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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Bengali:


, born 24 February 1942) is an Indian scholar, literary Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
theorist, and feminist critic.[1] She is University Professor at
Columbia University, where she is a founding member of
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.[2]

Considered "one of the most influential postcolonial


intellectuals", Spivak is best known for her essay "Can the
Subaltern Speak?," and for her translation of and introduction to
Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie.[3] In 2012, Spivak was
awarded the 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."[4][5][6] In 2013, she received the Padma Bhushan, the
third highest civilian award given by the Republic of India.[7]

Contents Native name


Born 24 February 1942
1 Life Calcutta, British Raj
2 Work
Alma mater University of Calcutta
3 Works
3.1 Academic Cornell University
3.2 Literary Era Contemporary philosophy
4 See also
5 References Region Western Philosophy
6 Further reading School postcolonialism, deconstruction
7 External links
Main Literary criticism, feminism,
interests Marxism, postcolonialism

Life Notable
ideas
Strategic essentialism, the Subaltern,
the Other
Spivak was born Gayatri Chakravorty in Calcutta, India, to Influences
[8]
Pares Chandra and Sivani Chakravorty. Spivak's great
grandfather Pratap Chandra Majumdar had been Sri Ramakrishnas doctor. Her father Paresh Chandra Chakrabarti
was "initiated (given diksha)" by Sri Sarada Devi, and her mother Sivani Chakrabarti, by Swami Shivananda.[9]
After completing her secondary education at St. John's Diocesan Girls' Higher Secondary School, Spivak attended
Presidency College, Kolkata under the University of Calcutta, from which she graduated in 1959.[8] Spivak
attended Cornell University, where she completed her MA in English and was one of the first women to be elected
to membership in the Telluride House.[10] She continued to pursue her PhD in comparative literature from Cornell
while also teaching at the University of Iowa.[8] Her dissertation, advised by Paul de Man, was on W.B. Yeats and
titled Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats.[8]
In March 2007, Spivak became a University Professor at Columbia University, making her the first woman of
color to achieve the highest faculty rank in the University's 264-year history.[11][12] She has received numerous
honorary degrees from universities around the world.[2][11]

She also came first in Bengali literature among all the students at the university. In 1959 she was the National
Debating champion of India; she had already been placed as an honorary member of the West Bengal Legislative
Assembly by Justice Ajit Nath Ray in 1956 for her debating skills, equal in English and Bengali.

She lost her father in 1955, and in 1959, upon graduation, secured employment as an English tutor for forty hours a
week, in addition to working for her MA at the university. In 1961, she joined the graduate program in English at
Cornell University, travelling on money borrowed on a so-called life mortgage. In 1962, unable to secure
financial aid from the department of English, she transferred to Comparative Literature, a new program at Cornell,
under the guidance of its first Director, Paul de Man, with insufficient preparation in French and German. It is
interesting to note that it did not occur to her to declare her mother tongue as a foreign language.

At Cornell, she wrote her MA thesis on the representation of innocence in Wordsworth with M.H. Abrams. In
1963-64, she attended Girton College, Cambridge, as a research student under the supervision of Professor T.R.
Henn, writing on the representation of the stages of development of the lyric subject in the poetry of William
Butler Yeats. She presented a course in the summer of 1963 on Yeats and the Theme of Death at the Yeats
Summer School in Sligo, Ireland. (She returned there in 1987 to present Yeats position within post-coloniality.)

In the Fall of 1965, Spivak became an assistant professor in the department of English, University of Iowa. She
received tenure in 1970. She did not publish her doctoral dissertation, but decided to write a critical book on Yeats
that would be accessible to her undergraduate students without compromising her intellectual positions. The result
is her first book, written for young adults, Myself I Must Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats.

In 1967, on her regular attempts at self-improvement, Spivak purchased a book, by an author unknown to her,
entitled De la grammatologie. She decided to translate this brilliant book by an unknown author, insisting on
writing a long translators preface. This publication was immediately a success, and the Translators Preface
became popular across the world as an introduction to the philosophy of deconstruction launched by the author,
Jacques Derrida; whom Spivak met in 1971.

