Can the Subaltern Speak?

Author: Rosalind C. Morris
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231512856
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's original essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism's "worlding" of the world. Spivak's essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, to be able to access the state, and to suffer the burden of difference in a capitalist system that promises equality yet withholds it at every turn. Since its publication, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued. In these phenomenal essays, eight scholars take stock of the effects and response to Spivak's work. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights. Then, through the lens of Spivak's essay, they rethink historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates "Can the Subaltern Speak?" within contemporary issues, particularly new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico. In an afterword, Spivak herself considers her essay's past interpretations and future incarnations and 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.

An Analysis of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak?

Author: Graham Riach
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1351350234
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 106

Book Description
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.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' 1985, Estefania Peñafiel Loaiza Two Works Series

Author: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Publisher: Walther Konig Verlag
ISBN: 9783960989004
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148

Book Description
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's landmark essay in decolonial thought is animated for a new generation with art by Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza In 1985, Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born 1942) published what would become a landmark essay in the academic study of colonialism. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" interrogates the obstructions that prevent certain subjects from being heard and how this state-enforced silence maintains the degradation of those at the peripheries of society. Over three decades later, Spivak's piece is perhaps even more compelling in its affirmation of Marxism's relevance to contemporary decolonial thought. This volume revives Spivak's text for yet another generation of thinkers, placed in dialogue with artwork by Ecuadorian artist Estefanía Peñafiel Loaiza (born 1978). Loaiza's preoccupation with questions of occlusion and the need for and absence of image makes for an art series that shares a clear kinship with Spivak's line of reasoning. Loaiza's visual vocabulary echoes and refracts the central ideas put forth by Spivak in a compelling new interpretation of this essential text.

Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture

Author: Cary Nelson
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252014017
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 756

Book Description
This title provides a picture of the state of Marxist thinking. It aims to provoke a debate that will be of interest to those concerned with the status and development of Marxism and also to theorists in all fields of the human sciences.

Women and Men

Author: Joseph McElroy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781564780232
Category : Apartment houses
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York--from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs--believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages--rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American--in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.

A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Author: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674177649
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
Are the “culture wars” over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave. “We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,” Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the “native informant” through various cultural practices—philosophy, history, literature—to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant’s analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on. A major critical work, Spivak’s book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.

Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire

Author: Heather Raffo
Publisher: Dramatists Play Service, Inc.
ISBN: 9780822220978
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 84

Book Description
An Iraqi artist paints-into-life an astonishing generation of women, exposing their radical, sexy and ultimately human stories beneath. Nine Parts of Desire is inspired by live interviews and events of the last ten years on both sides of the Iraqi border.

The Spivak Reader

Author: Gayatri Spivak
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135217122
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
Among the foremost feminist critics to have emerged to international eminence over the last fifteen years, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has relentlessly challenged the high ground of established theoretical discourse in literary and cultural studies. Although her rigorous reading of various authors has often rendered her work difficult terrain for those unfamiliar with poststructuralism, this collection makes significant strides in explicating Spivak's complicated theories of reading.

Australianama

Author: Samia Khatun
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190922605
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Book Description
Charts the history of South Asian diaspora, weaving together stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire.

Deleuze and the Postcolonial

Author: Simone Bignall
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 074863701X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
This is the first collection of essays bringing together Deleuzian philosophy and postcolonial theory. Bignall and Patton assemble some of the world's leading figures in these fields - including Reda Bensmaia, Timothy Bewes, Rey Chow, Philip Leonard, Nick Nesbitt, John K. Noyes, Patricia Pisters, Marcelo Svirsky and Simon Tormey - to explore rich linkages between two previously unrelated areas of study. They deal with colonial and postcolonial social, cultural and political issues in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia and Palestine. Topics include colonial government, nation building and ethics in the contemporary context of globalisation and decolonisation; issues relating to resistance, transformation and agency; and questions of 'representation' and discursive power as practiced through postcolonial art, cinema and literature. This book constitutes a timely intervention to debates in poststructuralist, postcolonial and postmodern studies. It will be of interest to students in cultural studies, cinema and film studies, languages and literature, political and postcolonial studies, critical theory, social and political philosophy.