Spivak is not for everyone, and I hope that disagreements with her on substantive or stylistic grounds do not become an excuse to bash any and all attempts at global or, in this case, non european history and literature in which Spivak's critics have often hardly been interested. Aside from a blurb on book jacket here and there, these critics often don't review books on the the subjects addressed by Spivak that don't suffer from the problems they are harping about. So if they know so little, why are they doing the reviewing? It's not like a debate between Eagleton and Spivak on colonial representation of India or African post colonial literature or the theory of the Asiatic Mode of Production could have any of the substance of the Sahlins/Obeyesekere debate: Eagleton is not to to the study of India what Sahlins is to scholarship on the Pacific Islands.
If I remember correctly, Eagleton has not a word to say for example about how Spivak deals with the Asiatic Mode of Production theory in light of contemporary scholarship on Indian history (and Spivak herself seems not to have consulted the crucial Sharma/Mukhia debate in TJ Byres and Harbans Mukhia, ed. Feudalism and the Non European World, relying instead mostly on the 25-year-old theoreticisms of Hindess and Hirst). He probably doesn't know anything about such scholarship, so it was not simply a choice for him to rag about Spivak's often impenetrable and opaque style.
At any rate, why commission the review to him?
And if I remember he makes the terribly obnoxious comment--really a cheap shot by a white man paranoid of a resurgent third worldism despite two decades of neo liberalism and structural adjustment programs --that interest in third world or post colonial studies by we brown and black Westerners can only be motivated by a disinterest in changing one's own society, a substitute politics--as if the same could not be said about literary and cultural studies tout court? Don't we have a need to understand the societies from which we come in terms of new concepts, relevant kinds and theories? And why not study world literature or politics? Why not study Ancient or Mughal India? Who cares if it's not directly relevant to changing one's immediate concerns? Is Chaucer? The PreSocratics? What the heck is his point?
Yours, Rakesh