Can the Subaltern Speak?
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Spivak published the essay in 1988 in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg for the University of Illinois Press, at pages 271 to 313. She argues that the subaltern has no position from which to be heard, and that Western intellectuals who claim to let the oppressed speak tend to reinstall themselves as the speaker. The link is to the Columbia edition edited by Rosalind Morris, which prints the essay with later reflections on it rather than presenting it alone.
Why you should read this
Spivak's essay asks whether colonized and marginalized subjects can represent themselves within the very discourse structures that were built to speak for them. A foundational, notoriously difficult text in postcolonial theory that assumes prior grounding in Derrida, Foucault, and Marx.
- Field
- History
- Form
- Non-fiction
- Published
- 1988
- Themes
- PostcolonialismHistory
