Can the Subaltern Speak?

Introduction

An essay first presented in 1983 at a conference at the University of Illinois and published in 1988; a revised version forms part of A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). Spivak takes the term “subaltern” from Gramsci and from the Subaltern Studies group of Indian historians. She criticises Foucault and Deleuze, who in a 1972 conversation claimed that the oppressed can speak for themselves, for concealing the intellectual’s own position. Her main example is the British ban on widow-burning (sati) in 1829: between colonial rescue – “white men saving brown women from brown men” – and the nativist claim that the women chose to die, the women themselves are not heard. The essay is a founding text of postcolonial theory.

Connections

Builds on

• Prison Notebooks1935 · Antonio Gramsci
• Of Grammatology1967 · Jacques Derrida