Gayatri Spivak

8 Key excerpts on "Gayatri Spivak"

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  Critical Theorists and International Relations

  • Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams, Jenny Edkins, Nick Vaughan-Williams(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is as a postcolonial feminist critic that Spivak has most persistently challenged contemporary Western thought by showing how dominant institutional and cultural discourses and practices have consistently excluded and marginalized the subaltern, especially the subaltern woman. Her focus on subaltern women’s histories and her critique of the Subaltern project have radically challenged the way political identity has been conceptualized in much contemporary thought. Her emphasis on the subaltern’s ability to speak has particularly problematized notions of power, resistance, knowledge, memory and history in international relations theory. By moving deconstruction as a methodology from ethics to global economic and political relations she has also been able to reconceptualize traditional Marxist concepts. And by questioning the role of elite representation she has continually used her own role as an academic to challenge the academic profession. In particular she has been able to rethink feminist thought from the perspective of non-Western women’s lives and histories. These insights have been crucial for creating a global awareness of the local conditions that structure women’s oppression in different parts of the world. Critical debates on globalization, nationalism, identity politics, deconstruction, postcolonialism and gender in international relations theory have thus, more or less explicitly, been informed by much of Gayatri Spivak’s early ideas.

  Further reading

  Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1976) Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. This book features an extended ‘Translator’s preface’, that serves both as an introduction to Derrida and to Spivak herself.

  Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1987) (1998) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Methuen 1987 and Routledge 1998. This book consists of essays on Dante, Marx, Wordsworth and Mahasweta Devi. It is Spivak’s most well known book and contains important ideas on feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, the subaltern and the literary text. A key text.

  Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1988) ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. This is probably Spivak’s most famous essay. Here she combines the theoretical and political insights of Marxism, feminism and deconstruction to show how the subaltern woman is constructed and controlled in paradoxical ways. A key text.

  Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1990) The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues

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  Understanding Postcolonialism

  • Jane Hiddleston(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The work of many of the postcolonial thinkers discussed in this book has both ethical and political implications, yet most tend to privilege one approach over the other. Fanon and Sartre's militancy is underpinned by an ethical call for freedom and subjective self-invention, but their first objective is the decolonization of Algeria, whereas for thinkers such as Derrida and Bhabha it is the ethical awareness of the others intractability that initially provides the basis for political liberation. Moreover, one can detect in Glissant's evolving trajectory, and in Said's movement between Palestinian politics or Islam and literary criticism, a distinction between writing that is first and foremost political, and that which insists above all on an ethical or cultural agenda. It is Spivak, Mudimbe and Achille Mbembe, however, who engage most explicitly throughout their work both with Marxist political theory and with a form of ethical thinking derived from deconstruction. Particularly in the work of Spivak, this duality can lead to contradiction, since at times she calls for a renewed understanding of subaltern political agency while at others the subaltern is a more intractable figure signifying the resistance of the other to concrete forms of representation. Such contradictions are never fully resolved in Spivak's work, although she comes up with the notion of “strategic essentialism” in an effort to argue that specific claims for agency might rest on the assertion of an identity, but that identity does not necessarily acquire permanence or “truth”. Nevertheless, the eclecticism of Spivak, Mudimbe and Mbembe finally suggests that, while politics and ethics do indeed require different modes of thinking, these different modes are both necessary for an understanding of postcolonialism and, indeed, the challenge is to keep both in play without falling prey to the shortcomings associated with the programmatic use of either. These three thinkers are treated together here, then, because despite the differences in their focus – Mudimbe and Mbembe write specifically about colonial and postcolonial Africa – they all draw at once on Marxism and on poststructuralist ethics, and in so doing demonstrate the inevitable multivalency of postcolonial philosophical reflection.

