Spivak's book is challenging, thought-provoking, and much worth the investment of time and mental energy required to read it. I would especially recommend the first essay, which is framed as an interview, the essay on Salman Rushdie, and the final essay in the book, in which she brings all her ideas together in an examination of post-colonial theory. These essays bring Spivak's concerns of catachresis, performance and post-structuralist philosophy together nicely. As one previous reviewer commented however, Spivak's own "catachrestic" approach to writing makes much of the work in this book difficult to read, and the feeling one gets is that the book is targeted only to other academics. This kind of catachrestic writing, originated by Derrida, has been used by several post-structuralist theorists to varying degrees of success - perhaps most successfully employed by Henry Louis Gates in his seminal work, "The Signifying Monkey."However, the ideas presented by Spivak -- especially those concerning and surrounding essentialism versus anti-essentialism when approaching the question of feminism or civil rights -- (basically deciding whether or not to accept the falsely constructed concepts of gender or race or any other social construct you might choose) -- in order to fight the social order which oppresses people, are especially important today, and will remain so as long as these social constructs continue to exist. Which is to say that Spivak's book remains a classic (which is of course itself a catachresis - a social construct), even if it is sometimes frustratingly flawed in the way that Spivak's language often alienates instead of engages the reader.