In 1974, at the University of Iowa, Spivak founded the MFA in Translation in the department of Comparative
Literature [1] (http://www.writinguniversity.org/content/writing-iowa). The following year, she became the
Director of the Program in Comparative Literature and was promoted to full professorship. In 1978, she was
National Humanities Professor at the University of Chicago. She received many subsequent residential visiting
professorships and fellowships, among them; from, for example, Wesleyan University, University of California,
Santa Cruz, Stanford University, Universit Paul Valry in Montpellier, France, University of Mainz, Germany,
Frankfurt University, Germany, Shelby Cullom Davis Center at Princeton University, Maharaja Sayajirao
University of Baroda in Vadodara (as Tagore Professor), Womens Section of University of Riyadh, Jawaharlal
Nehru University, New Delhi, Center for Studies in Social Science, Kolkata, Brown University, Cornell University,
University of Pennsylvania, University College, Galway, Ireland, University of California, Irvine, and the
Guggenheim.

In 1978, she moved to the University of Texas at Austin as professor of English and Comparative Literature. In
1982, she was appointed as the Longstreet Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Emory University.
In 1986, she was invited to the University of Pittsburgh as the first Mellon Professor of English. Here she
established the Cultural Studies program. In 1991, she was invited to Columbia University as Avalon Foundation
Professor in the Humanities. In 2007, she was made University Professor in the Humanities, the first woman of
color ever to be awarded this highly prestigious position in Columbias 260 years history. She remains the only
University Professor in the Humanities.
Spivak has received 11 honorary doctorates: University of Toronto, University of London, Oberlin College,
Universitat Rovira Virgili, Rabindra Bharati University, Universidad Nacional de San Martn, University of St
Andrews, Universit de Vincennes Saint-Denis, Presidency University, Yale University, University of Ghana-
Legon. In 2012, she became the only Indian recipient of the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in the category of
Arts and Philosophy. (This prize is considered by some to be equivalent to the Nobel Prize in fields unrecognized
by the Nobel.) In 2013, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the government of India.

Apart from Derrida, Spivak has also translated a good deal of the fiction of the Bengali author, Mahasweta Devi;
the poetry of the 18-century Bengali poet Ram Prashad Sen; and most recently A Season in the Congo by Aim
Csaire, the famed radical poet and essayist and statesman from Martiniquewith an introduction by Souleymane
Bachir Diagne. In 1997 she received a prize for translation into English from the Sahitya Akadamithe National
Academy of Literature in India.

Can the Subaltern Speak? an essay first delivered in 1983, has established Spivak among the ranks of feminists
who consider history, geography, and class in thinking woman. In all her work, Spivaks main effort has been to try
to find ways of accessing the subjectivity of those who are being investigated. She is hailed 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. In the
early 80s, she was also hailed as a co-founder of postcolonial theory, which she refused to accept fully, as has been
demonstrated in her book Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999),
which suggests that so-called postcolonial theory should be considered from the point of view of who uses it in
what interest. Spivaks other works are: In Other Worlds (1987), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), Death of
a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2008), and An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012). She is
currently at work on an annotated translation of the correspondence between Antonio Gramsci, and the Schucht
sisters his wife and sister-in-law- - while he was in prison; and a book on the great historian-sociologist W.E.B.
Du Bois.

Since 1986, Spivak has been engaged in teaching and training adults and children among the landless illiterates on
the border of West Bengal and Bihar/Jharkhand. 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. In 1997, her dear friend Professor Lore Metzger, a survivor of the Third Reich,
who was also firm in her criticism of the politics of the state of Israel, left Spivak $10,000 in her will, to help with
the work of rural education. 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. The group, on their own
initiative, is now attempting to bring about a farmers cooperative based on natural fertilizers and natural seedsa
mind-changing project against the exploitation of the poor that they have undertaken themselves, moved by
Spivaks repeated descriptions of the effects of chemical fertilizers and hybrid seeds upon the health of the
community.

