Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, born 24 February 1942, is an Indian literary theorist and feminist critic, a professor at Columbia University and a founding member of its Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Considered one of the most influential postcolonial intellectuals, she is best known for her essay Can the Subaltern Speak? and for her translation of and introduction to Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie, and has also translated many works of Mahasweta Devi into English with critical notes on Devi's life and writing style, notably Imaginary Maps and Breast Stories. Spivak was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in relation to the globalized world, received the Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian award, in 2013, and received the Holberg Prize in 2025 for her groundbreaking work in literary theory and philosophy; although often associated with postcolonialism, she stated her separation from the discipline in her 1999 book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, a position she maintained in a 2021 essay on how the heritage of postcolonial studies thinks colonialism today.