Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Calcutta, Bengal Presidency, British India
Alma materUniversity of Calcutta
Cornell University
Girton College, Cambridge
Spouses
Talbot Spivak
​
(m. 1964⁠–⁠1977)​
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolContinental philosophy, postcolonialism, deconstruction
Main interests
Literary criticism, feminism, Marxism, postcolonialism
Notable ideas
Strategic essentialism, the Subaltern, the Other

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's 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 her translation of and introduction to Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie.[3][4] She has also translated many works of Mahasweta Devi into English, with separate critical notes on Devi's life and writing style, notably Imaginary Maps and Breast Stories.

Spivak was awarded the 2012

Republic of India.[8]

Although associated with postcolonialism, Spivak confirmed her separation from the discipline in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), a position she maintains in a 2021 essay titled "How the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies Thinks Colonialism Today", published by Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies.[9]

Life

Early life

Spivak was born Gayatri Chakravorty in

Presidency College, Kolkata under the University of Calcutta, from which she graduated in 1959.[10]

Spivak has been married twice—first to Talbot Spivak, from 1964 to 1977, and then to Basudev Chatterji.[11] She has no children.[11]

1960s and 1970s

In 1959, upon graduation, she secured employment as an English tutor for forty hours a week. Her MA thesis was on the representation of innocence in

M.H. Abrams. 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. Her dissertation was under the guidance of the program's first director, Paul de Man, titled Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats.[10] In 1963–1964, 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 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.)[citation needed
]

In the Fall of 1965, Spivak became an assistant professor in the English department of the 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 was her first book, written for young adults, Myself I Must Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats.[12]

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 book, and wrote a long translator's preface. 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.[13]

In 1974, at the University of Iowa, Spivak founded the MFA in Translation in the department of Comparative Literature.

visiting professorships and fellowships. In 1978, she joined the University of Texas at Austin
as professor of English and Comparative Literature.

1980s to present

In 1982, she was appointed as the Longstreet Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Emory University. In 1986, at the University of Pittsburgh, she became the first Mellon Professor of English. Here, she established the Cultural Studies program. From 1991, she was a member of faculty at Columbia University as Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, where, in 2007, she was made University Professor in the Humanities.

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 friend Lore Metzger, a survivor of the Third Reich, left her $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.

Work

Gayatri Spivak
Spivak speaking on “The Strength of Critique: Trajectories of Marxism–Feminism” at the Internationaler Kongress

Spivak rose to prominence with her translation of

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".[16] 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."[17]

"Can the Subaltern Speak?"

Her essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), established Spivak among the ranks of feminists who consider history, geography, and class when thinking about women. In "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak discusses the lack of an account of the

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. In all her work, Spivak's main effort has been to try to find ways of accessing the subjectivity of those who are being investigated. She is hailed[by whom?] 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 1980s, she was also hailed as a co-founder of

Hegel) not only tend to exclude the subaltern from their discussions, but actively prevent non-Europeans from occupying positions as fully human subjects.[19] In this work, Spivak launched the concept of "sanctioned ignorance" for the "reproducing and foreclosing of colonialist structures". 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. 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 and "can be powerfully displacing and disruptive."[21]

However, while others have built upon the idea of "strategic essentialism", Spivak has been unhappy with the ways the concept has been taken up and used. In interviews, she has disavowed the term, although she has not completely deserted the concept itself.[22][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", 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]

Apart from Derrida, Spivak has also translated the fiction of the Bengali author, Mahasweta Devi, the poetry of the 18-century Bengali poet Ramprasad Sen, and A Season in the Congo by Aimé Césaire, a poet, essayist, and statesman from Martinique. In 1997, she received a prize for translation into English from the Sahitya Akadami from the National Academy of Literature in India.[26]

Academic roles and honors

She has been a

honorary doctorate from Oberlin College,[27] and has been on the editorial board of academic journals such as Boundary 2. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007.[28] In March of that same year, 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 scholarship—grounded in deconstructivist literary theory—range 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 has served on the advisory board of numerous academic journals, including Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies published by

Université de Vincennes à Saint-Denis, Presidency University, Yale University, and 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, while in 2021 she was elected a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.[32]

Spivak has advised many significant post-colonial scholars. Professors Jenny Sharpe and Mark Sanders are among her former students.[19]: xxiii [33]

Criticism

Spivak has often been criticized for her cryptic prose.[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. She herself, unsurprisingly, reads the book's 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 don't she doesn't much care, are as much the overcodings of an academic coterie as a smack in the face for conventional scholarship.[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]

Avital Ronell controversy

In May 2018, Spivak signed a collective letter to New York University to defend Avital Ronell, a colleague of Spivak, against the charge of sexual abuse from NYU graduate student Nimrod Reitman. Spivak and the other signatories called the case a "legal nightmare" for Ronell and charged Reitman with conducting a "malicious campaign" against her. More specifically, the letter suggested that Ronell should be excused on the basis of the significance of her academic contributions. Many signatories were also concerned of the utilisation of feminist tools, like Title IX, to take down feminists.[38] Judith Butler, the chief signatory, subsequently apologized for certain aspects of the letter.[39][40] NYU ultimately found Ronell guilty of sexual harassment and suspended her for a year.

