Concept
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Overview
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (; born 24 February 1942) is an Indian literary theorist and feminist critic. She is a professor at Columbia University and a founding member of Columbia's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Considered as one of the most influential postcolonial intellectuals, Spivak is best known for her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" and her translation of and introduction to Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie. She has also translated many works of Mahasweta Devi into English with critical notes on Devi's life and writing style, notably Imaginary Maps and Breast Stories.
Spivak was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for "speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in relation to the globalized world." In 2013, she received the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian award in India. In 2025, Spivak received the Holberg Prize for "her groundbreaking work in the fields of literary theory and philosophy."
Although often associated with postcolonialism, Spivak has stated her separation from the discipline in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), a position she maintained in a 2021 essay titled "How the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies Thinks Colonialism Today", published in Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
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The Critical theory starts originally from the distinction of elements presented in the analysis of experience, viz. the matter of sense, and its universal relations. Taking into account Hume's criticism on this distinction as given in the preceding section, viz. that sensation does not explicitly apprehend more than an individual or more than a mere event, it insists at the same time on the _fact_ that universality…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is; the author is tied to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in the knowledge graph.
In this sphere, therefore, Reason is mistress of a possession, her title to which she does not require to prove—which, in fact, she could not do. The burden of proof accordingly rests upon the opponent. But as he has just as little knowledge regarding the subject discussed, and is as little able to prove the non-existence of the object of an idea, as the philosopher on the other side is to demonstrate its reality…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
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Psychology, like logic, is one of those sciences which in modern times have yet derived least profit from the more general mental culture and the deeper conception of reason. It is still extremely ill off. The turn which the Kantian philosophy has taken has given it greater importance: it has, and that in its empirical condition, been claimed as the basis of metaphysics, which is to consist of nothing but the…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
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Philosophers who discussed Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Related ideas
- Feminism
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- India
- Immanuel Kant
- Judith Butler
- Sahitya Akademi
- University of St Andrews
- Edward Said
- Postcolonialism
- Metaphysics
- Marxism
- Nazi Germany
- Intellectual
- University of Pittsburgh
- Brahmin
- Fellow of the British Academy
- American Philosophical Society
- Theodor W. Adorno
- Paul de Man
- University of Texas at Austin
- University of Chicago
- Subaltern (postcolonialism)
- W. B. Yeats
- Yale University
Place in the tradition
Part of Essentialism.
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