Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a distinguished scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic who holds the rank of University Professor at Columbia University in New York. Educated at the University of Calcutta and later earning her PhD at Cornell, she rose to international prominence through her translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, which included a translator’s preface that set new standards for self-reflexivity in theoretical work. Over the decades, Spivak has built an intellectual repertoire spanning postcolonial theory, feminism, Marxism, and deconstruction—a hybridity of disciplines that reflects her own self-description as a “practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist.”
Her work focuses especially on the figure of the “subaltern” (as originally theorised by Antonio Gramsci) and on how women and marginalised subjects in post-colonial contexts are shaped by, and resist, global structures of power and representation. One of her most-cited essays, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), asks whether the most vulnerable are ever truly able to “speak” within dominant academic and political discourses. Spivak has coined influential concepts such as “strategic essentialism”, and her major book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999) explores how European metaphysical traditions exclude non-European subjects. She has received many honours—among them the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy (2012), India’s Padma Bhushan (2013), and the Holberg Prize (2025) for her groundbreaking contributions to literary theory and philosophy.