Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Toward a History of the Vanishing Present

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by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Harvard University Press

Due/Published May 1999, 448 pages, paper

ISBN 0674177649

In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak poses questions from within the postcolonial enclave. Are the "culture wars" over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class?

"We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban," Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the "native informant" through various cultural practices--philosophy, history, literature--to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's analytic of the sublime to child labor 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.

A major critical work, Spivak's book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.

Review

Complicating the matter of the post-colonial subject is the rise of globalization, and the introduction of the transnatinonal subject -- defining difference and articulating identity takes on wholly new meanings in today’s world. Gayatri Spivak, one of the leading literary critics and theorists of recent years, examines the shift from colonial discourse to transnational culture through various cultural practices -- philosophy, history, lieterature. In the opening chapter she explores how Kant, Hegel, and Marx articulated conceptions of the aboriginal, the colonial subject, and difference. In the next chapter she looks at how colonialism and postcolonialism are figured in the works of such writers as Bronte, Shelley, Baudelaire, Rhys, Mahasweta, Coetzee, and others. In the final chapter she discusses postmodern fashion and the place of women in the history of textile. In a review of the book, Jacqueline Rose writes, “In these pages Gayatri Spivak performs what often seems either impossible or purely gestural -- a critique of transnational globalization which manages to be attuned to its cultural and economic effects. This book deserves to be read for its modulated defense of Marxism and feminism alone...With a brilliance that is uniquely hers, Spivak issues a challenge which will be very hard to avoid to the limits of theory and of academic institutions alike.”