Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born February 24 1942) is a literary critic and theorist. She is best-known for the article "Can the Subaltern Speak?", which is considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and also for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. Spivak currently teaches at Columbia University, though she is a popular speaker, invited to lecture around the world.

Spivak was born Gayatri Chakravorty, in Calcutta, India, 24 February 1942, to a middle class family. She received an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Calcutta (1959), graduating with first class honours. After this, she completed her Master's in English from Cornell University, and then pursued her Ph.D. while teaching at University of Iowa. Her dissertation was on W.B. Yeats, directed by Paul de Man, titled Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats. At Cornell, she was the first woman elected to membership in the Telluride Association.

It was her subsequent translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology which brought her to prominence, after which she carried out a series of historical studies (as a member of the "Subaltern Studies Collective") and literary critiques of imperialism and international feminism. She has often referred to herself as a "Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist", seeing each of these fields as necessary but insufficient by themselves, yet productive together. Her overriding ethico-political concern has been the tendency of institutional and cultural discourses/practices to exclude and marginalize the subaltern, especially subaltern women.

Her recent work, 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, the attitude that women's groups have many different agendas makes it difficult for feminists to work for common causes. "Strategic essentialism" is about the need to temporarily accept an "essentialist" position in order to be able to act.

Books

Academic

Myself, I Must Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1974).
Of Grammatology (translation, with 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 (1990)
Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993).
The Spivak Reader (1995).
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999).
Death of a Discipline (2005).
Other Asias (2007).

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)

External Links

["In the Gaudy Supermarket"] - 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"] - Letters responding to Eagleton's review of Spivak by Judith Butler and others
[Glossary of Key Terms in the Work of Spivak]

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