s illegal entrance into the island and

subsequently, his death. Despite suffering arrow injuries upon initial interactions, the diary

survived by Chau states his intentions “to declare Jesus to these people” (Chavez). A

Postcolonial reading of this incident; where Chau’s intention to bring Jesus to the Sentinelese

people is explained by the “ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental

inferiority” which Edward Said envisions to be the “essence of Orientalism” (50); is indeed

tempting as Said’s Orientalism is widely lauded as the birthplace of Postcolonialism.

Nonetheless, due to essentialist assumptions such a reading must be avoided at all costs.

Uncovering the fallacies of Postcolonialism discourse through this news event is the intention

of this essay. The opaque assertions of Said’s Orientalism are further exposed by considering

GC Spivak’s sensitivity towards the voicelessness of the Subaltern condition in Can the

Subaltern Speak? With an acute awareness of misrepresentation, Spivak exposes the Western

ethnocentrisms of Said’s interdependent power dynamics. Ultimately, however, the

Postcolonial essentialisms of both theorists underpin the free subjectivity of the Sentinelese.

Therefore, by positing the perspective of exteriority as the starting point of discourse

concerning the Sentinelese, it becomes possible to de-center the politics of Colonialism and

Sentinelese essence from theory (by virtue of exteriority). In doing so, we may re-center our

vision to grant the Sentinelese free subjectivity and better appreciate a livelihood that has

retained its sovereignty over land and being for thousands of years.

To begin with, the foremost problem in Said’s conception of the phenomenon which

he terms Orientalism, “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological

distinction” that separates “the Orient” from “the Occident” is the interdependency through

which he distinguishes the Orient from the Occident (10). This interdependency is a crucial

element of Orientalism, and Said himself explicates of this: “by Orientalism I mean several

things, all of them, in my opinion, interdependent” (10). However, while Said’s investigation

of Orientalism intends to bring clarity to the power dynamics between the Orient and the

Occident, the obscurity of uniting several manifestations of Orientalism in interdependency

lacks theoretical rigor as Said’s Orient ultimately denotes a blurred vision of Otherness

whose self-definition is limited by the assumption European superiority. The promiscuity of

assuming this relationality between the Orient and the Occident is that it encourages us to

simply interpret the interaction between John Chau and the Sentinelese through Said’s power

structures. After all, it must be acknowledged that Orientalism enables us to envision

numerous similarities between the Sentinelese as the Orient and Chau as the Occident. With

the intention of momentarily elaborating a few of these, we must attend to John Chau’s

response to the tribesman who pierced his Bible with a bow and arrow: “My name is John, I

love you and Jesus loves you” (Chavez). The level of ignorance displayed by Chau’s cultural

confidence in declaring his love to a tribesman who would not have the first clue of the

English language while simultaneously forgiving his act of aggression through his Christian

ethics echoes Said’s claim that the Occident assumes that the Orient is “in need of corrective

study by the West” (49). Unconcerned with the Orient “except as the first cause of what he

says” it seems fitting that Chau’s decision to love and bring Jesus to the Sentinelese indicates

that as an Orientalist he is “outside the Orient, both as an existential and as a moral fact” (29).

However, it cannot be overemphasized that a reading as such would create an overly

simplistic rationalization of Chau’s interaction with the Sentinelese people. If we are to

impose the power dynamics of the Occident and the Orient upon this news event we are

likely to be guilty of the very “exteriority” that informs Said’s critique of Orientalism (28). In
interrogating the interdependency of the Occident and the Orient we uncover a paradox of

Postcolonialism in Said’s theory. If the postcolonial intellectual thrusts their validity upon

distinguishing the post-colonial Other, then Said’s assumption of interdependency must be

relegated by the fact that its only point of reference in visualizing the Other is the power

dynamics of Euro-centrism. A true understanding of the Other cannot occur through Western

categories. Admittedly, when Said distinguishes that “knowledge of the Orient, because

generated out of strength, in a sense creates the Orient” he makes a logical assumption (48).

The diary survived by Chau has indeed created what Said would term an Orientalized body of

knowledge in news media, as the world of news exists outside North Sentinel. However, the

implausibility of Said’s theory may be distinguished by envisioning the bias of his Western

framework. By envisioning the presence of a non-Western Other in inherently Western

frameworks of Orientalism, where power structures are based on the interdependence of the

Occident and the Orient, it becomes virtually impossible to locate the individuality of the

Sentinelese. This overgeneralization of indigenous groups reorients indigenous presence to

the colonial narrative as all knowledge of the Orient implicitly returns to the political event of

Imperialism. Therefore, while Said’s theory accurately portrays the exteriority of the West in

John Chau’s cultural ignorance, Orientalism falls short of theorizing the role of the

Sentinelese in their interaction with Chau.

