IN OTHER
WORLDS
Essays in Cultural Politics
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
METHUEN: NEW YORK AND LONDONContents
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
2aForeword
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.