Page 117 - Introducing Cultural Studies

The Indian feminist
and member of the ayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Subaltern Studies
collective Gayatri
Spivak is
considered to be
one of the most
subversive post-
colonial critics. An
aggressive anti-
historicist and
translator of
Jacques Derrida,
Spivak argues
against
"hegemonic
historiography"
which, to take one
example, presents
Indian history as
continuous and
homogeneous in
terms of heads of
state and British
administrators. Her
aim is not so much
to deconstruct
imperial history but
to destroy critical
historical
reasoning itself.

Spivak wants to
relocate non-
Western
discourses in
totally new spaces
where
heterogeneity is
the norm and a
new "worlding of
the world" is
created.

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