Work
In "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Spivak discusses the lack of an account of the Sati practice, leading her to reflect on
whether the subaltern can even speak.[13] Spivak recounts how Sati appears in colonial archives.[14] Spivak
demonstrates that the Western academy has obscured subaltern experiences by assuming the transparency of its
scholarship. Spivak writes about the process, the focus on the Eurocentric Subject as they disavow the problem of
representation; and by invoking the Subject of Europe, these intellectuals constitute the subaltern Other of Europe
as anonymous and mute.

Spivak rose to prominence with her translation of Derrida's De la grammatologie, which included a translator's
introduction that has been described as "setting a new standard for self-reflexivity in prefaces."[15] After this, as a
member of the "Subaltern Studies Collective," she carried out a series of historical studies and literary critiques of
imperialism and international feminism. She has often referred to herself as a "practical Marxist-feminist-
deconstructionist."[12] Her predominant ethico-political concern has been for the space occupied by the subaltern,
especially subaltern women, both in discursive practices and in institutions of Western cultures. 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."[16] In "Can the Subaltern Speak?"[17]

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.

Spivak coined the term "strategic essentialism," which refers to a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of
social action. For example, women's groups have many different agendas that potentially make it difficult for
feminists to work together for common causes; "Strategic essentialism" allows for disparate groups to accept
temporarily an "essentialist" position that enables them able to act cohesively. However, while others have built
upon this idea of "strategic essentialism," Spivak has since retracted use of this term.

Spivak taught at several universities before arriving at Columbia in 1991. She has been a Guggenheim fellow, has
received numerous academic honours including an honorary doctorate from Oberlin College,[18] and has been on
the editorial board of academic journals such as boundary 2. In March 2007, Columbia University President Lee
Bollinger appointed Spivak University Professor, the institution's highest faculty rank. In a letter to the faculty, he
wrote,

Not only does her world-renowned scholarshipgrounded in deconstructivist literary theoryrange


widely from critiques of post-colonial discourse to feminism, Marxism, and globalization; her lifelong
search for fresh insights and understanding has transcended the traditional boundaries of discipline
while retaining the fire for new knowledge that is the hallmark of a great intellect.

Spivak's writing has received some criticism,[19] Including the suggestion that her work puts style ahead of
substance.[20] It has been argued in her defense, however, that this sort of criticism reveals an unwillingness to
substantively engage with her texts.[21] Judith Butler has noted that Spivak's supposedly complex language has, in
fact, resonated with and profoundly changed the thinking of "tens of thousands of activists and scholars."[22] On
the other hand, Terry Eagleton has lamented 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. She herself, unsurprisingly, reads the books broken-backed structure in just this way,
as an iconoclastic departure from accepted scholarly or critical practice. But the ellipses, the heavy-handed
jargon, the cavalier assumption that you know what she means, or that if you dont she doesnt much care, are as
much the overcodings of an academic coterie as a smack in the face for conventional scholarship."[23]

In speeches given and published since 2002, Spivak has addressed the issue of terrorism and suicide bombings.
With the aim of bringing an end to suicide bombings, she has explored and "tried to imagine what message [such
acts] might contain,"[24] ruminating that "suicidal resistance is a message inscribed in the body when no other
means will get through."[24] One critic has suggested that this sort of stylised language may serve to blur important
moral issues relating to terrorism.[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. It has not the banality of evil. It is informed by the stupidity of belief taken to extreme."[24]

Works
Academic

Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1974).
Of Grammatology (translation, with a critical introduction, of Derrida's text) (1976)
In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987).
Selected Subaltern Studies (edited with Ranajit Guha) (1988)
The Post-Colonial Critic Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990)
Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993).
The Spivak Reader (1995).
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999).
Death of a Discipline (2003).
Other Asias (2008).
An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012).
Readings (2014).