By contrast, GC Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak? lends an acute sensitivity to the

plight of the Sentinelese by deconstructing the voicelessness of the Subaltern in discourses of

Western hegemony. The term Subaltern has attained numerous connotations. Its usage begins

as a lower rank in the military, but Spivak borrows it from Gramsci to refer to a class of

underrepresented people, the untouchables, the female amidst patriarchal society. Reinforcing

Pierre Macherey’s formula for theoretical interpretation, Spivak’s critique is

characteristically deconstructive as it asserts “what the work cannot say is important, because
there the elaboration of the utterance is carried out, in a sort of journey to silence” (286). In

Spivak’s principal illustration of Subalternity, the 1926 suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri

(307), Bhaduri’s failed attempt at self-representation makes for a more fitting analogy in

understanding the perspective of the Sentinelese than Said’s reliance on interdependent

subjectivity. Parallel to the sacrificial attempt of Bhaduri to find representation in a suicide

letter, what John Chau’s diary cannot determine about the Sentinelese characterizes the fate

of the Subaltern. It is crucial to distinguish that acts of retaliation, committed by the

Subaltern, do not represent the Subaltern. In the Sentinelese tribesman’s attack on Chau’s

Bible, and Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s suicide as “an unemphatic, ad hoc, subaltern rewriting of

the social text of sati-suicide” (308), we do not obtain a voice in the Other. A dialogue of

utterance, a transaction between the speaker and listener, is not possible for the Subaltern.

Therefore, for Spivak, the emphasis of Subaltern Studies situates the Subaltern by their

journey to silence (286). In conceiving this voicelessness, it is useful to derive that

Subalternity, by definition, is doomed by a static condition of misrepresentation.

Spivak’s static Subaltern object and the diversity of Said’s critique of Orientalism

make for intriguing dichotomies in respect to the characteristics of news media. Principally, it

must be reinforced that it is the acuteness of her theoretical frameworks that establishes its

overall prowess over Orientalism. The influential ideology of Derrida bolsters an implicit

critique of Said’s European essentialism by de-centering the “European intellectual’s

ethnocentric impulse” to distinguish the static Subaltern subject (292). In doing so, her

deconstructive approach allows us to envision the way in which Said fallaciously reorients

his critique of Orientalism to Western hegemony. In appreciating the irony of Spivak- a

middle-class Bengali woman and American academic- voicing the third-world subject in this

essay, we have an illustration of the confinement faced by third-worldism. Sarcastically

referred to as “benevolent first-world appropriation” by Spivak (289), the appropriation of

third-world subjectivity in the West forms a suitable anecdote to contemplate the disparity

between Sentinelese representations in news media and the actualities of Sentinelese

experience. In Spivak’s theorization of the Subaltern voice, or rather lack thereof, we do not

attain an understanding of how or what the Sentinelese really are. Rather, she

comprehensively offers an “account of how an explanation and narrative of reality

(established by the news media) is established as the normative one” (281). Spivak explains

the acuteness of the Indian Third-world female, in Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, as the dominant

Subaltern subject of her framework by acknowledging her acute positionality towards Indian

material. In an accident of birth and education, she claims to have been armed with a

Derridian sense of India’s historical canvas and cultural tools (281). In support of acuteness,

she distinguishes her Indian case cannot represent the Subaltern in all countries, nations and

cultures that may be invoked as the Other of Europe as Self (281). If Said’s claim that “the

Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West)” is deemed guilty of such Ethnocentrisms

(9), then the dichotomy of Said’s diversity and Spivak’s acuteness problematizes any scope

of knowledge derived about the Sentinelese people. Firstly, although Spivak’s acuteness

shows a greater sensitivity to the Other than Said by placing her sense of Indian material as a

point of reference for the Indian Subaltern, the justification of her authority rests on historical

dexterity. Hence, it allows us to consider the falsity of deriving any understanding of the

Sentinelese through news media, since there is virtually no point of reference to the history of

the Sentinelese, who have been isolated for thousands of years. Secondly, while the opacity

of Said’s theory is rightfully criticized, his awareness of the perils of written language aptly

characterizes the news media as a fallacious “re-presence” rather than a “delivered presence”

(29). Therefore, in considering Said and Spivak’s claims in tandem, one must be cautioned

against forming judgements of the Sentinelese based on the misrepresentations created by the

news media after this incident. Characteristically, the CNN article subjugates the Sentinelese
by relating Chau’s interaction with them to Chau’s stereotypically colonialist conduct during

his childhood; the article claims that Chau and his brother “would paint their faces with wild

blackberry juice and run around their backyard with bows and spears made from sticks”

(Chavez). It is plausible to claim that news article is guilty of such misrepresentations both

implicitly and explicitly. While the former is a formal limitation of written language, the

latter is a more atrocious act as it creates an explicit comparison between stereotypes of

savagery and John Chau’s experience in North Sentinel.

