G C Spivak
Biographic Data
| ID | 10817 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G C Spivak |
| GIVEN NAMES | G C |
| FAMILY NAME | Spivak |
| SIGNATURE | SPIVAK G C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7514-4920 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 108 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1705 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 108 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Imperativer for å forestille oss fremtiden på nytt
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak mottok Holbergprisen i 2025. Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift trykker her hennes Holberg-forelesning, avholdt i Bergen 4. juni 2025
En una palabra. Entrevista . Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak con Ellen Rooney
In this interview, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revisits the debate between essentialism and anti-essentialism by reconsidering various theoretical frameworks she has engaged with over her intellectual journey. These frameworks include deconstruction, Marxism, and feminisms, alongside reflections on the role of philosophy. One key focus of her reflection is the concept of strategic essentialism in understanding social movements, diverging from her …
To My Questioners: Alphabetically Listed by Last Name
Emily Apter (EA): Death of a Discipline was and remains a brilliant title. The indefinite article “a” immediately makes us ask: Which discipline? Can we put in the one we want? Is the referent always-already understood to be Comp Lit? Does it signal para-disciplinarity (a term you have claimed to describe your own points of entry and cross-disciplinary work)? Or is the absent name—“Comparative Literature”—purposefully withheld because it cannot b…
Can the Subaltern Speak?
Can the Subaltern Speak? - 1
Poststructuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value
Presumed cultural identity often depends on a name. In Britain in July of 1988 a section of underclass ‘Asians’ was vigorously demanding to be recognized as different from underclass ‘Blacks’, basically because they felt that on account of their cultural attributes of mildness, thrift, domesticity and industriousness, they were, unlike the lazy and violent peoples of African origin, responsible and potentially upwardly mobile material. Today the …
Not Political Theory
Not political theory
Epistemic daring: An interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
An interview on subalternity (published in partnership with Éditions Amsterdam)
Etienne Balibar: Of course I would like to say what a pleasure it is for me to be here with our friends from Editions Amsterdam of the bookstore Le Merle Moqueur of Maison Payot represented by Gaya
Cultural pluralism
This article is an analysis of the ideological production of the idea of cultural pluralism. It points at the impossibility of inhabiting two or more civil societies at once. It points at the fact that culture alive cannot be accessed. It recommends attention to the ungeneralizable huge subaltern populations of the world that often also constitute an electorate. It recommends linguistic rather than cultural pluralism and a nurturing of the unders…
Europe? A Speech
My talk has two main points. One is a longstanding desire for continentality by the extreme northwestern edge of our continent, the island of Eurasia. It is a tiny edge and Imperial Europe is even a tiny edge of that one. The other point is a desire for a self, a mastership of interpellation. To be the master of "Hey you," which is what interpellation is. The one hailed thinks s/he is the right person. There is thus a complicity in interpellation…
From the Last Dancer
Edward W. Said died in 2003. Jacques Derrida died in 2004. Kofi Awoonor was killed in Westgate Mall last year. Now Stuart Hall is gone. And then Ernesto Laclau. A generation of intellectuals and activists, intellectual/activists, is disappearing. Academics worldwide could not think “Black Britain” before Stuart Hall. And, in Britain, the impact of cultural studies went beyond the confines of the academy. That quiet, gentle, witty, tenacious, lear…
Planetarity' (Box 4, Welt)
‘Planetarity,’ as an English word, was first used in a paper I presented at Stiftung-Dialogik in Zurich, December 16, 1997, entitled ‘Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet,’ and later printed as Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet/Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten, ed. Willi Goetschel, Vienna: Passagen, 1999. ‘Planetarity’ was figured as a word set apart from notions of the planetary, the planet, the earth, the world, the globe, globalizat…
Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital
Additional informationNotes on contributorsGayatri Chakravorty SpivakGayatri Chakravorty Spivak (PhD, Cornell University) is University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including 'Can the subaltern speak' (1988) and Du Bois and the General Strike (forthcoming); her academic work spans nineteenth- and twentieth-century l…
The 2012 Antipode Aag Lecture Scattered Speculations on Geography: Scattered Speculations on Geography
General Strike
This article is an account of the development of the concept of the general strike—as well as some of its modifications—primarily in Western Europe. The author encourages the continued rethinking of the concept even as it has seen varying expressions in practice throughout its development.Key Words: ChartismEpistemologyGeneral StrikeImperialismInternational Workingmen's Association Notes1. The Marxist-feminist writer Tillie Olsen reported the San…
An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization
The world’s most renowned critical theorist—who defined the field of postcolonial studies—has radically reoriented her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient, she argues that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy
Diaspora: Außerhalb in der Metropole?
