Other Asias

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects (Post)colonial studies All Subjects Asian Studies Cultural Studies Literary Studies Literary Studies MOSTLY Theory

by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published March 2006, 176 pages, paper

ISBN 1405102071

This collection of Spivak's essays that examine the issues generated by conflicting ideas of Asia. It features a previously unpublished version of the essay "Moving Devi," which already enjoys the kind of problematic canonical status we have come to associate with the best and most difficult of Spivak's work. In this version, she writes (as she did in her well-known "Can teh Subaltern Speak?") about the authority of autobiography. In "Foucault and Najibullah," through her reading or "ab-use" of the Enlightenment as the "public use of reason, " Spivak exposes Foucault's unlocated critique of governmentality and addresses what is today suddenly topical: the playing out of Kipling's "Great Game" from the perspective of the subaltern. In "Responsibility," she makes another excursion into spheres of "the Other" and "the Ethical."

Lastly, Spivak examines the concept of "Asia" as an idea that reflects Europe's "eastward" trajectory. She writes to pluralize the name of a continent, and, by an inspired if ironically paradoxical return to Yeats (the long-ago subject of her doctoral thesis), she seeks to do so also in the name of woman.