Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is best known for her overtly
political use of contemporary cultural and critical theories to challenge the
legacy of colonialism on the way we read and think about literature and
culture.Indeed, for Spivak the effects of European colonialism did not simply
vanish as many former European colonies achieved national independence in the
second half of the twentieth century. Rather, the social, political and
economic structures that were established during colonial rule continued to
inflect the cultural, political and economic life of postcolonial nation
states.
During her early career Spivak was influenced by the
French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–), her professor Paul de Man- the two
most prominent and rigorous advocates of deconstruction in North
America during the 1960s and 1970s. De Man’s approach to reading
emphasised how the meaning of a literary text is not stable or transparent, but
is radically indeterminate and therefore always open to further questioning.
For de Man, the practice of literary criticism is not a matter of formulating a
single, correct interpretation; instead, de Man argues that texts contain blind
spots which always and necessarily lead to errors and misreadings. From the
outset, Spivak has persistently and persuasively demonstrated that
deconstruction is a powerful political and theoretical tool. One of the ways in
which Spivak has demonstrated the political value of deconstruction is by
focusing on the rhetorical blind spots or grounding mistakes which stabilizes
conventional notions of truth and reality.
Like Said and Derrida, Spivak has examined the way in
which the real world is constituted by a network of texts. In doing so, Spivak
has increasingly sought to challenge some of the dominant ideas about
contemporary globalization. By highlighting the political and economic
interests which are served by the economic text of globalization, Spivak
exposes how the world is represented from the dominant perspective and
geopolitical location of the ‘First World’ to the exclusion of other
disenfranchised groups.
Spivak has developed the ideas of the Subaltern Studies.
More specifically, Spivak has argued that the everyday lives of many ‘Third World’ women are so complex and unsystematic that
they cannot be known or represented in any straightforward way by the
vocabularies of western critical theory. In this respect, the lived experiences
of such women can be seen to present a crisis in the knowledge and
understanding of western critical theory (Hitchcock 1999: 65). For Spivak, this
crisis in knowledge highlights the ethical risks at stake when privileged
intellectuals make political claims on behalf of oppressed groups. These risks
include the danger that the voices, lives and struggles of ‘Third
World’ women will be silenced and contained within the technical
vocabulary of Western critical theory. For Spivak, the traditional disciplines
of rational academic inquiry have restricted the way we think about texts and
ideas in relation to the social, political and economic world. Before we can
learn anything about the economic text of globalisation or the patriarchal
oppression of ‘Third World’ women, Spivak
insists that we must first unlearn the privileged systems of western knowledge
that have indirectly served the interests of colonialism and neo-colonialism.