Are the "culture wars" over? What is their relationship to gender struggle
and the dynamics of class? Gayatari Spivak poses these questions and attempts
to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic,
tracking the figure of the "native informant".Are the "culture wars" over? What is their relationship to gender struggle
and the dynamics of class? Gayatari Spivak poses these questions and attempts
to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic,
tracking the figure of the "native informant" through various cultural
practices - philosophy, history, literature - to suggest that it emerges as the
metropolitan hybrid.; The text addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist
intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's analytic of the
sublime to child labour in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World
interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply
suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as
Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on.