In Other Worlds
Terror: Um Discurso Após O 11 De Setembro
Este artigo é uma reflexão em busca de respostas diante das inquietações e da necessidade de explicar criticamente, por intermédio do conhecimento das humanidades, a guerra estadunidense contra o terrorismo. Apesar da impossibilidade de uma resposta à guerra, não podemos permanecer em silêncio. Assim, duas perguntas precisam ser formuladas: "Quais são algumas das respostas já existentes? E: como responder diante da impossibilidade de oferecer uma…
Birangonas (War Heroines), Rehabilitation Center, Dhaka, Bangladesh [photograph]
Research Article| June 01 2012 Birangonas (War Heroines), Rehabilitation Center, Dhaka, Bangladesh [photograph] Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2012) 30 (2 (111)): 121. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-1541781 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Birangonas (War Heroines), Rehabilitation Cen…
Response
Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch
The following is a discussion between two distinguished comparative literature scholars, David Damrosch and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. This is a transcription of their dialogue, delivered orally before a large audience at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Conference in Vancouver, Canada, on 2 April. It has been lightly edited to remove the natural redundancy inherent to oral communication, to eliminate asides regarding technical aspects o…
Desert Island Texts
Kultur
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
In *A Critique of Postcolonial Reason*, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak examines the legacy of colonialism and its impact on contemporary cultural and political thought. She argues that Western intellectual traditions, even in their poststructuralist and deconstructive forms, often perpetuate colonial logics by marginalizing or misrepresenting subaltern voices. Spivak explores the complex relationship between power, knowledge, and representation, focu…
Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism
It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to…
Puede hablar el subalterno
Este artigo, uma tradução de "Can the Subaltern Speak?", examina os pressupostos epistemológicos da representação do subalterno. Spivak argumenta que o intelectual ocidental, mesmo com intenções progressistas, frequentemente reproduz estruturas de poder que silenciam as vozes subalternas. A autora analisa o caso de Sati, a prática indiana de autoimolação de viúvas, para ilustrar como as narrativas coloniais e pós-coloniais obscurecem a agência e …
The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives
Two years ago, when a conference with title and Its Others was proposed by Sociology of Literature Group at Essex, I made some pious remarks about an alternative title, namely, as an Other. It has since then seemed to me that proposed revision was ill-considered in at least two ways. First, it ignored fact that history and theory that such a conference would want to expose are precisely those of how Europe had consolidated itself as sovereign sub…
Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular
Subaltern is to popular as gender is to sex, class to poverty, state to nation. One word inclines to reasonableness, the other to cathexis - occupation through desire. 'Popular' divides between des
Righting Wrongs
Acting Bits/Identity Talk
In Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, Assia Djebar places herself with great autobiographers: Augustine, the Berber who wrote not only his theology but his Confessions in the language of Rome; and Ibn Khaldfin, son of a family that fled southern Arabia, who wrote not only his history but his Ta'arif[identity] in Arabic. Staging herself as an Algerian Muslim woman, she gives a fragmented version of the graph-ing of her bio in French. Identity as a w…
Translation as Culture
An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Spivak: I think now of the necessity of unlearning one's learning in a slightly different way from when I first said it. I understand all my work as being in a sort of stream of learning how to unlearn and what to unlearn, because my positions are growing and changing so much; since I don't really work from within an expertise, I have to really be on my feet learning new things all the time, and as I learn these new things, my positions change. I…
In a Word.Interview
Research Article| July 01 1989 In a Word. Interview Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of the recent In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ellen Rooney Ellen Rooney Ellen Rooney is an assistant professor of English at Brow…
Echo
Linguistics and Grammatology
Responsibility
Draupadi' by Mahasveta Devi
Rethinking Comparativism
In an era of globalization, Comparative Literature must think of all languages as equivalent, not in terms of translatability, but because any language(s) can be (a) first language(s) and thus activate the infant's metapsychological circuits, that reach out to meet lingual memory and provide the ingredients for ethical semiosis. Comparative Literature must try to reproduce this reflexivity through deep language learning accessing lingual memory. …
Imperialism and Sexual Difference
Feminist criticism can be a force in changing the discipline. To do so, however, it must recognize that it is complicitous with the institution within which it seeks its space. That slow labour might transform it from opposition to critique. Let me describe a certain area of this complicity in a theoretical and a historical way: My theoretical model is taken from Paul de Man. De Man suggests that a critical philosopher initially discovers that th…
Terror: A Speech After 9-11
Research Article| May 01 2004 Terror: A Speech After 9-11 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2004) 31 (2): 81–111. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-31-2-81 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Terror: A Speech After 9-11. boundary 2 1 May 2004; 31 (2): 81–111. doi: https…
Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital
Additional informationNotes on contributorsGayatri Chakravorty SpivakGayatri Chakravorty Spivak (PhD, Cornell University) is University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She is the author of numerous books and articles, including 'Can the subaltern speak' (1988) and Du Bois and the General Strike (forthcoming); her academic work spans nineteenth- and twentieth-century l…
Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and David Damrosch