  Gayatri Spivak

  Spivak grew up in Calcutta, where she took her undergraduate degree in English, and she went on to complete her graduate work at Cornell while also teaching at Iowa in the United States. She now teaches at Columbia University in New York, and although earlier in her career she was perhaps best known as the translator of Derrida's Of Grammatology

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  Reading Postcolonial Theory

  Key texts in context

  • Bibhash Choudhury(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge India

    (Publisher)

  8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: In Other Worlds Forms of engagement and cultures of reading Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak straddles many worlds in critical theory. Acts of definition, some of which have gained considerable currency in critical literature over the past several decades, have, it seems, transformed her name into a site that reflects not just the Spivak mind, but more crucially, these overtures have found moulds which project forms of critical engagement, each suggesting some of her preoccupations. Readers of Spivak have acknowledged, irrespective of how they are positioned as readers, her remarkable versatility, and as each foray of hers into critical space is prised open for purposes of scrutiny and critical insight, we see her pointers being drawn into structures that are sometimes considerably removed from the schemes in which they first emerged. The difficulty of reading Spivak stems, at one level, from this pull to which her texts are submitted to by enthusiastic readers; her wide range, and the outstanding variety of critical space that she covers through multiple agencies – interviews, translations, commentaries, essays, theoretical asides, books and critical discourses – this is borne out by the immense weight of her conceptual creativity and engagement with forms of reading. We can perhaps take a cue from Spivak herself in approaching a book like In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, a repository of writings that is not only genre-challenging in arrangement but path-breaking in the ways the theoretical pathways are carved and crafted out of settled conventions. The book is an assortment of essays, each written in contexts that were separated from each other, but still threaded through that stamp of creative criticism that we have now come to associate with her writings

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  Dalit Theology after Continental Philosophy

  • Y.T. Vinayaraj(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Unlike the other representatives of postcolonial theory, such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, Spivak pays more attention to the economic, cultural, and political facts of present postcolonial circumstances, and the international division of labor and its cultural and political consequences in which postcolonial nations are embedded. 2 Within the postcolonial framework, she directs her focus on the colonial imprints on the gendered subaltern who are most silenced within colonial and postcolonial institutional structures, textualities and practices. Thus, the Spivakian approach locates itself in a post-postcolonialist rhetorical location that is being termed as ‘postcoloniality.’ 3 Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason : Toward a History of the Vanishing Present explains her contentions with so-called postcolonial theory that has become “a thing of the past, an unproblematized past that grounds a homogenous ‘postcolonial identity and identitarianism.’” 4 The postcolonial theology that emerged in the mid-1990s began in the field of biblical studies through which the ancient imperial context of the biblical texts and their use in Western colonial adventures were exposed and interrogated. 5 The eruption of this postcolonial theology marked a new phase in the theological program and, as Vitor Westhelle comments, ‘it initiated the indisposition or inquietude toward the hegemonic canons of Western theology.’ 6 Spivakian notions of postcoloniality, subalternity, and planetarity have been appropriated by contemporary postcolonial theologians in order to address the colonial implications embodied in the formulation of Christian doctrines

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  Irigaray and Politics

  A Critical Introduction

  • Laura Roberts(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  108 5 Luce Irigaray with Gayatri Spivak This, then, might be the moment to remember that, even when – in class, in a lecture room – the other seems a collection of selves and nothing seems displaced or cracked, what ‘really happens’ remains radically uncertain, the risky detail of our craft . . . Can it be imagined how this mischief conducts traffic between women’s solidarity across two sides of imperialism? (Spivak 1993a: 146) Might it be productive to think through the still harder task of reconnecting Gayatri Spivak with Luce Irigaray, so that the latter’s consistent citation predominantly as object of postcolonial critique becomes more difficult to justify (Spivak, 1987; Irigaray, 1985)? (Hemmings 2005: 131) Luce Irigaray’s thinking through of intersubjectivity in terms of the relations between two sexuate subjects raises the question, as Gail Schwab suggests, of thinking through sexuate difference as a global model for ethics (Schwab 1998). In this chapter, I turn to Gayatri Spivak’s work in order to meditate further on the possibility of thinking through an Irigarayan-inspired ethics of sexuate difference in our con- temporary global contexts. How can we articulate a universal ethics of sexuate difference? What issues does this raise for structuring rela- tions between and among women? How do we communicate cross- culturally between traditions in a way that, as I argue in Chapter 6, Luce Irigaray attempts to do in Between East and West? With these questions in mind, this chapter examines how Spivak mobilises Iriga- ray’s work on sexuate difference to address women’s solidarity and what this suggests about the possibility of cross-cultural communica- tion between and among women. In particular, this chapter considers the way Spivak engages with – and goes beyond – Irigaray’s thinking of sexuate difference in two articles: ‘French Feminism in an Interna- tional Frame’ (1981) and ‘French Feminism Revisited’ (1993b).

