On Spivak's Postcolonial Feminist Criticism

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the activest critics in the west world at present and the most important figure on the postcolonial criticism in the United States after Said has been dead. From the view of culture and politics, Spivak always absolutely criticizes the serious issues in the post-industry time with the Marxism and deconstruction theory standing at a woman's position. So, she called herself a practicing deconsturctism and feminism Marxist. She runs her postcolonial feminist criticism quite different from the others in the Feminist history. It is Spivak who introduced Derrida's deconsturction strategy that is so powerful to destroy the hegemonic discourse of whole essentialism into the America Feminism. Spivak discovered the double oppressions and double margins existing of the subaltern women from the colonialism and patriarchy that made the women feel embarrassed between the women liberation and the national liberation. Moreover, Spivak transfers the surplus value theory of Marxism into the Feminism to analyze the women's issues of pregnancy and fostering babies so she combines the Feminism, social politics and economy practices together. As a result of her criticism, the women's subjectivity can obtain some attention and women's oppressed voice will be heard in the near future. The particular characteristic of Spivak's postcolonial Feminism is that she focuses on culture and politics, which meets the multiply centered ideas appropriately and widens the field of traditional Feminism that just derived its points from the limited literature texts. Because of Spivak's criticism, the Feminism got its new birth and owns a broader criticism space since it got the practical utility. The value of Spivak's theory on the postcolonial Feminism is very special and full of practice significance.This thesis puts its importance on the developing of Spivak's postcolonial Feminism and her criticism from the angle of political practice especially on realistic living issues of the third world women based on the analysis of her works and speech, which is very important to our literature theory since China also belongs to the same third world. The first chapter discusses why and how Spivak pays her attention to the subaltern's benefits and her achievements to combine the Feminism and postcolonialism into a new criticism as the postcolonial Feminism successfully and originally which pushes the third world women's discourse to a higher level. The second chapter analyses the experience that Spivak changes the Feminism critical character from the close text to the open society and culture originally that bridges the literature text and the reality and moves the critics'focus from the literate games to the real life since the text limitation has been broken by the deconstruction strategy. More significantly Spivak transplants the surplus value of Marxism into the criticism of women's giving baby birth. It means a lot to deconstruct logocentrism and hegemonic discourse of the imperialism and patriarchy government in order to build a multiply-center world but not a single-centrism world with the respect for differences, as a result of which the subaltern silent women can be exposed from the double oppressions so their subjectivity can get some kind of deserved attention. The third chapter discusses the theme of Spivak's postcolonial feminism: a kind of political ethics criticism with the aim to pursue the silent third world women's lost discourse. This chapter majors in the analyses of Spivak's subaltern notion based on her non-center and singular ideas and her extraordinary contribution to the third world women's discourse issue from theory to practice. The last chapter puts it forward that Spivak's postcolonial feminist criticism will influence the Chinese criticism at different aspects, for example, on the ideas of relationship between literature composition and culture, taking the body-description as a case, the national literature and Chinese Feminism building with her own voices, the Chinese women's discourse situation and so on.