Cultural Forms of Woman's Submission and Resistance in Pramoedya Ananta Toer's The Girls From The Coast

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Spivak in her well-known essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak” concerns to the representation of Other, the colonial subject which is often constitutionalized by ideology and scientific production. In her opinion, the intellectuals seem to persist on produce Other as the Self’s shadow. She objects Foucault and Deleuze’s opinion that the Others or the oppressed “can speak and know their condition”, if they are given chance. Rather, she questions the possibility of the subaltern to speak under strictly social strata which surround their lives. This article is developed from Spivak’a argument to look at the construction of the Girl from the Coast, the main character of the novel which has the same title. This article scrutinizes the cultural forms of domination and the main female character’s submission and resistance to the cultural forms of oppression. Further, it investigates how Pramoedya construct the woman as the Other and identify voice-consciousness of the Other under patriarchal colonialism.