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  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  In Other Words

  • Sangeeta Ray(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  I will return to Spivak’s reading of the Subaltern Studies Collective later in this chapter. For now, though, I want to concentrate on her various statements on Anglo-American feminism in general, as well as her contentious evocations of strategic essentialism. While the articulation of strategic essentialism occurred, initially, as an endorsement of the particular methodology adopted by the Subaltern Studies Collective, it lost its very particularity as an illustra-tion of a mode of transactional reading, becoming instead an indexical reference for coming to terms with the inevitable presence of essential-ism in various feminist discourses. Rather than a mode of reading, strategic essentialism became a mode of address, a buzz phrase denot-ing one’s situated subject position for engaging in a feminism that refused essentialism. Spivak herself has relied on such positionings, deliberately and often contradictorily insisting on the politics of naming, because she refuses the positioning of the postcolonial migrant academic as Third World, especially when it comes to gendered sub-jects engaged in academic feminism. In a 1989 interview, “Naming 110 Reading Woman, Reading Essence: Whither Gender? Gayatri Spivak,” she addresses the issue directly when she says: “[M]y work would not be an undermining of names but an acknowledge-ment of the vulnerability that there is nothing but naming … I think the historicizing of the inevitable production of names is a much more productive enterprise that a counter-name calling (85–6). Again and again, Spivak reminds us of how the center always needs its margins and when “certain peoples have been asked to cathect the margins” it sometimes forces them to see themselves as marginal. When that hap-pens, the “only strategic thing to do is to absolutely present oneself at the center”( PC , 40–1). One can already see how different Spivak’s idea of strategic essentialism is from how it currently registers in feminist discourse.

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  Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing

  • Kelly Oliver(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Gayatri Spivak, in an interview, urges us to shelve the question of essentialism. 4 Spivak says that she has “no time for essence/anti-essence,” while at the same time claiming to be “repelled by Kristeva's politics.” She “can't read her seriously anymore [ sic ]” because of Kristeva's “long-standing implicit sort of positivism”—her “naturalizing of the chora.” 5 What is it in Kristeva's politics that repels Spivak? Is she repelled according to the same schema within which she objects to the naturalizing of the chora ? Whatever naturalizing means, does it name anything different from the target of essentialist critiques? Is it certain that the outmoded functioning of the essentialist label as a taboo on the body has not left certain kinds of residues? Can the legacy of the essentialist critique be discerned in Spivak's objection to what she regards as Kristeva's naturalizing? The answers to such questions remain obscure so long as we fail to pay attention to the convoluted history of essentialism, and to the ways in which feminism itself, in different ways, is both implicated in essentialism, and generates various critiques of essentialism. We need to examine the ways in which the debate over essentialism is situated in terms of other motifs that have guided the development of feminism. We need to provide a his tory of the various ideological investments feminism has constructed for itself in legislating certain thinkers as essentialist and in attempting to maintain a place for itself outside that alleged essentialism

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  Subaltern Geographies

  • Mathew Coleman, Sapana Doshi, Tariq Jazeel, Stephen Legg(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of Georgia Press

    (Publisher)

  Priya Gopal argues, however, that by counter-posing the recovery of subaltern consciousness and the methods of deconstruction Spivak makes it difficult to engage with the “possibility that the subaltern may have a mediated … relationship” to consciousness and agency (2004, 149). Gopal argues that, as a result, Spivak’s approach evades the “work of examining the complicated engagement of selves, societies, bodies, histories, events, memories, interests and desires that goes into the making of both consciousness and action” (Gopal 2004, 148). The remainder of this chapter argues that a focus on the geographies of subaltern politics, particularly one that reasserts situated geographies of subaltern agency and trajectories, can help transcend the binary positions marked out by Spivak. Dissident Left Political Trajectories and the Emergence of Subaltern Studies Rajnarayan Chandavarkar argues that, despite the impact of The Making of the English Working Class, it was “only in the late 1970s that [Thompson’s] influence came to be more directly and tangibly registered in Indian historiography” (2000, 53). He notes that the influence of moral economy, and in particular the more open sense of class antagonism in essays like “Class Struggle without Class,” moved more successfully to a South Asian context than The Making itself. Thus he notes that “Thompson’s argument seemed to be that class struggle and the cultural and historical experience which it encompassed could be studied more extensively in societies where capitalism had manifested itself weakly and unevenly” (Chandavarkar 2000, 54). Thompson’s influence on Indian historical writing was facilitated by his election in the 1970s as president of the Indian History Congress

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