ABSTRACT
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s three seminal essays published in Yale French Studies (hereafter YFS) and Social Text (hereafter ST) are still a great deal better known among feminists and others working in the field of literary studies in America, than they are on the British side of the Atlantic.1 YFS is primarily a literary journal and has been responsible for introducing to the USA much of the work of Lacan, Derrida and their followers. It has also provided a forum for an emergent American structuralist and poststructuralist criticism. Social Text spans a wide political and theoretical spectrum, and it has done much to familiarize American readers with Foucault and his critics. Alongside this there has been, in ST, a continual engagement with debates around popular culture, cinema, imperialism, racism and of course Marxism, with contributions from writers like Fredric Jameson and Edward Said.
