Can the Subaltern Speak by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks - Article Example

 More specifically, Spivak questions the validity [the essence] of third world studies inclined towards a research methodology that justifies the West's conquest of other cultures; a limitation well-articulated in a language that she sums up as hegemonic vocabulary.

She criticizes different writers, male and female alike, right from Marx to Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, for complicity in the perpetuation of neo-colonial imperatives of economic exploitation, political domination, and cultural erasure in the third world. Spivak goes deeper with her criticisms, attacking the subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha, for re-appropriating themselves the Gramsci's term "subaltern" in a false attempt to “voice” out the concerns of the economically dispossessed in postcolonial India (Spivaks 83-84).

Hardly impressed with efforts, she wonders whether data harvested without the blessings of the subject in question, compiled in the language of the west, by a western writer(s), and sold for the benefit of the west can speak for the non-west without sustaining a western-discourse.