Promotional Information

Can the Subaltern Speak? is one of those extremely rare essays that can truly be said to be deserving of a book-length consideration. Challenging, rich, dense, and virtuosic in its range of reference, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay is one of the most widely read and cited in the canon of postcolonial theory. -- Brent Edwards, Columbia University

Table of Contents

Introduction, by Rosalind C. Morris Part 1 Text "Can the Subaltern Speak?" revised edition, from the "History" chapter of Critique of Postcolonial Reason, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Part 2 Contexts and Trajectories Reflections on "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Subaltern Studies after Spivak, by Partha Chatterjee Postcolonial Studies: Now That's History, by Ritu Birla The Ethnical Affirmation of Human Rights: Gayatri Spivak's Intervention, by Drucilla Cornell Part 3 Speaking of (Not) Hearing: Death and the Subaltern Death and the Subaltern, by Rajeswawri Sunder Rajan Between Speaking and Dying: Some Imperatives in the Emergence of the Subaltern in the Context of U.S. Slavery, by Abdul JanMohamed Subalterns at War, by Michele Barrett Part 4 Contemporaneities and Possible Futures: (Not) Speaking and Hearing Biopower and the New International Division of Reproductive Labor, by Pheng Cheah Moving from Subalternity: Indigenous Women in Guatemala and Mexico, by Jean Franco Part 5 In Response In Response: Looking Back, Looking Forward, by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Appendix Can the Subaltern Speak? Bibliography Contributors Index

About the Author

Rosalind C. Morris is professor of anthropology and former associate director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. A scholar of both mainland Southeast Asia and South Africa, she has published widely on topics concerning the politics of representation, the relationship between violence and value, gender and sexuality, the mass media, and the changing forms of modernity in the global south. Her most recent book is Photographies East: The Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia. She is also the author of In the Place of Origins: Modernity and Its Mediums in Northern Thailand and New Worlds from Fragments: Film, Ethnography, and the Representation of Northwest Coast Cultures.