PERSON
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Indian-American literary theorist (b. 1942) whose 1988 essay Can the Subaltern Speak? established the epistemological critique of representation that Mouffe's framework mobilizes for democratic theory.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (b. 1942) is a University Professor at Columbia University and one of the foundational figures of postcolonial theory. Her 1988 essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' — developed from a 1983 lecture — became one of the most influential and contested texts in late twentieth-century critical theory. Drawing on Marx, Gramsci, Derrida, and her own engagement with the Subaltern Studies collective, Spivak argued that the subaltern woman in particular cannot speak within the terms of dominant discourse because the institutional structures of knowledge production do not provide positions from which her speech can be heard as political claim rather than as data for academic interpretation. Her broader work on translation, globalization, and pedagogy has extended the foundational epistemological question into questions of how democratic representation can accommodate the voices systematically excluded from its presuppositions.
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Spivak's framework provides the epistemological depth that Mouffe's political analysis requires. Mouffe argues that democratic legitimacy demands institutional mechanisms through which