Description

Selected by Mikela Lundahl

Over the past few decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has established herself as one of the most important intellectuals of our time. In her critical work, drawing on a Marxist perspective, she has analysed global inequalities of material and knowledge-based power, whilst also challenging colonial structures and patterns within the intellectual traditions of the left.

This volume brings together, for the first time in Swedish, some of the texts that have helped to establish Spivak’s reputation both within a range of academic disciplines and in political activist circles. From the classic ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, which ranks among the foundational texts in the field of postcolonial studies, to more recent interventions such as ‘The Politics of Translation’ and ‘Situating Feminism’, this volume offers a broad introduction to several of the themes in Spivak’s critique that continue to engage and provoke debate: the exposure of colonial patterns in theory and practice, the role of the humanities, the significance of reading and translation, and the complex and necessary connection between intellectual work and political activism.

In a lengthy foreword, Mikela Lundahl presents the selected texts and provides an overview of Spivak’s work as a whole. In conjunction with this anthology, TankeKraft has also published Spivak’s essay ‘Rectifying Injustice’.

Contents:

– Foreword by Gayatri C. Spivak
– Introduction: Learning from and with Spivak
– Old and new diasporas
– Women in the transnational world
– The new immigrant
– Comparativism revisited
– The politics of translation
– Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular
– Situating feminism
– Three women’s texts and a critique of imperialism
– Can the subaltern speak?