Recovering Subaltern Voices in Colonial Narration of The Western Epistemological Framework of Multatuli’s Max Havelaar and Joseph Conrad’s Works

Paper Abstract: According to Gayatri Spivak's anti-positivist critique, subaltern is silenced and subjected to epistemic violence and therefore cannot speak. Spivak challenges the intellectuals’ and the postcolonial historians’ assumption that the voices and perspectives of the oppressed can be recovered. Using Edward Said's contrapuntal method on reading text of Multatuli's Max Havelaar and several colonial African, Indonesian texts of Joseph Conrad, we can identify the audible subaltern’s voice in the perspective of Western epistemological framework and colonial authority of both European authors, responding to Spivak’s challenge. By examining and deconstructing the interdependent to independent sound of the narrator’s description in heterophonic Max Havelaar and dual-voice Conrad’s text, it is possible to recover the subaltern’s voice in the colonizer’s perspective and answering the question whether the Africans and native Indonesian in Conrad’s text really speak.