A New ‘Post-’ For Spivak
The noted academic is named University Professor
These are the biographical fragments that follow Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: she was born in Calcutta in 1942; she graduated from the University of Calcutta’s Presidency College at 17 and at the top of her class; she completed a dissertation on Yeats under the direction of the literary theorist Paul de Man at Cornell in 1961; she translated and wrote a celebrated preface to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology in 1974; her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) was met with praise and contempt for its suggestion that the “subaltern”—the socially dispossessed—cannot be heard by the socially privileged (including those in postcolonial studies speaking for the subaltern as one of its avatars); she came to Columbia in 1991, which was also around the time that she got involved with educational reform in India (rural literacy and teacher-training); she is the director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society and teaches comparative literature and the politics of culture (classes on modernism, literary criticism, feminist psychoanalysis, Derrida, and Gramsci, etc.); now, she is a University Professor. “The institution’s highest faculty rank,” as the Columbia Web site puts it. University Professors are those who “have made contributions to their fields that transcend national boundaries, assume international significance, and add importantly to the human store of knowledge.”
In fact, Spivak has never “transcended national boundaries” so much as questioned how those boundaries are written, and she has not quite “added to the human store of knowledge” so much as asked what counts as knowledge and who says so. It is only appropriate that one of the most vocal advocates of interdisciplinary learning in the University should now be able to teach in any of its departments—but Spivak has never needed permission from the administration to exceed her disciplinary borders.
Marco Roth, now one of the editors of the intellectual journal n+1, is a former student of Spivak’s. “Gayatri is a wonderful and underrated teacher,” he says. “She liked to puncture both academic hypocrisies and Ivy League students’ sense of entitlement.” He recalls “some rather painfully humiliating episodes in seminars” as “a highly demanding form of negative encouragement ... I got the sense that her teaching was a different way of playing out the conflicts that she deals with her in theoretical work—the relations between aesthetics and politics, one’s responsibility to literature, to the historical circumstances in which we find ourselves, to one’s own motives for action, to power ... She made me feel that a constant rage against complacency is necessary for any higher learning worthy of that name.”
While Roth appreciates Spivak’s harshness as a pedagogical tactic, and Spivak herself chalks it up to a reaction against students’ assumptions and lack of preparation, one also gets the sense that Spivak is simply a rigorous thinker in a time of anti-intellectualism and complacency. Spivak herself would not say that her harshness is justified, but her dissatisfaction bears the mark of a true “rage,” as Roth puts it, that what is “good” in this culture is what is comfortable and affirming of what one already knows.
Spivak is most often described to me as “brilliant” (and she has been described to me repeatedly: by way of full disclosure, I, like Roth, am a former student). Avital Ronell, a fellow member of the “Derrida family” (as Ronell puts it) and chair of the department of Germanic languages and literature at NYU, remembers meeting Spivak in 1989 in Paris. “She was just this gorgeous, brilliant goddess that everyone was drawn to. She was generous and kind and everything—just stunning and luminous.” Étienne Balibar, the French post-Marxist philosopher, calls her “the grande dame of contemporary critical thought,” and Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies in MEALAC, notes her “awe-inspiring aura.”
For all this otherworldly rhetoric, one might forget that Spivak has worked extremely hard. Bruce Robbins, a professor in Columbia’s department of English and comparative literature, recalls walking into his office (which had been Spivak’s office before she moved into the Heyman Center) to find her “copying out Chinese characters when it was already my desk”—she had needed a quiet place to study and could not find one. “Of course she is very brilliant,” Robbins says. “But if you want to play with the big boys, with the biggest boys, it’s not just a question of confidence but of earning that confidence, being backed up by learning languages deeply, knowing Kant and Hegel and Marx enough to quote chapter and verse.”
Spivak’s work is associated with “post-s”: post-structuralism, post-colonialism, post-Marxism. What is Spivak coming after? Spivak did not simply arrive on the intellectual scene after structuralism, colonialism, or Marxism, but ushered in the “post-” by exposing the limits of European thought, suggesting that their universal claims could only hold up so long as they excluded non-Europeans, women—“the other,” in theoryspeak. “In a significant way she begins to change the rules of the game,” Dabashi says. “Her particular contribution is when she speaks from a post-colonial perspective—a perspective missing from the European theoretical game—and then when we are enamored with a post-colonial perspective, she does a somersault and subjects the result to a feminist critique.” Much of Spivak’s work has not only been devoted to showing that a given “universal” stance is, in fact, “particular” to a certain time, place, and people, but also with challenging the fetishes and false sense of solidarity extended to the “others” who have interrupted the European “theoretical game.”
The most praised points of Spivak’s work are also the most criticized: where some see Spivak weaving a text of disparate parts to testify to the heterogeneity of her subject matter, others, like Terry Eagleton, see a “reluctan[ce] to be left out of any theoretical game in town.” Where some praise the difficulty of her prose as a challenge to lazy reading and to the “mastery” of a text, others disdain it as willfully obscure and elitist. Ania Loomba has criticized Spivak for depicting those under colonial rule as only colonized, without any identity beyond the scope of that rule, and Benita Parry has suggested that Spivak’s emphasis on the “epistemic” violence of imperialism and the shattering of the colonized subjectivity effaces the material violence of imperialism.
Spivak actively highlights the limits of her own theoretical frameworks—deconstructivism, post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism—but does not write off what is limited as “wrong.” Her critiques, incisive as they are, do not generally take the form of “I’m right, you’re wrong,” but tend more toward “we’re both right, and we’re both wrong.” As Spivak herself says, her “way of thinking and doing and living is not to be opposed to the thing.”
Spivak does not resist “opposition” on a philosophical basis—on the basis that opposing something only reinforces it—but on an ethical basis, where “it’s always too soon to be opposed to anything.” Spivak ushers in the “after,” the “post-,” and yet is always suspended in anticipation of a future that will make opposition impossible. Shuttling across the spaces in which she has made herself responsible—the university classrooms, villages in Bangladesh, lectures everywhere else—Spivak opens herself onto new threads, new interruptions, for her text. Within the embattled terrain of the university, one can only hope to imagine what Spivak will be weaving, and what will let itself be woven there.