“Can the Subaltern Speak” to My Students?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is one of the most frequently assigned works of feminist, postcolonial theory in the Anglo-American academy. The essay, which was published in multiple versions beginning in 1983 and which contains nearly one hundred endnotes, is also widely understood to pose a tremendous challenge to students and teachers encountering it for the first time. It is, in short, a hard essay to teach. This article argues that feminist pedagogues must nevertheless strive to equip both undergraduate and graduate students with the critical tools and desire to read Spivak’s essay now, in the twenty-first century. It offers methods for approaching the text in the classroom and reflects on the author’s experiences teaching and studying the essay; it also references interviews with other teachers of the essay and offers provisional exegesis of some of Spivak’s arguments. The essay pays particular attention to Spivak’s titular question, arguing that the question itself has become a contribution to feminist scholarship.