Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the noted postcolonial scholar and global public intellectual, is perhaps best known for her piece, “Can the subaltern speak?,” in which she claims that elite systems of knowledge filter out subaltern voices so that even when the subaltern does speak, it’s not heard. Spivak’s May 21 lecture on Du Bois’s “vision of democracy” was aimed at underlining …
