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Soul making: Gayatri Spivak on upward mobility

In a famous reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argued that stories about a European woman’s rise to independent agency, including stories about the rise of feminism, sometimes depend upon a silent alliance with European imperialism. The present essay uses Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Spivak’s reading of it to suggest that the powerful logic of Spivak’s analysis might be carried forward and redirected, thereby making room for the upward mobility of Third World women (among others) and for the political defence of the welfare state.