ABSTRACT
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born in Calcutta in 1942, and was educated in both India and America. Her experience in these two countries informed her later work. In her pioneering essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), Spivak argues that the world's poorest people have no voice in society. She claims that the local elite—officials, educators, religious leaders—and Western scholars can never faithfully speak for them. The impact of the essay has been profound. It sparked furious debate in the academic community about how intellectuals play a role in silencing subaltern voices. By speaking for subalterns, Spivak suggests, even well-meaning academics can do harm. Spivak's ideas have been influential for postcolonial studies and literary criticism. They have also been taken up in other disciplines, such as history, anthropology, archaeology, and cultural studies. Its ideas are also used in the work of political activists.
