“If she rightly distinguishes between ethnic minority and colonised nation, she fails to drive home the point that a good deal of post-colonialism has been a kind of ‘exported’ version of the US’s own grievous ethnic problems, and thus yet another instance of God’s Own Country, one of the most insular on earth, defining the rest of the world in terms of itself. For this exportation to get under way, certain imports known as Third World intellectuals are necessary to act as its agents; yet though Spivak has reason to know this better than most, she never pauses long enough in this book to unpack its implications. To do so would require some systematic critique; but systematic critique is for her more part of the problem than the solution, as it is for all those privileged enough not to stand in need of rigorous knowledge. These individuals used to be known as the gentry, and are nowadays known as post-structuralists. If she can be splendidly scathing about ‘white boys talking post-coloniality’, or the alliance between cultural studies, liberal multiculturalism and transnational capitalism, these wholesome morsels surface only to vanish again into the thick stew of her text.”
“But there are discreditable as well as creditable reasons for the speedy surfacing of post-colonialism, and Spivak remains for the most part silent about them. Its birth, for example, followed in the wake of the defeat, at least for the present, of both class-struggle in Western societies and revolutionary nationalism in the previously colonialised world. American students who, through no fault of their own, would not recognise class-struggle if it perched on the tip of their skateboards, or who might not be so keen on the Third World if some of its inhabitants were killing their fathers and brothers in large numbers, can vicariously fulfil their generously radical impulses by displacing oppression elsewhere. This move leaves them plunged into fashionably Post-Modern gloom about the ‘monolithic’ benightedness of their own social orders. It is as if the depleted, disorientated subject of the consumerist West comes by an extraordinary historical irony to find an image of itself in the wretched of the earth. If ‘margins’ are now much in vogue, it is partly because those who inhabit them clamour for political justice, and partly because a generation bereft of political memory has cynically abandoned all hope for the ‘centre’. Like most US feminism, post-colonialism is a way of being politically radical without necessarily being anti-capitalist, and so is a peculiarly hospitable form of leftism for a ‘post-political’ world.”
“Gayatri Spivak, by contrast, has kept faith, however ambiguously, with the socialist tradition; but though she has a good many striking perceptions about Marxism in this book, she is too deeply invested in feminism and post-colonialism to launch a full-scale socialist critique of these currents. And just as she straddles two worlds here, so her work’s rather tiresome habit of self-theatricalising and self-alluding is the colonial’s ironic self-performance, a satirical stab at scholarly impersonality, and a familiar American cult of personality.”
“‘the obscurity of a theorist’s style can sometimes signal insecurity quite as much as arrogance’”
“There are some kinds of criticism – Orwell’s would do as an example – which are a good deal more politically radical than their bluffly commonsensical style would suggest. For all his dyspepsia about shockheaded Marxists, not to speak of his apparent willingness to shop Communists to the state, Orwell’s politics are much more far-reaching than his conventionally-minded prose would suggest. With much post-colonial writing, the situation is just the reverse. Its flamboyant theoretical avant-gardism conceals a rather modest political agenda. Where it ventures political proposals at all, which is rare enough, they hardly have the revolutionary élan of its scandalous speculations on desire or the death of Man or the end of History. This is a feature shared by Derrida, Foucault and others like them, who veer between a cult of theoretical ‘madness’ or ‘monstrosity’ and a more restrained, reformist sort of politics, retreating from the one front to the other depending on the direction of the critical fire.”
“Gayatri Spivak’s own politics are as elusive as her thought-processes; but there are signs in this study that she, too, is rather more audacious about epistemology than she is about social reconstruction. At times, she will speak positively about the need for new laws, health and education systems, relations of production; at other times, in familiar post-colonial style, her emphasis is less on transformation than on resistance. Resistance suggests militant action, but also implies that the political buck is always elsewhere. It is a convenient doctrine for those who dislike what the system does while doubting that they will ever be strong enough to bring it down. Marxism, for Spivak if not for its founder, is a speculation rather than a programme, and can only have violent consequences if used for ‘predictive social engineering’. Like the thought of strangling your flat-mate, in other words, it is all very well as long as you don’t act on it. The current system of power can be ceaselessly ‘interrupted’, deferred or ‘pushed away’, but to try to get beyond it altogether is the most credulous form of utopianism.”
“This may well turn out to be true; but it sounds a little too undeconstructively sure of itself as it stands, just as this book assumes (rather than openly argues) the dogmatic Post-Modern case that almost all universalism is reactionary, almost all transgression or disruption positive, and almost all attempts at precise calculation a form of dominative reason.”