> Spivak, however, used to argue that trapped between the rock and hard
> places "the subaltern [e.g. poor women in poor nations] cannot speak"
> (I don't know if she's still committed to this statement).
No, no, this was one of those rhetorical flourishes, kind of the 3rd world equivalent of Adorno's quip, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric". Her translation of Mahasweta Devi's short stories is simply outstanding, the subaltern doesn't just speak, it builds its own satellite uplink. Spivak's latest book, "Critique of Postcolonial Reason" she has a nifty passage towards the end dealing with this issue, insisting that the old borderlines between First World theory and Third World praxis are gone for good, and that we need a genderized multinational Marxism to fight The Forces of Capitalist Evil. It's gorgeous stuff, though I wish she'd pay less attention to smacking Derrida upside the head and more attention to Adorno's Sixties writings. Probably I'm just jealous (us theorists are a weird bunch).
-- Dennis