Postcolonial scholars are marginalized from high deconstructionist ethics discourse

Evidence

In the Spring 1993 issue, Rey Chow features Spivak in her essay “Ethics after Idealism.” Chow, a feminist who works on questions of identity, ethnicity, and postcoloniality, reads Spivak and Slavoj £izek as two of the “most energetic” post-Marxists writing today. Three issues later, however, in the Winter 1993 issue, two other pieces on ethical questions, including the question of the Other, neglect to mention Spivak. It is as if Spivak’s work had become contaminated by too long an association with Marxism, Third Worldism, and international feminism to possess a theoretical position pure enough to be entertained any longer as high ethical discourse. This foreclosure in ethics of considerations of power or politics is, of course, precisely Spivak’s point in the recent interventions included in The Reader, Living in an age much given to interest in the personal, we have placed “Bonding in Difference” first, since in this interview Spivak reflects autobiographically. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 70

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to how ‘strategic essentialism’ was received: an intellectually essentialist ethic that excludes politics/power reproduces the very foreclosure Spivak critiques. — connects to: Scholarly discourse can itself silence and wound marginalized participants; Scholars from disenfranchised communities reject detached scholarship for committed praxis; Spivak’s postcolonial work lost standing among deconstructionist peers — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 70 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does the foreclosure of Spivak from ‘pure’ ethical discourse mirror the collapsing of strategic into literal essentialism that Spivak later worried about?

Broader Connections

• Spivak’s postcolonial work lost standing among deconstructionist peers #exemplifies (0.78) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 70
• Scholarly discourse can itself silence and wound marginalized participants #expands (0.75)
• Scholars from disenfranchised communities reject detached scholarship for committed praxis #corroborates (0.72)
• Marginalized groups reject postmodernism as a cover story for elite class interests #corroborates (0.72)