Can the Subaltern Speak?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1988 essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" introduced questions of gender and sexual difference into analyses of representation and offering a profound critique of both subaltern history and radical Western philosophy. Since the publication of Spivak's essay, the work has been revered, reviled, misread, and misappropriated. It has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued. In these phenomenal essays, eight scholars take stock of this response. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights, and then they think with Spivak's essay about historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death.