Literary

Imaginary Maps (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi) (1994)
Breast Stories (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi) (1997)
Old Women (translation with critical introduction of two stories by Mahasweta Devi) (1999)
Song for Kali: A Cycle (translation with introduction of story by Ramproshad Sen) (2000)
Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of the novel by Mahasweta Devi) (2002)
Red Thread (forthcoming)

See also
List of deconstructionists
Postcolonialism
Postcolonial feminism
Subaltern Studies
Comparative literature

References
1. "Spivak, Gayatri." Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago:
Encyclopdia Britannica, 2014.
2. "Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak" (http://english.columbia.edu/people/profile/409). Department of English and Comparative
Literature. Columbia University in the City of New York. Retrieved March 22, 2016.
3. Morton, Stephen (2010). Simons, Jon, ed. From Agamben To Zizek Contemporary Critical Theorists (https://books.googl
e.com.bd/books/about/From_Agamben_to_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek.html?id=b0wTTPRsPv8C&redir_esc=y). Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press. p. 210. ISBN 978-0-7486-3973-1.
4. "The Kyoto Prize / Laureates / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak" (https://web.archive.org/web/20160316234334/http://www.i
namori-f.or.jp/laureates/k28_c_gayatri/prf_e.html). Inamori Foundation. Inamori Foundation. Archived from the
original (http://www.inamori-f.or.jp/laureates/k28_c_gayatri/prf_e.html) on 16 March 2016. Retrieved 19 April 2016. "A
Critical Theorist and Educator Speaking for the Humanities Against Intellectual Colonialism in Relation to the
Globalized World."
5. "Columbia University Professor Gayatri Spivak Selected as 2012 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy" (http://k
yotoprize-us.org/columbia-university-professor-gayatri-spivak-selected-as-2012-kyoto-prize-laureate-in-arts-and-philoso
phy-2/). Kyoto Symposium Organization. Kyoto Prize USA. Retrieved 19 April 2016.
6. "Professor Gayatri Spivak Selected as 2012 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy" (http://news.columbia.edu/con
tent/professor-gayatri-spivak-selected-2012-kyoto-prize-laureate-arts-and-philosophy). Columbia News. Columbia
University. Retrieved 19 April 2016. "Known as the Nobel of the arts, the Kyoto Prize is an international award
presented annually to individuals who have contributed significantly to the scientific, cultural and spiritual betterment of
mankind in categories of advanced technology, basic sciences and arts and philosophy."
7. "Padma Awards Announced" (http://www.pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=91838). Ministry of Home Affairs
(India). 25 January 2013. Retrieved 25 January 2013.
8. Landry, Donna; MacLean, Gerald, eds. (1996). "Reading Spivak". The Spivak Reader (https://books.google.com/books?i
d=gCHcsaSi-sUC&pg=PT12). New York: Routledge. pp. 14. ISBN 0415910013. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
9. Das, Soumitra; Basu, Anasuya; Basu, Jayanta (17 June 2012). "Damning evidence of books" (http://www.telegraphindia.
com/1120617/jsp/calcutta/story_15619222.jsp#.Vxi2ytR97cd). The Telegraph. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
10. Sanders, Mark (2006). Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory. A&C Black. pp. 45. ISBN 9780826463180.
11. "Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Awarded Honorary Degree at Yale" (http://wgss.yale.edu/news/gayatri-chakravorty-spivak-
awarded-honorary-degree-yale). Yale University: Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Yale University. 29 May
2015. Retrieved 23 April 2016.
12. Lahiri, Bulan (6 February 2011). "Speaking to Spivak" (http://www.thehindu.com/books/in-conversation-speaking-to-spi
vak/article1159208.ece). The Hindu. Chennai, India. Retrieved 7 February 2011.
13. Sharp, J. (2008). "Chapter 6, Can the Subaltern Speak?". Geographies of Postcolonialism. SAGE Publications.
14. Spivak, Can the Sublatern, 214.
15. "Reading Spivak". The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (https://books.google.com/books?
id=gCHcsaSi-sUC&pg=PT12). Routledge. 1996. pp. 14.
16. Dinitia Smith, "Creating a Stir Wherever She Goes," (https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/09/arts/creating-a-stir-wherever
-she-goes.html) New York Times (9 February 2002) B7.
17. Spivak, Gayatri. "Can the subaltern speak?." Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (1988): 271313.
18. Oberlin College Commencement 2011 Oberlin College (http://www.oberlin.edu/commencement/). Oberlin.edu.
Retrieved on 21 June 2011.
19. Clarity Is King Eric Adler on Postmodernists' Limpid Bursts (http://www.newpartisan.com/home/clarity-is-king-eric-a
dler-on-postmodernists-limpid-bursts.html). New Partisan. Retrieved on 21 June 2011.
20. Death sentences (http://www.newstatesman.com/199908090039.html). New Statesman. Retrieved on 21 June 2011.
21. "letters" (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n12/letters.html). London Review of Books. 21 (12). 10 June 1999.
22. "letters" (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n13/letters.html). London Review of Books. 21 (13). 1 July 1999.
23. Terry Eagleton, "In the Gaudy Supermarket (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eagl01_.html)," London Review of Books (13
May 1999).
24. "Terror: A Speech After 9-11" (http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/boundary/v031/31.2spivak.html). boundary 2.
Duke University Press. 31 (2): 93. 2004.
25. Alexander, Edward (10 January 2003). "Evil educators defend the indefensible" (https://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/jpost/acce
ss/276661721.html?dids=276661721:276661721&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Jan+10%2C+2003&author=ED
WARD+ALEXANDER&pub=Jerusalem+Post&edition=&startpage=09.A&desc=Evil+educators+defend+the+indefensi
ble). Jerusalem Post.

