Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - Works

Works

In "Can The Subaltern Speak?" Spivak discusses the race and power dynamics involved in the banning of sati. Spivak writes that all we hear about sati are accounts by British colonizers or Hindu leaders of how self-immolation oppressed women, but we never hear from the sati-performing women themselves. This lack of an account leads Spivak to reflect on whether the subaltern can even speak. Spivak recounts how Sati appears colonial archives.

Spivak's translation of Derrida's De la grammatologie, which included a translator's introduction that has since been described as "setting a new standard for self-reflexivity in prefaces," brought her to prominence. After this, she carried out a series of historical studies as a member of the "Subaltern Studies Collective" and literary critiques of imperialism and international feminism. She has often referred to herself as a "practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist." Her overriding ethico-political concern has been for the site occupied by the subaltern, especially subaltern women, both in discursive practices and in institutions as much as Western cultures. Edward Said wrote that, "She pioneered the study in literary theory of non-Western women and produced one of the earliest and most coherent accounts of that role available to us." In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Spivak highlights how Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault confine the decentering of the subject to the subject of the West, which problematizes the non-Western other as real and knowable. In concluding her essay, she rebuffs Deleuze and Foucault for making it impossible to confer with the subaltern in a discursive practice, and suggests the possibilities Jacques Derrida offers for thinking the subaltern insomuch as he appertains to a classically philosophical interpretation of the subject, rather than a socio-political, cultural or historical interpretation, which might assume that the subject is always already the subject of the West.

Her recent work, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, published in 1999, explores how major works of European metaphysics (e.g., Kant, Hegel) not only tend to exclude the subaltern from their discussions, but actively prevent non-Europeans from occupying positions as fully human subjects.

Spivak coined the term "strategic essentialism," which refers to a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of social action. For example, the attitude that women's groups have many different agendas makes it difficult for feminists to work for common causes. "Strategic essentialism" is about the need to accept temporarily an "essentialist" position in order to be able to act.

Spivak taught at several universities before arriving at Columbia in 1991. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, has received numerous academic honors including an honorary doctorate from Oberlin College, and has been on the editorial board of academic journals such as boundary 2. On March 9, 2007, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger appointed Spivak University Professor, the institution's highest faculty rank. In a letter to the faculty, he wrote,

Spivak's writing has been described by some as opaque. It has also been suggested that her work puts style ahead of substance.

In her defense, it has been argued that this sort of criticism reveals an unwillingness to substantively engage with her texts. Judith Butler has noted that Spivak's supposedly inaccessible language has, in fact, resonated with, and profoundly changed the thinking of, "tens of thousands of activists and scholars." And Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, who has called her writing "inaccessible," noted nevertheless that, "there can thus be few more important critics of our age than the likes of Spivak. She has probably done more long-term political good, in pioneering feminist and post-colonial studies within global academia than almost any of her theoretical colleagues."

In speeches given and published since 2002, Spivak has addressed the issue of terrorism. Clearly stating that her intention is to bring an end to suicide bombing, she has explored and, "tried to imagine what message might contain." These ruminations have included descriptions such as: "Suicidal resistance is a message inscribed in the body when no other means will get through."

One critic has suggested that this sort of stylized language may serve to blur important moral issues relating to terrorism. However, she stated in the text of the speech that, "Single coerced yet willed suicidal 'terror' is in excess of the destruction of dynastic temples and the violation of women, tenacious and powerfully residual. It has not the banality of evil. It is informed by the stupidity of belief taken to extreme."