A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Are the "culture wars" over? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? Gayatari Spivak poses these questions and attempts to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic, tracking the figure of the "native informant".

A founder of postcolonial studies surveys the current state of the field and finds much to criticize. This is vintage Spivak--dazzling, often exasperating, but unfailingly powerful. -- Partha Chatterjee, author of The Nation and Its Fragments In these pages Gayatri Spivak performs what often seems either impossible or purely gestural--a critique of transnational globalization which manages to be equally attuned to its cultural and economic effects. This book deserves to be read for its modulated defense of Marxism and feminism alone. It will be welcomed as the clearest statement to date of Spivak's own relationship to the postcolonial theory with which she herself--wrongly, as she forcefully argues here--is so often identified. With a brilliance that is uniquely hers, Spivak issues a challenge which will be very hard to avoid to the limits of theory and of academic institutions alike. -- Jacqueline Rose, author of States of Fantasy Gayatri Spivak tells us that here she charts her progress from colonial discourse studies to transnational cutlural studies. She does so brilliantly. And she does so much more. She constructs this extraordinary progress through an intricate labyrinth, but one with blazing lights in every corner. -- Saskia Sassen, author of Globalization and its Discontents Gayatri Spivak works with remarkable complexity and skill to evoke the local details of emergent agency in an international frame. Her extraordinary attention to the texts she reads and her ability to track the reach of global power make her one of the unparalleled intellectuals of our time. -- Judith Butler, author of The Psychic Life of Power

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