Further reading
Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri; Landry, Donna; MacLean, Gerald M. (1996). The Spivak Reader: Selected
Works (https://books.google.com/books?id=gCHcsaSi-sUC&dq=). Routledge.
Spivak, Gayatri (1997). " "In a Word": interview". In Nicholson, Linda. The Second Wave: a Reader in
Feminist Theory. Ellen Rooney. New York: Routledge. pp. 356378. ISBN 9780415917612.
Milevska, Suzana (January 2005). "Resistance That Cannot be Recognised as Such: Interview with Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak". n.paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal. 15: 612.
Iuliano, Fiorenzo (2012). Altri mondi, altre parole. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak tra decostruzione e impegno
militante (in Italian). OmbreCorte. ISBN 9788897522362.

External links
Media related to Gayatri Spivak at Wikimedia Commons
"Righting Wrongs" (read full article) (http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AGayatri_C
hakravorty_Spivak%2C_Righting_Wrongs.pdf&page=2)
"'Woman' as Theatre" (http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id=2187&editorial_id=1071
6) in Radical Philosophy
"In the Gaudy Supermarket" (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n10/eagl01_.html) A critical review of A Critique
of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present by Terry Eagleton in the London
Review of Books, May 1999
"Exacting Solidarities" (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n13/letters.html) Letters responding to Eagleton's review
of Spivak by Judith Butler and others
Glossary of Key Terms in the Work of Spivak (http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Glossary.html)
MLA Journals: PMLA, Vol. 123, No. 1, January 2008 (http://www.mlajournals.org/toc/pmla/123/1)
MLA Journals: PMLA, Vol. 125, No. 4, October 2010 (http://www.mlajournals.org/toc/pmla/125/4)
"An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBzCwzvudv0)
on YouTube; Gayatri Spivak describes her 2012 collection from Harvard University Press
"Creating a Stir Wherever she goes" (https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/09/arts/creating-a-stir-wherever-she
-goes.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm) The New York Times, February 2002

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