Spivak, Gayatri (1942–)

Gayatri Spivak is a literary and cultural critic associated with postcolonial studies, feminism, deconstruction, and Marxism. She was born in Calcutta to a middle-class family and received her undergraduate degree at the University of Calcutta, in 1959. She then immigrated to the United States in order to undertake graduate studies at Cornell University under the supervision of Paul de Man, and is currently a faculty member at Columbia University. She is a widely published, popular lecturer and travels widely as part of her academic activism, which focuses in large part on the lives of Third World women.

Spivak came to prominence through her 1976 translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. Her monumental introduction to this translation paved the way for discussions of poststructuralist French thought in the English-speaking world. This publication was later followed by her best-known essay, Can the Subaltern Speak? This essay, examining the Indian practice of sati, or widow self-immolation, queries whether subaltern women are able to articulate their desires. The answer that Spivak provides in her essay is that the oppression that they face effectively precludes their being able to speak. She has [Page 1333]since shifted from this position, stating in her 1999 revision of the essay in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, that the oppression that subaltern women face prevents them from being heard, from having their perspectives registered by the socially dominant. This ongoing argument has proven to be foundational for postcolonial studies, which has attempted to find spaces to liberate peoples that have been affected by the processes of colonization.

Spivak has recently announced a shift away from postcolonial studies. She prefers instead to see herself as a deconstructionist who is influenced by feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial discourses, and who works strategically within these frameworks. Although she now disavows the idea, she is credited for creating the notion of strategic essentialism. Strategic essentialism is a strategy for resistance, similar to coalition politics, in which people group themselves together according to the imperfect labels of identity in order to achieve specific political ends. Examples include anti-racist activism by people of color, whose alliances require rallying around the label of race to the neglect of their other differences. Spivak is critical of identifications founded on essentialism, or the belief in transcendental commonality, but still allows for effective political strategies to be used. Her research turns repeatedly to the poststructural dismantling of metaphysics, the inquiry into a world of thought beyond the physical. Spivak focuses instead on the materialism advocated by Marxist criticism, looking for ways of achieving a just world.