- Lived:
- Born 1942, Calcutta (Kolkata), India · working in New York and rural West Bengal
- Tradition:
- Postcolonial theory; deconstruction; Marxist feminism
- The Big Idea:
- The world's poorest and most silenced people are not just unheard — the very systems that claim to speak for them are part of what silences them, and no one escapes that problem by good intentions alone.
- In their words:
- Education, she says, is an "uncoercive rearrangement of desires."
- If you remember one thing:
- She asked, "Can the subaltern speak?" — and her answer was not that the powerless have no voice, but that the powerful have never built the ears to hear it.