ABSTRACT
If one postcolonial critic in particular is associated with Derrida’s work, it is his early translator Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Fittingly, there is much to be said about Spivak in relation to autobiographical theory. Three things need to be stated about Spivak’s relationship with autobiography. First, she is extremely critical of what she sees as metropolitan diasporic intellectuals flaunting their difference as part of some dubiously careerist manoeuverings. Second, according to her critics she’s not above flaunting her difference as part of some dubiously careerist manoeuvering. Third, her work displays an admirable honesty about how these two things co-exist, and a stern theoretical grasp of the necessity of this co-existence. Indeed, she remarks a necessity to staging identity: ‘The stagings of Caliban work alongside the narrativization of history: claiming to be Caliban legitimises the very individualism that we must persistently attempt to undermine from within’.1 Yet, according to Spivak, while we must accept this necessity of staging, we need simultaneously to hold on to the impossibility of controlling that staging in any absolute sense:
As you may have gathered by now, I am guarded and watchful of the autobiographical impulse within postcoloniality. The line between aesthetics and politics is not necessarily programmed by the authority of the author. […] Let us not read the text’s desire as its fulfillment in the text. Let us not read the historical provenance of author/protagonist as if unmediated by the dynamics of class, institution, and affiliation. Let us remember the informant of the testimonial as we read autobiography.2
