In this major intervention into the "Asian Century," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak challenges the reader to re-think Asia, in its political and cultural complexity, in the global South and in the metropole. Among the chapters in this volume are:

• "Foucault and Najibullah," in which she looks at Afghanistan in its own historical and gendered narrative
  
• "Moving Devi," in which she addresses the authority of autobiography and writes as a diasporic
  
• "Responsibility," in which she examines the limits of "theory" upon the floodplains of Bangladesh
  
• "Megacity," where she reads cyberliteracy in Bangalore.

Other chapters focus on, among other things, Human Rights, and the turbulent "present" of the Caucasus.