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Thirty years ago, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak penned “Can the subaltern speak?” – first published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s (1988) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture – and sent a series of shock waves across the contested terrain of postcolonial, subaltern, and cultural studies, as she boldly problematized popular deconstructive notions of culture, identity, representation, and voice, arguing that these functioned to both reproduce and co-opt elitist imperatives of political domination and exploitation, leading to the wholesale cultural erasure of subaltern sensibilities. Accordingly, Spivak posed challenging questions by way of her forceful criticism of imperialist complicities of male intellectuals on the left, who ignoring their privilege freely advanced themselves as competent to speak for the subaltern, particularly subaltern women. Spivak, moreover, criticized patriarchal elites “prone to project and reproduce these ethnocentric and developmentalist mythologies onto the Third world ‘subalterns’ they are ready to help develop” (Andreotti, 2007, p. 70). Both Foucault and Deleuze’s generalizations of workers, for example, were fodder for Spivak’s disdain for essentializing emancipatory discourses that assumed a non-existent solidarity across wildly diverse populations. Spivak’s critical deconstructions were, indeed, framed amid acknowledgment of capitalist production and Marxist sensibilities, which nevertheless she argued have hung as backdrops to institutionalized subaltern discourses of the east that theorized subalternity through epistemological modes of colonial (or imperial) domination – discourses absent of subaltern voices to affirm, contest, or deny the veracity of claims (Plate 1).
Spivak’s history and lived experience, in addition to her intellectual preparation, informed the passion and commitment of her argument in the article. Her “intrigue with Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, [her] grandmother’s sister, who had hanged herself in 1926, as a result of her inability to follow through on an assassination detail assigned to her by a small anti-imperialist organization”[1] served as a powerful impetus to the development of her own ideas on subalternity, particularly as these related to women in India. At the heart of her powerful contribution is an underlying desire to interrogate critically “the work of producing subaltern intellectuals” (Andreotti, 2007). This concern over the formation of subaltern intellectuals has only deepened over the last three decades, given increasing numbers of subaltern students entering the academy and intellectuals writing on questions of subalternity. Yet, what has not changed is the saliency...