Selvedge Salvage

Abstract

Gayatri Chakravotry Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason explicitly asks the reader to examine the limits of its argumentative structure. Just as Spivak has recently argued that the form of Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy is paratactic (a way of using language that withholds connections and conjunctions), Spivak’s own A Critique of Postcolonial Reason is carefully constructed to force the reader to supply links between the sections of the text. In this sense, Spivak achieves a poetic effect, one that is not unrelated to the contemporary paratactic prose poetry of Harryette Mullen. The formal parataxis of Spivak’s work also serves to reflect an argument in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason about the difficulty of forging solidarity among disparate migrant and racialized groups in the Western metropolis.