Publications

Academic books

Selected essays

Translations

In popular culture

Phire Esho, Chaka, a 1961 book of love poems by Binoy Majumdar, was addressed and dedicated to her.[41]

Her name appears in the lyrics of the

Hot Topic".[42]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Spivak, Gayatri." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2014.
  2. ^ "Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak". Department of English and Comparative Literature. Columbia University in the City of New York. Archived from the original on 11 January 2018. Retrieved 22 March 2016.
  3. ISBN 9780748643264. Archived
    from the original on 17 July 2022. Retrieved 17 October 2020.
  4. ISBN 978-0-7486-3973-1. Archived
    from the original on 7 April 2022. Retrieved 17 October 2020.
  5. ^ "The Kyoto Prize / Laureates / Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak". Inamori Foundation. Archived from the original 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.
  6. ^ "Columbia University Professor Gayatri Spivak Selected as 2012 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy". Kyoto Symposium Organization. Kyoto Prize USA. Archived from the original on 6 May 2016. Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  7. ^ "Professor Gayatri Spivak Selected as 2012 Kyoto Prize Laureate in Arts and Philosophy". Columbia News. Columbia University. Archived from the original on 21 June 2016. 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.
  8. ^ "Padma Awards Announced". Ministry of Home Affairs (India). 25 January 2013. Archived from the original on 19 November 2018. Retrieved 25 January 2013.
  9. ^ Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (11 November 2021). "How the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies Thinks Colonialism Today". Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies. 1 (1): 19–29.[non-primary source needed]
  10. ^
    ISBN 978-0415910019. Archived
    from the original on 4 January 2020. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
  11. ^ a b c Smith, Dinitia (9 February 2002). "Creating a Stir Wherever She Goes". The New York Times.
  12. ^ MYSELF MUST I REMAKE: The Life and Poetry of W. B. Yeats by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak | Kirkus Reviews. Archived from the original on 4 January 2020. Retrieved 10 March 2018.
  13. ^ "Gayatri Spivak on Derrida, the subaltern, and her life and work". e-flux conversations. Archived from the original on 10 March 2018. Retrieved 9 March 2018.
  14. ^ "Writing at Iowa | the Writing University". Archived from the original on 17 June 2019. Retrieved 19 March 2016.
  15. ISBN 9780415910019. Archived
    from the original on 4 January 2020. Retrieved 19 April 2016.
  16. ^ Lahiri, Bulan (6 February 2011). "Speaking to Spivak". The Hindu. Chennai, India. Archived from the original on 24 April 2013. Retrieved 7 February 2011.
  17. ^ Dinitia Smith, "Creating a Stir Wherever She Goes," Archived 1 May 2017 at the Wayback Machine New York Times (9 February 2002) B7.
  18. ^ Sharp, J. (2008). "Chapter 6, Can the Subaltern Speak?". Geographies of Postcolonialism. SAGE Publications.
  19. ^
    ISBN 978-0-674-17764-2.[page needed][non-primary source needed
    ]
  20. S2CID 166543159
    .
  21. doi:10.1215/10407391-1-2-77
    . Spivak's simultaneous critique and endorsement of Subaltern Studies's essentialism suggests that humanism can be activated in the service of the subaltern; in other words, when put into practice by the dispossessed themselves, essentialism can be powerfully displacing and disruptive.
  22. JSTOR 303357.[non-primary source needed
    ]
  23. ^ "Strategic Essentialism". Literary Theory and Criticism Notes. 9 April 2016. Archived from the original on 9 March 2018. Retrieved 9 March 2018.
  24. ^
    Project MUSE 171420.[non-primary source needed
    ]
  25. ^ Alexander, Edward (10 January 2003). "Evil educators defend the indefensible". Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original on 5 October 2012. Retrieved 6 July 2017.
  26. ^ "Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Awards" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 25 May 2019. Retrieved 25 May 2019.
  27. ^ Oberlin College Commencement 2011 – Oberlin College Archived 17 July 2022 at the Wayback Machine. Oberlin.edu. Retrieved on 21 June 2011.
  28. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Archived from the original on 17 May 2021. Retrieved 17 May 2021.
  29. ^ "differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies". Duke University Press. Archived from the original on 9 July 2019. Retrieved 21 August 2017.
  30. ^ "Masthead". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 22 August 2012. Archived from the original on 8 August 2019. Retrieved 21 August 2017.
  31. Project MUSE journal 321[verification needed
    ]
  32. ^ "The British Academy elects 84 new Fellows recognising outstanding achievement in the humanities and social sciences". The British Academy. 23 July 2021. Archived from the original on 23 July 2021. Retrieved 22 January 2022.
  33. ^ "Postcolonial Reading". Postmodern Culture. 10 (1). Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999. Archived from the original on 8 September 2019. Retrieved 31 March 2021.
  34. ^ Clarity Is King – Eric Adler on Postmodernists' Limpid Bursts Archived 22 August 2019 at the Wayback Machine. New Partisan. Retrieved on 22 August 2019.
  35. ^ Death sentences Archived 22 August 2019 at the Wayback Machine. New Statesman. Retrieved on 22 August 2019.
  36. ^ Terry Eagleton, "In the Gaudy Supermarket Archived 10 December 2006 at the Wayback Machine," London Review of Books (13 May 1999).
  37. ^ "letters". London Review of Books. 21 (13). 1 July 1999. Archived from the original on 8 October 2009. Retrieved 24 April 2006.
  38. ^ Greenberg, Zoe (13 August 2018). "What Happens to #MeToo when a Feminist is the Accused?". The New York Times.
  39. ^ Wang, Esther (17 August 2018). "What Are We to Make of the Case of Scholar Avital Ronell?". Jezebel. Archived from the original on 31 August 2018. Retrieved 31 August 2018.
  40. ^ "Judith Butler Explains Letter in Support of Avital Ronell". 20 August 2018. Archived from the original on 30 August 2018. Retrieved 31 August 2018.
  41. doi:10.22452/sare.vol54no2.2
    .
  42. ^ Oler, Tammy (31 October 2019). "57 Champions of Queer Feminism, All Name-Dropped in One Impossibly Catchy Song". Slate Magazine. Archived from the original on 29 November 2020. Retrieved 8 December 2020.

Further reading

External links
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