Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor in the Humanities and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. A founding member of the historic Subaltern Studies Collective, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a central voice in postcolonial and globalization studies, with a strong influence as well on international feminism and poststructuralist thought. Her translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology introduced poststructuralism to the anglophone world. In Other Worlds gave this philosophical method the activist thrust that distinguishes Spivak by tuning deconstruction to feminist and Marxist critique, as in the classic essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” A sequence of reflections on the state of comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and the globe— A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Death of a Discipline, and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization —position Spivak as one of the foremost thinkers about the humanities in a global age. Taking these insights beyond the academy, Spivak implements the activism she theorizes in teacher training in 4 elementary schools among the landless illiterates in Western West Bengal. She is also well known for her literary translations from Bengali and French, and her reflections on the complexities of translation.