IN OTHER WORLDS Essays in Cultural Politics Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak METHUEN: NEW YORK AND LONDONContents Foreword by Colin MacCabe Author's Note One: Literature ‘The Letter as Cutting Edge Finding Feminist Readings: Dante-Yeats Unmaking and Making in To The Lighthouse Feminism and Critical Theory ‘Two: Into the World 6. Reading the World: Literary Studies in the Eighties 7. Explanation and Culture: 8 The Pol of Interpretations 98. French Feminism in an International Frame 10, Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value Three: Entering the Third World 11. “Draupadi by Mahasweta Devi 12. Suk 1 Studies: Deconstructing Historiography 18, "Breast er” by Mahasweta Devi 14. A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text from the Third World Notes ‘Sex and History in The Prelude (1805): Books Nine to Thirteen 95 118 134 154 197 2aForeword Gayatri Spivak is often called a feminist Marxist deconstructivist. This might seem a rebarbative mouthf ‘ny reader of this remarkable book it will come to seem a necessarily complex description, limning not an identity, but a network of multiple contradictions, traces, inscriptions, The book does not merely state that we are formed in con- lentites are the effects of heterogenous signifying practices its analyses start from and work towards contradiction and heterogeneity. Iumination is a necessarily transitory and conjunctural moment. Any foreword to this work is, of necessity, asked to address the three fields of wach ofthe force of Spivak's se fields can only be under- stood and used in a constant attention to their interpenetration and re-articu- lation. Any simplifying foreword thus runs the risk of reducing the potential of this productive work. The task is, however, worth undertaking exactly because importance to anyone concerned with our understanding of h the relation both of culture and its interpretation to the proposed by a foreword? Lurking somewhere, iHicult.” Difficulty is, as we know, {an ideological notion, Wi is just a simple job, what is, easy for women is difficult for men, what is difficult for children is easy for ficulty lie subterranean and complex evs if Spivak’s work is judged to be difficult, where is that diff ued journal inquiries, Let us quickly enumerate the ways in which these texts are not diffc Every analysis is carefully annotated, by someone who is, this, a model product of an Indian undergraduate and an American graduate education—probably the most scholarly combination on this planet. Indeed one of the minor uses of this text sn annotated bibliography to several of the most tes of the past two decades.