Content area
Full Text
Written and re-written several times, 15 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's celebrated essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" has become emblematic of post-colonial studies, without being limited by it. Much translated, excerpted, anthologized and misunderstood, the title of the essay has become a standard rhetorical gesture of the (un)initiated! If only Stephen Greenblatt's recommendations to the PMLA had been heeded, 16 this essay could well have stood in for a monograph at an academic tenure committee.
On February 26, 2004 when I walked into the august and apposite precincts of the Casa Italiana (Italian Academy for Advanced Studies) at Columbia University, New York, for a day-long symposium on the essay two decades after its publication, little did I anticipate the interest and enthusiasm of the swelling audience. By the end of the day, when it was Spivak's turn to respond to her interlocutors, long queues of last minute hopefuls had formed outside the auditorium who were kept at bay with great difficulty by the security personnel apprehensive of fire hazards for the old building.
A brief address of welcome by David Freedberg, the Director of the Italian Academy, launched the day's proceedings, followed by Rosalind Morris's introductory remarks. As the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWaG), at Columbia University, who had organized the symposium, Morris drew attention to several anniversaries being commemorated by the symposium. Not only was the essay twenty years old, the university itself was celebrating its bicentennial even as the IRWaG marked its tenth anniversary. Clearly...