The Greatest Gift of Deconstruction

Abstract

Every preface is a moment of self-reflection, an occasion for thinking about one’s biography, practice and the relationship between one’s own work and that of the community of equals. In the translator’s foreword to Mahasweta Devi’s Draupadi, a Bengali short story that represents a prelude to the third section of her book, Entering the Third World, Spivak sets out on an allegorical reading of its two main characters: Sentayanak, the police officer who successfully tracks down the rebellious peasant woman Draupadi as she is scandalously imprisoned and tortured, and Draupadi the heroine/mythic figure that gives the story its title. Rather than interpreting this piece of fiction as the perennial strife between forces of good and evil, progress and regress, colonialism and decolonization, Spivak reads into it the stressed relationship between the First World scholar (Sentayanak) and the Third World (Draupadi) and comments on the inherent implications for her situation as a Third World scholar living up to the economy of Western scholarship.