Subalterns cannot speak, Spivak argues, because the hegemonic discourse renders them mute. In order to find a voice, they need to violate their subalternity. Spivak argues that the subaltern cannot speak; my paper - a meta-reflection based on the research I'd conducted for my M.Ed thesis - argued that, even when they acquire this foreign, dominant discourse, they still may not speak. Their subaltern accents give them away, and their voices cannot be heard.
Revisiting data collected at UCT from (former) colleagues, I found myself presenting on my new "home ground" to former colleagues from my former "home ground" about issues that were now more theirs than mine, re/presenting silenced voices (many long since gone) in my own (since gone) voice, silenced from those same corridors that once silenced theirs. Surrounded by familiar foreigners, I was at once familiar and foreign, addressing issues both foreign and familiar.
As a disciplinary bergie, I used to see my role as some kind of discursive broker, a boundary spanner, translating between paradigms and practices and consciousnesses in a landscape where additional dimensions could not be comprehended, far less tolerated. Others saw me, perhaps, as a different kind of spanner - the one that jams up the works...