>Sounds like Spivak has been studying the collected works of Eddie Vedder
>and Billy Corgan; that is, the school of popular, widely influential,
>far-from-underdog intellectuals and artists* who trumpet their own (usually
>imagined) oppression, the rhetorical goal being, of course, to point to
>their daring and nonconformism.
I think this overstates things a bit. Spivak is pretty aware of her influence and prestige. One of her themes the other night was wondering why so many of her critics point to her allegedly privileged origin as a way of undermining her - something, as she rightly points out, that rarely happens to other writers. By her account, she's of middle class origin, and not of the landowning class as is sometimes claimed. Her theory is that her male critics (many of the South Asians in London) would love to call her a "ballbuster" or "castrating bitch," but they don't have the nerve, so they call her upper class instead.
I find it a little odd to be in this position of defending her, since I don't know her work that well, but she does deserve to be taken seriously. Vedder and Corgan, on the other hand, suck.
Doug