Analysis Of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can The Subaltern Speak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an unsettling voice in literary theory and especially, postcolonial studies.
She has describes herself as a “practical deconstructionist feminist Marxist” and as a “gadfly”. She uses deconstruction to examine "how truth is constructed" and to deploy the assertions of one intellectualand political position (such as Marxism) to "interrupt" or "bring into crisis" another (feminism, forexample). In her work, she combines passionate denunciations of the harm done to women, non-Europeans, and the poor by the privileged West with a persistent questioning of the grounds on whichradical critique takes its stand.Her continual interrogation of assumptions can make Spivak difficult to read. But her restless critiquesconnect

"Can the Subaltern Speak?" may be Spivak 's best-known essay; it is certainly her most controversial.Postcolonial critics, like many feminists, want to give silenced others a voice. But Spivak worries thateven the most benevolent effort merely repeats the very silencing it aims to combat. After all,colonialists often thought of themselves as well-intentioned. Spivak points to the British outlawing

Marxists speak of andfor the proletariat, feminists of and for oppressed women, and anticolonialists of and for third worldpeoples. In part, Spivak is reacting against the persistent tendency of radical political movements toromanticize the other, especially against the notion that third world peoples must lead the fight againstmultinational global capitalism. To assign them that role is to repeat colonialism 's basic violence, whichviews non-Europeans as important only insofar as they follow Western scripts. Furthermore, when mostf the power resides in the West, why should the least powerful of those caught up in globalization beresponsible for halting its advance? Finally, Spivak points out that the suggestion that all third worldpeoples stand in the same relation to global capitalism and should respond to it in the same way