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An Analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? (Hardcover)
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An Analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? (Hardcover)
Series: The Macat Library
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A critical analysis of Spivak's classic 1988 postcolonial studies
essay, in which she argues that a core problem for the poorest and
most marginalized in society (the subalterns) is that they have no
platform to express their concerns and no voice to affect policy
debates or demand a fairer share of society's goods. A key theme of
Gayatri Spivak's work is agency: the ability of the individual to
make their own decisions. While Spivak's main aim is to consider
ways in which "subalterns" - her term for the indigenous
dispossessed in colonial societies - were able to achieve agency,
this paper concentrates specifically on describing the ways in
which western scholars inadvertently reproduce hegemonic structures
in their work. Spivak is herself a scholar, and she remains acutely
aware of the difficulty and dangers of presuming to "speak" for the
subalterns she writes about. As such, her work can be seen as
predominantly a delicate exercise in the critical thinking skill of
interpretation; she looks in detail at issues of meaning,
specifically at the real meaning of the available evidence, and her
paper is an attempt not only to highlight problems of definition,
but to clarify them. What makes this one of the key works of
interpretation in the Macat library is, of course, the underlying
significance of this work. Interpretation, in this case, is a
matter of the difference between allowing subalterns to speak for
themselves, and of imposing a mode of "speaking" on them that -
however well-intentioned - can be as damaging in the postcolonial
world as the agency-stifling political structures of the colonial
world itself. By clearing away the detritus of scholarly attempts
at interpretation, Spivak takes a stand against a specifically
intellectual form of oppression and marginalization.
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