Gayatri Spivak

From Geography

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak calls herself a practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist. She is best known for her essay 'Can the subaltern speak?', in which she created the term subaltern. Subaltern refers to a group that cannot represent itself or is not put in a position where it may represent itself and therefore is put outside of the hegemonic discourse. Discussing essentialism, she argues there is a risk that the voices of the subaltern people will cause generalization of the group, creating a stereotype. Spivak argued that when you have a identity, you can speak for yourself, so ‘strategic essentialism’ could help representing the group, through a temporary use of the stereotype.

In postcolonial theory, the essay makes a clear distinction between two senses of representation: Depiction and delegation. Spivak argues depiction means speaking as others and delegation means speaking for others. She thinks it is important to distinguish the way in which these two senses of representation imply a different process of substitution between the represented and the representative.

References

Aitken S. and Valentine G., 2006, Approaches to Human Geography, p. 147-159