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Postcolonial Futures
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Other Asias, Maiden US, Oxford UK & Victoria, Australia, Blackwell, 2008, 365pp; £14.99 paperback.
Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation- State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, London, Seagull, 2007, 121pp; £9.99 hardback.Gayatri Spivak's major new publication, Other Astas, ties the future of postcolonial studies to questions of democracy, human rights, and new ways of imagining the heterogeneous spaces of 'Asia' as a single, yet pluralistic, region. If the postcolonial imagination is to be oriented towards the future, Spivak suggests, it will have to work for the re-invention of collectivities in relation to state structures beyond identitarianism, nationalism and national sovereignty. This point is reinforced in the critical dialogue between Judith Butler and Spivak entitled Who Sings the NationState?, a small volume that addresses the problem of statelessness in the age of globalisation, and calls for 'postnational forms of political opposition' (p41). Spivak and Butler's insistence on the 'postnational' as the horizon for postcolonial thought differs somewhat from some of the...See the full content of this document
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