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" through various cultural practices - philosophy, history, literature - to suggest that it emerges as ...

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" through various cultural practices - philosophy, history, literature - to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The text addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's analytic of the sublime to child labour in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on.

佳亚特里·斯皮瓦克(1942— )，出生于印度。当今世界首屈一指的文学理论家和文化批评家，西方后殖民理论思潮的主要代表，早年师承美国解构批评大师保罗·德曼，在20世纪70年代曾以将解构大师德里达的De la grammatologie引入英语世界而蜚声北美理论界。