Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The essay opens by criticising Foucault and Deleuze for assuming that oppressed groups can simply be allowed to speak for themselves, arguing that this apparently generous move conceals the Western intellectual's own position and interests. Taking the term subaltern from Gramsci and from the Subaltern Studies historians, Spivak asks whether the colonised subject, and particularly the colonised woman, occupies a position from which speech can be heard as speech within the available frameworks. Her central case is the debate over the abolition of sati in British India, in which the colonial administration justified intervention as saving brown women from brown men, while Hindu nativist defenders claimed the women chose to die — and in neither account does the woman's own testimony have a place. She closes with the case of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, a young woman involved in the armed independence struggle whose carefully staged death was read by her family as a matter of illicit love, her attempt at a legible political statement having failed.

Spivak's answer, that the subaltern cannot speak, is widely misread as a claim that the oppressed are silent. Her argument is about audibility and about the structures of representation: speech requires a hearer positioned to receive it as such, and the subaltern position is precisely the one from which utterance does not register. The essay's prose is notoriously difficult, which she has defended as a refusal to make the argument consumable. Her related concept of strategic essentialism concedes that a group may need to invoke a unified identity for political purposes while knowing it to be a construction, and the important distinction she draws between representation as speaking for someone politically and as depicting them — the two senses of the German Vertretung and Darstellung — is a standard examination point.