Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1988 essay Can the Subaltern Speak? introduced questions of gender and sexual difference into analyses of representation and offering a profound critique of both subaltern history and radical Western philosophy. Spivak's eloquent and uncompromising arguments engaged with more than just power, politics, and the postcolonial. They confronted the methods of deconstruction, the contemporary relevance of Marxism, the international division of labor, and capitalism's show more worlding of the world, calling attention to the historical and ideological factors that efface the possibility of being heard. Since the publication of Spivak's essay, the work has been revered, reviled, misread, and misappropriated. It has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued. In these phenomenal essays, eight scholars take stock of this response. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights, and then they think with Spivak's essay about historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates Spivak's work in the contemporary world, particularly through readings of new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico. In an afterword, Spivak herself looks at the interpretations of her essay and its future incarnations, while specifying some of the questions and histories that remain secreted in the original and revised versions of Can the Subaltern Speak? -- both of which are reprinted in this book. show less

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4 reviews
Nós mulheres do sul global podemos falar? Spivak escreveu esse texto sobre isso já há 40 anos invocando as mulheres indianas, mas a pergunta persiste e as considerações formuladas com base em muita pesquisa ainda reverbera na mulher como ser político.
Livro brevíssimo, mas denso e bem articulado.
really good work but some ideas to disagree upon as for today point of view.

This book is detailed analysis of Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak on subalterns which are in our society and got suppressed by the people in power will they able to shine, what are the problem, what they have to face, how discrimination happened to them , how domination happened, what went wrong, here she take example of women who are got dominated in male preferred society, she take example of institutions where upper level always try to suppress the lower level to went out there frustration and how that leads to several problems in life. Crimes against women , rise of problem and treatment of women as a inferior sex that cause problems in society, she wants to show more raise a question will they ever get the right to speak there heart out, are they going to get a fair chance against men. Thats what she is discussed and what basis that women must take up to get equality is written in this book from the account of Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak. show less
Read in English - English version not on Goodreads. (Languages are not my strong suit, although I give it a good try.)

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34+ Works 1,607 Members
Born in Calcutta, Spivak attended the University of Calcutta and Cornell University, where she studied with Paul de Man and completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature (1967). She has since taught at a number of academic institutions worldwide, most recently at Columbia University. Her critical interests are wide-ranging: she has written on show more literature, film, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, historiography, psychoanalysis, colonial discourse and postcolonialism, translation, and pedagogy East and West. She argues forcefully that these disciplinary and theoretical categories must each be articulated in ways that do not "interrupt" each other, bringing them to "crisis." Spivak's own work is resistant to any easy categorization. Her first book, Myself I Must Remake: Life and Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1974), did not have the impact of her second publication, the 1976 translation and long foreword to deconstructive philosopher Jacques Derrida's (see Vol. 4) De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology), which established her as a theorist of note. Since then Spivak has concentrated on examining deconstruction and postcolonialism, and its implications for feminist and Marxist theory. She engages not so much the specifics of colonial rule as the forms that neocolonialism currently assumes, both in the intellectual exchanges of the First World academy and in the socioeconomic traffic between the industrialized and developing nations. In the last decade, Spivak has been associated with revisionist, post-Marxist historians who have sought to challenge the elitist presuppositions of South Asian history, whether colonial or nationalist. Her contributions include theoretical essays and translations of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi. Most recently, Spivak has published essays on translation and more translations of Mahasweta Devi's stories. She has also given a number of important interviews on political and theoretical issues, many of which have been collected in The Post-Colonial Critic (1990). (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Some Editions

Daija, Pauls (Afterword)
Hanovs, Deniss (Afterword)
Kolmane, Ieva (Editor)
Meškova, Sandra (Translator)
Sarkane, Līga (Cover designer)

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Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea

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Genres
Nonfiction, General Nonfiction, Sexuality and Gender Studies, Philosophy, Politics and Government, Literature Studies and Criticism
DDC/MDS
325.3Society, government, & culturePolitical scienceInternational migration and colonizationEnglish
LCC
JV51 .C28Political ScienceColonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migrationColonies and colonization. Emigration andColonies and colonization
BISAC

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6 — English, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish
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Paper, Ebook
ISBNs
14
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