Spivak was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for being "a critical theorist and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in relation to the globalized world.

In 1961, Spivak joined the graduate program in English at Cornell University in the United States, traveling on money borrowed on a so-called "life mortgage".

In 1962, unable to secure financial aid from the department of English, she transferred to a new program called Comparative Literature, although she had insufficient preparation in French and German.

[12] In 1967, on her regular attempts at self-improvement, Spivak purchased a book, by an author unknown to her, entitled De la grammatologie.

This publication was immediately a success, and the "Translator's Preface" began to be used around the world as an introduction to the philosophy of deconstruction launched by the author, Jacques Derrida, whom Spivak met in 1971.

This sustained attempt to access the epistemologies damaged by the millennial oppression of the caste system has allowed her to understand the situation of globality as well as the limits of high theory more clearly.

With this, Spivak established the Pares Chandra and Sivani Chakravorty Memorial Foundation for Rural Education; to which she contributed the majority of her Kyoto Prize.

Edward Said wrote of Spivak's work, "She pioneered the study in literary theory of non-Western women and produced one of the earliest and most coherent accounts of that role available to us.

as a critic who has feminized and globalized the philosophy of deconstruction, considering the position of the subaltern (a word used by Antonio Gramsci as describing ungeneralizable fringe groups of society who lack access to citizenship).

Her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, published in 1999, explores how major works of European metaphysics (e.g., Kant, Hegel) not only tend to exclude the subaltern from their discussions, but actively prevent non-Europeans from occupying positions as fully human subjects.

This concept denotes a purposeful silencing through the "dismissing of a particular context as being irrelevant"; an institutionalized and ideological way of presenting the world.

[20] Spivak coined the term "strategic essentialism", which refers to a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of social action.

"Strategic essentialism" allows for disparate groups to accept temporarily an "essentialist" position that enables them able to act cohesively and "can be powerfully displacing and disruptive.

[25] However, Spivak stated in the same speech that "single coerced yet willed suicidal 'terror' is in excess of the destruction of dynastic temples and the violation of women, tenacious and powerfully residual.

[34][35] Terry Eagleton laments that If colonial societies endure what Spivak calls 'a series of interruptions, a repeated tearing of time that cannot be sutured', much the same is true of her own overstuffed, excessively elliptical prose.

[36]Writing for the New Statesman, Stephen Howe complained that "Spivak is so bewilderingly eclectic, so prone to juxtapose diverse notions without synthesis, that ascribing a coherent position to her on any question is extremely difficult.

"[11] Judith Butler, in a response critical of Eagleton's position, cited Adorno's comment on the lesser value of the work of theorists who "recirculate received opinion", and opined that Spivak "gives us the political landscape of culture in its obscurity and proximity", and that Spivak's supposedly "complex" language has resonated with and profoundly changed the thinking of "tens of thousands of activists and scholars", and continues to do so.

[37] In May 2024, Spivak was involved in a controversy where she repeatedly corrected the pronunciation of a Dalit graduate student Anshul Kumar who asked her a question as part of a discussion at an event in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

[39] Dalit scholar Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan called the student's reaction "a strategy of counter-violence" against "the structural violence built into the very edifice of postcoloniality on which many dominant class intellectuals [like Spivak] have been comfortably placed".

Spivak and the other signatories called the case a "legal nightmare" for Ronell and charged Reitman with conducting a "malicious campaign" against her.