Spivak is one of the most influential postcolonial thinkers and activists, whose work as a theorist and critic has ceaselessly campaigned against intellectual colonisation in a globalised world. Her 1988 essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, which tackled problems of representation and agency in formerly colonised countries, continues to be a key point of reference within postcolonial studies, and in recent years her influence has grown beyond academia and into an artworld that is attempting to decolonise its practices and institutions, becoming a lodestone for curators and artists working in the field. Advocating for the importance of the humanities in the redress of the economically dispossessed and marginalised, Spivak also runs the Pares Chandra and Sivani Chakravorty Memorial Rural Education Project, which she founded in 1986 to fund and provide high standards of teaching in primary schools in her home state of West Bengal. She is currently a professor at Columbia University, where she cofounded the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

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