A key theme of Gayatri Spivaks work is agency: the ability of the individual to make their own decisions. While Spivaks main aim is to consider ways in which subalterns - her term for the indigenous dispossessed in colonial societies - were able to achieve agency, this paper concentrates specifically on describing the ways in which western scholars inadvertently reproduce hegemonic structures in their work. Spivak is herself a scholar, and she remains acutely aware of the difficulty ...