WEB ONLY: Interview Transcript With Gayatri Spivak
Alissa Romanow: Some of your students would describe you as maternal in the classroom. What do you think of that?
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: If that is how I am perceived, I have to acknowledge the perception. I would certainly not want to be maternal, I don’t know what it is to be maternal. I myself should have thought that I was too harsh to be quite a mother figure, but on the other hand there is the bad mother.
AR: How does harshness function in your pedagogy?
GCS: I’m not particularly happy with…
Letter From the Editor—041207
Christopher Hitchens is no stranger to pointing the finger, as he so eloquently demonstrated to a hostile and heckling television audience last year. So it should come as little surprise that the controversial writer and pundit would come out so vociferously against “You.”
The essay, published this week for Slate, does not merely take aesthetic offense to that dreadful Time cover, though its onanistic patting on the back certainly manifests the offense. The ’80s “me” generation, argues Hitchens, has displaced into “you”: me, essentially, but with charitable pretensions of reciprocity. Hitchens traces the invidious pronoun through the…
General Schmeneral
You might have class with Adrienne Herrera, GS, but you might never know that she once sang with Fleetwood Mac, belly-danced professionally, or performed with a Mexican Elvis impersonator. Students in the School of General Studies are often enigmatic, but it took several sessions of an English seminar before I realized that Adrienne was quite a character. Once, discussing a production of Hamlet she had seen, she said that she felt unconvinced by the actor playing Hamlet. “I mean, did you really believe,” she said emphatically, “that he was, like, a melancholy Dane?” And when our class read Oscar…
Committing It to Heart
Muslim students dedicate their free time to memorizing the Qur'an
While some of us struggle to commit our Italian vocabulary lists to memory, a number of Muslims at Columbia are attempting to memorize the Qur’an. They are studying to become huffaz: Muslims who are able to recite the entirety of the Islamic holy book from memory.
Although not a requirement, becoming a hafiz (singular of huffaz) brings honor and spiritual rewards. “On the day of judgment, every verse we know will send us higher up in heaven,” Faisal Khan, CC ’09, says.
In the Muslim Students Alliance prayer room, Faisal Khan, Imran Khan, a graduate…
Hate Crime vs. Bias Incident
The technical jargon behind the violence
Hate is no stranger to Columbia. The now infamous Ruggles vandalism incident a little over a year ago, the homophobic messages found in East Campus last spring, and the inception of the student group Stop Hate on Columbia’s Campus, among other things, have made that more than clear.
But what constitutes a hate crime, or even a bias incident, has proven more difficult to discern. What is the difference between the two? When and how is someone convicted of a hate crime?
Strictly speaking, the police cannot arrest someone on hate crime charges—they can only…
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…
Living the Childhood Dream
Leading Man Jonathan Groff Tells About His Spring Awakening
Whether it be a ballerina, an astronaut, or a professional baseball player, our childhood musings about our grown-up selves typically do not align with our adult identities. En route to becoming a grown-up, pasts get traded for futures—and the old pointe shoe and baseball glove lie abandoned, a misbegotten dream.
But for Spring Awakening’s leading man, Jonathan Groff, his childhood dream is alive and well. He reaffirms it every night when he grabs his hand held microphone and takes the stage at the Eugene O’Neill Theater.
“That was the moment where I was like—I’ve got…
Point/Other Point: Bear or Lion?
Lion
Three of history’s most famous lions are Aslan, Mufasa, and the MGM lion—best known as the lion who roars before Droopy cartoons.
China’s Forbidden City, one of the 10 wealthiest cities in the world, contains many sculptures of lions. Many cultures worldwide believe that lions “consume” evil spirits by eating them.
The lion is the mascot of the Hufflepuff house in the best-selling Harry Potter series. Harry Potter is a member of this house, noted for its history of educating England’s bravest magic guys.
Friedrich Nietzsche—who later got syphilis—argued that lions, as one…
Point/Other Point: Bear or Lion?
