ABSTRACT
Post-colonial studies have placed critical theory in a new context, challenging its precepts and its applicability outside the West. Spivak always foregrounds specificity and maintains that as a teacher she is combating the homogenizing moves of 'liberal-nationalist-universalist humanism' together with such claims as the autonomy of art and of the author. For Spivak, the group's project therefore contains an element of strategic essentialism in the attempted recuperation of a subaltern consciousness something which, necessary but unachievable, could only be a 'theoretical fiction'. Spivak's most common example when she discusses the 'Third World Woman' is the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, some of whose short stories she has translated and analyzed, initially in essays included in 'In Other Worlds', and later in a separate collection, Imaginary Maps. Parry's view is that Spivak's arguments against epistemic violence, 'hegemonic nativism' and reverse ethnocentrism deny the native's role as historical subject and undervalue anti-imperial liberation movements.
