Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak offers an overtly political challenge to the way we think about literature and culture. As she highlights the many legacies of colonialism, she re-defines the ethical horizons of contemporary critical thought. This volume focuses on her key theoretical concepts, intellectual context and critical reception, providing an accessible introduction to one of the most important thinkers of our time. Stephen Morton introduces Spivak's crucial work through an analysis of such issues as: * methodology and Spivak's 'difficult' style * deconstructive strategies * third world women, the concept of the 'subaltern' and the critique of western feminism * re-reading Marx for the global capitalist era * Spivak's contribution to colonial discourse studies and postcolonial theory. Having examined the ways in which Spivak has transformed contemporary cultural theory, and in particular feminist and postcolonial thought, Morton concludes with a guide to reading Spivak's work and that of her critics. Essential for students of literature or cultural studies, this volume is the ideal companion for a first encounter with Spivak's remarkable texts.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is among the foremost figures in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences of the past half-century. In this book, originally published in 2003, she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and sounds an urgent call for a “new comparative literature,” in which the discipline is reborn—one that is not appropriated and determined by the market. Spivak examines how comparative literature and world literature in translation have fared in the era of globalization and considers how to protect the multiplicity of languages and literatures at the university. She demonstrates why critics interested in social justice should pay close attention to literary form and offers insightful interpretations of classics such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. Through readings of texts not only in English, French, and German but also in Arabic and Bengali, Spivak practices what she preaches. This anniversary edition features a new preface in which Spivak reflects on the fortunes of comparative literature in the intervening years and its tasks today.

Are the “culture wars” over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave. “We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,” Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the “native informant” through various cultural practices—philosophy, history, literature—to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant’s analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on. A major critical work, Spivak’s book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the most pre-eminent postcolonial theorists writing today and a scholar of genuinely global reputation. This collection, first published in 1993, presents some of Spivak’s most engaging essays on works of literature such as Salman Rushdie's controversial Satanic Verses, and twentieth century thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Karl Marx. Spivak relentlessly questions and deconstructs power structures where ever they operate. In doing so, she provides a voice for those who can not speak, proving that the true work of resistance takes place in the margins, Outside in the Teaching Machine.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's original essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" transformed the analysis of colonialism through an eloquent and uncompromising argument that affirmed the contemporary relevance of Marxism while using deconstructionist methods to explore the international division of labor and capitalism's "worlding" of the world. Spivak's essay hones in on the historical and ideological factors that obstruct the possibility of being heard for those who inhabit the periphery. It is a probing interrogation of what it means to have political subjectivity, to be able to access the state, and to suffer the burden of difference in a capitalist system that promises equality yet withholds it at every turn. Since its publication, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued. In these phenomenal essays, eight scholars take stock of the effects and response to Spivak's work. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights. Then, through the lens of Spivak's essay, they rethink historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates "Can the Subaltern Speak?" within contemporary issues, particularly new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico. In an afterword, Spivak herself considers her essay's past interpretations and future incarnations and the questions and histories that remain secreted in the original and revised versions of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" both of which are reprinted in this book.

Among the foremost feminist critics to have emerged to international eminence over the last fifteen years, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has relentlessly challenged the high ground of established theoretical discourse in literary and cultural studies. Although her rigorous reading of various authors has often rendered her work difficult terrain for those unfamiliar with poststructuralism, this collection makes significant strides in explicating Spivak's complicated theories of reading.

The postcolonial moment has passed, but the need to locate and confront shifting forms of oppression remains imperative. For Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, such a task should be activated through long-term practice in the ethics of reading. In"Readings," Spivak elaborates a utopian vision: imaginative training for epistemological performance, to develop a will for peaceful social justice in coming generations. Teaching as she reads, she demonstrates modes in which such a vision might be apprehended. She celebrates Frantz Fanon s appropriation of Hegel. Preparing herself to read, she pays close attention to signposts of character, action and place in J. M. Coetzee s"Summertime" and Elizabeth Gaskell s"North and South."Re-reading two of her own essays, she addresses changes in her thinking and practice over the course of her career.Now, in her fifth decade of teaching, Spivak passes on her lessons through anecdote, interpretation, warning and instruction, to students and teachers of literature. She writes, I urge students of English to understand that utopia does not happen, and yet to understand, also, their importance to the nation and the world. Indeed, I know how hard it is to sustain such a spirit in the midst of a hostile polity, but I urge the students to consider the challenge. "