"Can the subaltern speak?" revised edition, from the "History" chapter of Critique of postcolonial reason / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak --
Reflections on "Can the subaltern speak? : subaltern studies after Spivak / Partha Chatterjee --
Postcolonial studies : now that's history / Ritu Birla --
Ethical affirmation of human rights : Gayatri Spivak's intervention / Drucilla Cornell --
Death and the subaltern / Rajeswari Sunder Rajan --
Between speaking and dying : some imperatives in the emergence of the subaltern in the context of U.S. slavery / Abdul Janmohamed --
Subalterns at war : First World War colonial forces and the politics of the Imperial War Graves Commission / Michèle Barrett --
Bipower and the new international division of reproductive labor / Pheng Cheah --
Moving from subalternity : indigenous women in Guatemala and Mexico / Jean Franco --
In response : looking back, looking forward / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1988 essay Can the Subaltern Speak? introduced questions of gender and sexual difference into analyses of representation and offering a profound critique of both subaltern history and radical Western philosophy. Spivak's eloquent and uncompromising arguments engaged with more than just power, politics, and the postcolonial. They confronted the methods of deconstruction, the contemporary relevance of Marxism, the international division of labor, and capitalism's worlding of the world, calling attention to the historical and ideological factors that efface the possibility of being heard. Since the publication of Spivak's essay, the work has been revered, reviled, misread, and misappropriated. It has been cited, invoked, imitated, and critiqued. In these phenomenal essays, eight scholars take stock of this response. They begin by contextualizing the piece within the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies and the quest for human rights, and then they think with Spivak's essay about historical problems of subalternity, voicing, and death. A final section situates Spivak's work in the contemporary world, particularly through readings of new international divisions of labor and the politics of silence among indigenous women of Guatemala and Mexico. In an afterword, Spivak herself looks at the interpretations of her essay and its future incarnations, while specifying some of the questions and histories that remain secreted in the original and revised versions of Can the Subaltern Speak? -- both of which are reprinted in this book.