Bear
Fact: Did you know that doctors have identified more than 23 types of bears, not including currently extinct types of bears? Now you know.
Polar bears can grow to over 10 feet long and weigh more than 1,300 pounds. This is the equivalent of a large white car with claws. Polar bears mainly eat seals.
According to the ancient Greeks, bears are the only animals to live in the stars. The story goes that a young maiden bewitched the god Apollo with her golden voice. He pursued her, but at the last minute, she sang…
“I Didn’t Count On Falling in Love”
President Bollinger thought he had everything all planned out
An intrepid reporter for The Eye recently discovered the text of President Bollinger’s planned commencement speech. Or maybe he already saw Bollinger give it because he just came back for the future. Or maybe robots! Space robots! Whatever. Here it is:
When the class of 2007 first set foot on campus four years ago, I thought I knew what to expect. Don’t let the youthful good looks and striking posture fool you—I’ve been around the being-president-of-a-major-university block a few times. It’s a nice block. There are trees on it. But in all the preparation, there was one…
A Lasting Monument to Change
The Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame and Museum rewards innovation while wading in a sea of controversy
On the banks of Lake Erie, a stately glass pyramid rises from the depths of the water, glowing with an ethereal veneer. Equal parts memorial and fortress, this holy site, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, designed by architectural guru I.M. Pei, is quite literally a time capsule, documenting the birth and subsequent evolution of rock and roll.
Just what rock ’n’ roll is has long been considered a matter of subjectivity. “Rock ’n’ Roll is a river of music that has absorbed many streams: rhythm and blues, jazz, rag time, cowboy songs, country…
A Soundrack to Wanderlust
Freakfolk artist brings new level of productivity to vagabond lifestyle
Boy gets girl. Boy becomes disillusioned. Boy loses girl and embarks on a cross-country journey, not really sure what answer he is looking for. (Run Forrest, run)
But this isn’t a Tom Hanks movie—it isn’t even a teen summer romance: it is the story of Paleo, aka David Strackany, a singer-songwriter who has been inconspicuously traveling the country for the past year.
And unlike Forrest, he actually did set out with a solid goal—to write one song a day for an entire year. What began as a simple concept quickly developed into an intoxicating project,…
Look Smart
How professors bring their personal style to the workplace
The runways of fashion and the realm of academia are often considered poles of the intellectual spectrum: the former is condemned as effeminate and superficial, while the latter is treated with distance for its unflinching seriousness.
Professors in particular have succumbed to widespread stereotypes: the tweed, the Oxfords, the thick glasses, the Marx-style beard. Ph.D. candidacy is a heady—and expensive—process, and one that is not above competitions of seriousness. And of course it would be a shame if all a student remembered from his four undergraduate years was his professor’s towering pair of Christian Louboutins.
…
Front of the Queue
A Tax Day Reminder from Accountant Will Thompson
As an accountant in the West Village, Will Thompson, CPA, probably won’t get a day off until taxes are due on April 17. But afterwards, he’s looking forward to catching up on what he missed during his busiest working time. Here are the next five movies he plans to see:
The Departed—“I’ve been meaning to see it since it won all those Oscars.”
Meet the Robinsons—“I’ll probably take my sons to that animated one with the T. rex.”
Wall Street—“Gordon Gekko isn’t the best role model, but it’s a good movie about money.”…
DVD Double Feature
Bobby and The Graduate
With graduation quickly approaching, the looming specter of life in the real world leaves most of us feeling depressed and anxious. Allow yourself to be transported back to a simpler, more exciting time—the ’60s—because nothing sends the blues packing quite like a dose of the Age of Aquarius. Newly released on DVD is Emilio Estevez’s stylized interpretation of the era, Bobby, which is filled to the brim with almost every nostalgic point of interest imaginable and cameos by most of Hollywood. After you‘ve watched your favorite stars romp about in this modern recreation, it’s time to watch Mike Nichols’…