The following is a discussion between two distinguished comparative literature scholars, David Damrosch and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. This is a transcription of their dialogue, delivered orally before a large audience at the 2011 American Comparative Literature Conference in Vancouver, Canada, on 2 April. It has been lightly edited to remove the natural redundancy inherent to oral communication, to eliminate asides regarding technical aspects o…
Neocolonialism and the Secret Agent of Knowledge
RY: This volume of the Oxford Literary Review is called Neo colonialism. Let us take the concept of neocolonialism first. Do you think it's a useful one? If so, for what? You have spoken of it as if it has a specific historical implication for the United States in the post-war period. The reference here would presumably be to particular instances of foreign policy, for example the Gulf War. Do you regard neo colonialism therefore as a way of th…
French Feminism in an International Frame
Planetarity' (Box 4, Welt)
‘Planetarity,’ as an English word, was first used in a paper I presented at Stiftung-Dialogik in Zurich, December 16, 1997, entitled ‘Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet,’ and later printed as Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet/Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten, ed. Willi Goetschel, Vienna: Passagen, 1999. ‘Planetarity’ was figured as a word set apart from notions of the planetary, the planet, the earth, the world, the globe, globalizat…
Questioned on Translation: Adrift
Public Culture - Volume 13, Number 1, Winter 2001
Feminism in Decolonization
Research Article| November 01 1991 Feminism in Decolonization Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She is the author of In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987) and of the forthcoming “Outside in the Teaching Machine” (New York: Routledge). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google d…
Woman in Difference: "Mahasweta Devi's "Douloti the Bountiful
ion of individual rights. Children are not written into mother right. Somni scrupulously distinguishes between my man's or husband's children and Latiya's children. Yet these women are absolutely committed, in the best sense of engagement, to the future of their children where they never do more than create a situation that only the child . . . can exceed.17 15. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1952), …
Linguistics and Grammatology
Glas-Piece: A Compte Rendu
The Letter as Cutting Edge
Anarchism Revisited: A New Philosophy
Feminism and critical theory
Revolutions That as Yet Have No Model: Derrida's Limited Inc
Finding Feminist Readings: Dante-Yeats
French Feminism in an International Frame
Draupadi' by Mahasveta Devi
The Politics of Interpretations
It is difficult to speak of a politics of interpretation without a working notion of ideology as larger than the concepts of individual consciousness and will. At its broadest implications this notion of ideology would undo the oppositions between determinism and free will and between conscious choice and unconscious reflex. Ideology in action is what a group takes to be natural and self-evident, that of which the group, as a group, must deny any…
Love Me, Love My Ombre, Elle
Deconstruction and Feminist Literary Theory
Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value
The "idealist" and the "materialist" are both exclusive predications. There have been attempts to question this exclusivist opposition, generally by way of a critique of the "idealist" predication of the subject: Nietzsche and Freud are the most spectacular European examples. Sometimes consciousness is analogized with labor-power as in the debates over intellectual and manual labor. Althusser's notion of "theoretical production" is the most contr…
The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives
Two years ago, when a conference with title and Its Others was proposed by Sociology of Literature Group at Essex, I made some pious remarks about an alternative title, namely, as an Other. It has since then seemed to me that proposed revision was ill-considered in at least two ways. First, it ignored fact that history and theory that such a conference would want to expose are precisely those of how Europe had consolidated itself as sovereign sub…
Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism
It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to…
Civilization folded back: Poems by Stanley Diamond
Imperialism and Sexual Difference
Feminist criticism can be a force in changing the discipline. To do so, however, it must recognize that it is complicitous with the institution within which it seeks its space. That slow labour might transform it from opposition to critique. Let me describe a certain area of this complicity in a theoretical and a historical way: My theoretical model is taken from Paul de Man. De Man suggests that a critical philosopher initially discovers that th…
The Miranda Complex: Colonialism and the Question of Feminist Reading
In praise of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid
Recent Writing on Interculturalism
Woman in Difference: "Mahasweta Devi's "Douloti the Bountiful
ion of individual rights. Children are not written into mother right. Somni scrupulously distinguishes between my man's or husband's children and Latiya's children. Yet these women are absolutely committed, in the best sense of engagement, to the future of their children where they never do more than create a situation that only the child . . . can exceed.17 15. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1952), …
In a Word.Interview
Research Article| July 01 1989 In a Word. Interview Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English at University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of the recent In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Ellen Rooney Ellen Rooney Ellen Rooney is an assistant professor of English at Brow…
Reading The Satanic Verses
(1990). Reading the Satanic Verses. Third Text: Vol. 4, ‘Beyond the Rushdie Affair’, pp. 41-60
Reading the Satanic Verses
(1990). Reading the Satanic Verses. Third Text: Vol. 4, ‘Beyond the Rushdie Affair’, pp. 41-60
The Making of Americans, the Teaching of English, and the Future of Culture Studies
WAS INTERESTED to find that, although "Constitutional Convention," "constitutional monarchy," and "Constitution of the United States" were three items listed under "What literate Americans know" in Professor E
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