Towards a postcolonial feminist philosophy of translation: On Gayatri Spivak’s critical transposition of Benjamin,Derrida and de Man

Abstract

This article examines how Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s postcolonial feminist theory of translation constitutes a critical reinvention of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man’s discourses on translation and language. It argues that Spivak’s paradigm, combining constructive pessimism with the ceaseless labour of intimate reading, exemplifies a method of feminist transposition that remains crucial for negotiating global feminism’s perennial challenge of reconciling universality and difference. Emerging alongside contemporary efforts to decolonise translation studies by Tejaswini Niranjana, Homi K Bhabha, Lawrence Venuti and others, Spivak’s reconceptualising of a translator’s surrender in ‘The politics of translation’ distinctly reframes translation as an ethically conscious feminist practice that could foster genuine solidarity with Third World women writers. Foregrounding the significance of women’s rhetoricity in translation, Spivak bridges poststructuralist methods with postcolonial imperatives through her feminist transposition – of not only Benjamin’s idea of a translator’s devotion to ‘pure language’ but also Derrida’s and de Man’s poststructuralist reconfigurations of this Benjaminian belief. Embodying an enduring feminist methodology for representing cultural otherness, Spivak’s rewriting of canonical translation theory resists the imposition of a single authority in defining a monolithic tradition of feminist philosophy in and beyond translation activities. Her approach urges us to value transpositional and reinventive labour as much as interpretive labour as we revisit and renew past works of theory and praxis to advance feminist solidarity in the face of persistent and emergent forms of gender inequality and neocolonial hegemony today.