The Complicity Between Postcolonialism and Imperialism

Abstract

Much of the controversy around Spivak’s enterprise is fuelled by the way she approaches her subjects and the theoretical paradigms she invests to that effect. In conjunction with the heterogeneity of concerns and preoccupations, she has deployed a spectrum of theoretical insights that can yield fruitful analyses and bring disparate discourses to a productive crisis outcome. Among the theoretical strands she has woven into the fabric of her theoretical and practical endeavour, there appear all forms of un-American theory: phenomenology, structuralism, deconstruction, semiotics, Marxism, psychoanalysis, historiography, political economy and Feminism. The objective is twofold; on the one hand, Spivak projects a dehegemonization of American literary criticism from the vice-like grip of the purely formal practices of ‘practical criticism’ as well as its liberation from the playful excesses of the proponents of deconstruction as such; on the other hand, she has set herself the task of illustrating how that Western theory can help enlighten her consideration of issues such as imperialism, racism, gender, patriarchy and subalternity.