Tag: L-R.Zakia Jafri

By Nadim Asrar, In her genre-bending essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1983), literary theorist and feminist critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak had interpreted the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised, especially the colonised women, with an epic sentence: “White men are saving brown women from brown men.” Writing in the context of the British colonisers banning the Hindu practice of Sati, Spivak argued that the western imperative to “reform” the colonised, a project which is never innocent, is produced in order to support western interests. That critical thinking about the “other”...