Ultimately, the theories of Said and Spivak face an entrapment in Postcolonial

essentialism when they are engaged with the Sentinelese. While Said’s conception of the

Postcolonial is interdependent on the notion of colonial hegemony, the decentered nature of

Spivak’s Subaltern is still deemed unimaginable. In doing so, both theories fail to address

Sentinelese subjectivity in claims of exteriority. However, rather than render themselves

useless in forming a critical understanding of the Sentinelese of North Sentinel, their flaws

point us toward the direction of plausible theorization. Therefore, any discourse initiated in

the name of understanding the interaction between John Chau and the Sentinelese may use

exteriority as a cautionary starting point. While all knowledge of the Orient in Said’s world is

implicitly vexed by the political event of Imperialism and all knowledge of the Subaltern in

Spivak’s’ is complicated by the politics of misrepresentation, the political autonomy and

subjectivity of the Sentinelese tribe is premised upon their exteriority from these forms of

knowledge. In other words, their extraneous ignorance posits a basis for sovereignty. Not

only is their sovereignty envisioned in the successful survival of their civilization for

thousands of years without venturing outside North Sentinel, their ignorance of any

discourses, either said or written about them, as well as the English language through which

John Chau wished to impose his faith upon them, becomes a symbol of protection for the

Sentinelese. In elaborating the physicality of this exteriority, the landmass of North Sentinel
becomes a dominant mediation of any interaction they have with the outside world, and vice

versa. However, the limits of symbolical interpretation must be elaborated. The former

interpretation must not metaphorize the island of North Sentinel as a characteristic of

Sentinelese being, any essentialisms as such would reorient the very Orientalist notions

explicated by Said. Its symbolic function is limited to ascertain Sentinelese livelihood from

the perspective of exteriority.

By postulating the exteriority of the Sentinelese in the tangible sovereignty of their

land and the intangible ignorance of external society it becomes possible to free their

subjectivity from the constraints of Spivak and Said’s Postcolonialism. Most importantly,

Postcolonial studies characteristically misrepresent the Sentinelese tribe because they are not

a post-colonial people. If this is to be explained in Said’s intersubjective approach, they

would be considered Pre-colonial. Academic discourse, however, is inherently conscious of

colonial structures in its investigation of history. Although a consciousness of colonialism

limits largely Postcolonial theory in an unsuccessful articulation of the Sentinelese’s

subjectivity, envisioning the Sentinelese as a pre-colonial society reorients the incidence of

colonialism to avoid imposing academic restraint upon the otherwise free Sentinelese subject.

In doing so, if land is accepted as a physical representation of Sentinelese sovereignty, a

discourse sensitive to Sentinelese subjectivity must infer that John Chau’s illegal interaction

may be received as a political act of colonialism by the outside world, but for the Sentinelese

it is first a physical threat to the livelihood of their society, which has thrived on isolation

thus far. If discourse created by academia or news media is to adopt a freer perspective of

indigeneity, it must not forget its exteriority and resist the temptation of configuring

indigenous actions according to Western categories centered around colonialism. In the CNN

article, Johnathan Mowzer of Survival International illustrates a sensitivity towards the

subjectivity of Indigenous consciousness. Contrasting the views of consciousness held by

Said and Spivak, who claim that the “Orient is not a free subject of thought or action” (11),

and that consciousness remains an idealistic bedrock for the Subaltern in their works

respectively (286), Mowzer posits the possibility of a collective memory in Indigenous

groups that detest the outside world on the basis of a massacre, a violent incident or a disease

or epidemic” (Chavez). Of course, it is virtually impossible to ascertain the accuracy of

Mowzer’s statement. However, the value of his perspective can be understood by considering

Indigenous motivations that de-center the narrative of colonialism by centering the ideology

of self-protection. Moreover, in granting the Sentinelese a freer perspective of subjectivity

Mowzer’s claims of possibility do not overstep the boundaries of his exteriority to make

essentialist claims.

A Postcolonial reading of a Pre-colonial Sentinelese is to be avoided at all costs. The

Eurocentrism of Said’s Orientalism is a clear illustration of the fallaciousness of assuming

Colonialism as the preliminary moment of consciousness. Although Spivak’s deconstruction

places crucial emphases of the misrepresentation of indigeneity in Can the Subaltern Speak?,

her essentialist conclusion in declaring that the Subaltern has no voice mistakenly denies the

Sentinelese free subjectivity. A true appreciation for indigeneity must not reduce the

Sentinelese to essentialisms by remembering the exteriority of discourse. Without making

claims of Sentinelese essence or being from the news event, we must seek to appreciate the

greater fact of their perpetual survival; a survival that has been bolstered by sovereign land

and modes of livelihood.

 Works Cited

Chavez, Nicole. "Indian authorities struggle to retrieve US missionary feared killed on

remote island." CNN, 26 November 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/11/25/asia/missionary-
john-chau-north-sentinel-island-sentinelese/index.html. Accessed 4 December 2018.

Said, Edward. " Said-Introduction and Chapter 1 of Orientalism." Evergreen Education

Organization, Redwood Burn Limited, 2003,
sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wpcontent/uploads/sites/33/2014/12/Said_fu
ll.pdf.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?." Marxism and Interpretation of
Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998, pp. 271-314.