An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780674072381
  9780674051836
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674257931
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

During the past twenty years, the world's most renowned critical theorist—the scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studies—has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting the globalized present, she turns elsewhere to make her central argument: that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy.

Spivak's unwillingness to sacrifice the ethical in the name of the aesthetic, or to sacrifice the aesthetic in grappling with the political, makes her task formidable. As she wrestles with these fraught relationships, she rewrites Friedrich Schiller's concept of play as double bind, reading Gregory Bateson with Gramsci as she negotiates Immanuel Kant, while in dialogue with her teacher Paul de Man. Among the concerns Spivak addresses is this: Are we ready to forfeit the wealth of the world's languages in the name of global communication? "Even a good globalization (the failed dream of socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues must challenge," Spivak writes. "The tower of Babel is our refuge."

In essays on theory, translation, Marxism, gender, and world literature, and on writers such as Assia Djebar, J. M. Coetzee, and Rabindranath Tagore, Spivak argues for the social urgency of the humanities and renews the case for literary studies, imprisoned in the corporate university. "Perhaps," she writes, "the literary can still do something."

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Burden of En glish
• Chapter 2. Who Claims Alterity?
• Chapter 3. How to Read a “Culturally Different” Book
• Chapter 4. The Double Bind Starts to Kick In
• Chapter 5. Culture: Situating Feminism
• Chapter 6. Teaching for the Times
• Chapter 7. Acting Bits/Identity Talk
• Chapter 8. Supplementing Marxism
• Chapter 9. What’s Left of Theory?
• Chapter 10. Echo
• Chapter 11. Translation as Culture
• Chapter 12. Translating into English
• Chapter 13. Nationalism and the Imagination
• Chapter 14. Resident Alien
• Chapter 15. Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching
• Chapter 16. Imperative to Re-imagine the Planet
• Chapter 17. Reading with Stuart Hall in “Pure” Literary Terms
• Chapter 18. Terror: A Speech after 9/11
• Chapter 19. Harlem
• Chapter 20. Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular
• Chapter 21. World Systems and the Creole
• Chapter 22. The Stakes of a World Literature
• Chapter 23. Rethinking Comparativism
• Chapter 24. Sign and Trace
• Chapter 25. Tracing the Skin of Day
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index