Spivak on the Subaltern, Epistemic Violence, and Representation

A discussion of Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?," an essay that interrogates the discursive conditions of speaking and the coloniality of such conditions. We focus here on silence, withdrawal, and the refusal to enter into discourse as a form of resistance and ethics. In particular, we are here interested in why Spivak makes this claim - what is protected, what is kept from colonial view - and what are its implications for thinking about gaps and silences in the archive of subaltern history and lives.

What is Fashioning Critical Theory?

Podcasted conversation on critical and literary theory, drawing on a range of theorists from Europe, the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America. Our title is drawn from Audre Lorde's essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," where she writes that poetry fashions a language where words do not yet exist. How does theory make words and world new, attuned, and embedded within inventive and inventing lived-experience, tradition, and cultural production?