Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"--originally published in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg's Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988)--perhaps best demonstrates her concern for the processes whereby postcolonial studies ironically reinscribe, co-opt, and rehearse neo-colonial imperatives of political domination, economic exploitation, and cultural erasure.
In other words, is the post-colonial critic unknowingly complicit in the task of imperialism?
Is "post-colonialism" a specifically first-world, male, privileged, academic, institutionalized discourse that classifies and surveys the East in the same measure as the actual modes of colonial dominance it seeks to dismantle?
