Spivakian Thought

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942) is a scholar renowned for her critique of postcolonial studies, her critical translation of Jacques Derrida's philosophy, and the provocative question she raised in a 1988 essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Her answer was a resounding “no,” an assertion stimulating much analysis and debate since that time. Spivak was born in India and received an undergraduate English degree from the University of Calcutta and graduate degrees from Cornell University. Her scholarship, which transgresses disciplinary and theoretical boundaries, draws from literary criticism, poststructuralism, Marxism, deconstruction (particularly Derrida), feminism, and cultural studies. She has produced incisive critiques of imperialism, historiography (the theories and practices of historical research), academia, knowledge construction, globalization, international feminism, and terrorism among others. Her work demonstrates unrelenting concern for the silencing of “subaltern” subjects. In 1976, Spivak garnered acclaim for her self-reflexive translation of French deconstructionist Derrida's Of Grammatology. Since then, she has published dozens of critical texts, essays, and literary works. In the last two decades, critical educational scholars have applied Spivak's rich theorizing to the field of curriculum studies in varied ways.

Spivakian thought animates the field of curriculum studies most notably through the critical questions it prompts concerning the power of knowledge production, the representation of marginalized voices, and the forms in which resistance is enacted. Who speaks and who is silent? Who has the right to speak for whom? What counts as speech? How can the interests and voices of marginalized people (the subaltern) be represented? How can subaltern people influence the production of knowledge? [Page 810]Such questions are significant for a field of study that creates knowledge and determines whose views, beliefs, and knowledge will dominate in educational spaces. Indeed, such questions crystallize a component of Spivakian thought critical to curriculum studies: the imperative to interrogate institutions, discourses, and practices constitutive of knowledge productionthe academy, canonical theory, activism, even critique. Her interrogative impulse proceeds from the understanding that academic practices and discourses wield significant power in inciting and suppressing voice, erasing and representing subjects, and fueling or obstructing social justice.

Spivak's critique of postcolonial studiesitself a critical fieldand advocacy for subaltern subjects are key resources for scholars concerned with questions of power, voice, representation, and justice. Through Spivak's scholarship, the concept of the “subaltern” gathered renewed momentum as a signifier for groups relegated to the periphery of society and history: the poor, women and children, the working classes, the disenfranchised. In her well-known essay foundational for feminist, post-colonial, and subaltern studies, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Spivak emphasized the impossibility of representingand hearingthe voices of subaltern subjects. Her argument emerged through her analysis of a critical collective's work during the 1980s that critiqued traditional Indian history for its elitist and imperialist leanings. She affirmed the deconstructive impulse of the group, their critique of the power shaping knowledge construction, and their advocacy for marginalized voices in dominant narratives. However, she also argued the group's work to represent marginalized voices constructed frozen and universalizing (essentialist) representations that erased subaltern subjectivity and agencya form of violence that repeated the representational crimes committed in the archival past and made hearing subaltern voices impossible. Enduring questions that Spivak's critique of post-colonial studies engender for curriculum scholars is how to disrupt official curriculum that legitimizes what counts as knowledge and create educational spaces in which subalterns can articulate their own diverse knowledge and perspectives. In such impossible circumstances of representing voices that cannot possibly speak and be heard through dominant accounts, Spivak does not advocate “better” accounts of marginalized people or abandoning representational efforts altogether. Instead, she suggests that scholars use the inevitably partial, fraught, but necessary tool of “strategic essentialism,” to pursue greater political good.

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