Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Early life

Spivak was born on 24 February 1942 as Gayatri Chakravorty in Calcutta, India, into a Bengali Brahmin family.^[15][16] Her father was Pares Chandra Chakravorty, a doctor, and mother was Sivani Chakravorty, a charitable worker.^[17] Her great-great-grandfather was Biharilal Bhaduri, a physician advocating homeopathy and a close friend of the Bengali reformer Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar.^{[18][19][20][21]} After completing her secondary education at St. John's Diocesan Girls' Higher Secondary School, Spivak attended Presidency College, Kolkata, from which she graduated in 1959.^[17]

Spivak has been married twice—first to Talbot Spivak (1937–2006), a fellow Cornell University student, from 1964 to 1977, and then until 1992 to historian Basudev Chatterji.^[16] Talbot Spivak published an autobiographical novel centred on their early marriage, The Bride Wore the Traditional Gold, in 1972.^[22][23][24]

1960s and 1970s

In 1959, upon graduation from Presidency College, she secured full-time employment as an English tutor. In 1961, Spivak joined the graduate program in English at Cornell University in the United States, travelling on money borrowed on a so-called "life mortgage". Unable to secure financial aid from the department of English, she transferred to the new comparative literature program, although she had insufficient preparation in French and German. She completed her Master of Arts in 1962, studying under M. H. Abrams.^[25][26] In 1963–1964, she attended Girton College, Cambridge, as a research student under the supervision of T.R. Henn, writing on the representation of the stages of development of the lyric subject in the poetry of W. B. Yeats. She presented a course in the summer of 1963 on "Yeats and the Theme of Death" at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland.^{[citation needed]}

Spivak was appointed assistant professor at the University of Iowa in 1965. She co-founded the MFA in Translation in 1974 and became a full professor and director of the Comparative Literature Program a year later.^[27][28] While teaching at Iowa, she worked towards her PhD at Cornell.^[25] Her dissertation was under the guidance of the program's first director, Paul de Man, titled The Great Wheel: Stages in the Personality of Yeats's Lyric Speaker (1967); she later reworked it to be accessible for undergraduate students and published it as her first book, Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats (1974).^[17][29] While at Cornell, she served as the second female member of the Telluride Association.^[24] She taught at the University of Iowa until 1977.^[26]

In 1967, Spivak purchased De la grammatologie by Jacques Derrida, though she was unfamiliar with the author. She decided to translate the book, and wrote a translator's preface. This publication was a success, and the preface has since been used around the world as an introduction to the philosophy of deconstruction launched by Derrida, whom Spivak met in 1971.^[30]

In 1977–78, she was a National Humanities Fellow at the University of Chicago. Also in 1978, she joined the University of Texas at Austin as professor of English and comparative literature, teaching there until 1982.^[26]

1980s to present

In 1982, she was appointed as the Longstreet Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Emory University.^{[citation needed]} In 1986, at the University of Pittsburgh, she became the first Mellon Professor of English.^{[citation needed]} At Pittsburgh, she was the first director of the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies.^[31] In 1991, she joined the faculty at Columbia University as Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities;^[32] in 2007, she was made University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia.^[33]

Since 1986, Spivak has been engaged in teaching adults and children among the landless illiterate Dalit people living in western West Bengal.^[34] In 1997, her friend Lore Metzger, a survivor of Nazi Germany, left Spivak $10,000 in her will to help with the work of rural education.^[35] With this, Spivak established the Pares Chandra and Sivani Chakravorty Memorial Foundation for Rural Education,^[36] to which she contributed the majority of her Kyoto Prize.^[22]

In May 2018, Spivak signed a collective letter to New York University defending Avital Ronell against the charge of sexual abuse from NYU graduate student Nimrod Reitman. