Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” argues that the subaltern is not simply an oppressed person who lacks a public platform, but a subject structurally produced as inaudible within dominant systems of knowledge, colonial power and intellectual representation. Her central claim is that Western theory often claims to recover marginal voices while actually reinscribing them through elite categories, thereby committing epistemic violence: the silencing that occurs when colonial, patriarchal or academic discourse defines what can count as speech, truth or agency . Spivak critiques Foucault and Deleuze for assuming that oppressed subjects can transparently speak for themselves, arguing instead that representation is never innocent: intellectuals may “speak for” the oppressed while claiming merely to “let them speak”. A decisive case study is the colonial debate over sati, where British imperial discourse presented itself as saving brown women from brown men, while indigenous patriarchal discourse framed widow sacrifice as tradition. In both narratives, the woman’s own subject-position disappears, trapped between imperial rescue and native authority. Spivak’s conclusion is therefore not that subaltern people never utter words, but that their speech is not recognised as meaningful within the institutional conditions that govern knowledge. Ultimately, the essay demands a radical ethics of scholarship: rather than appropriating marginal voices, intellectuals must interrogate the structures that make those voices illegible.