Other Asias

Book excerpt: In this major intervention into the fraught issues generated by ideas of Asia, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak collects together key essays that challenge, explicitly and implicitly, post-structuralist and post-colonial, as well as less radical, assumptions. In Foucault and Najibullah, through her bold reading or ab-use of the Enlightenment as the public use of reason, she exposes Foucault's unlocated critique of governmentality and addresses the playing out of Kipling's Great Game, from the perspective of the subaltern. In Moving Devi she writes as she did in Can the Subaltern Speak?, about the authority of autobiography in a way that the earlier essay could not begin to. In Responsibility she makes another excursion into classic Spivak territory as regards the Other and the Ethical. In Our Asias she examines the concept of Asia as an idea that reflects Europe's eastward trajectory. She writes to pluralize the name of a continent and, by an inspired - if ironically paradoxical - return to Yeats, she seeks to do so also in the name of woman.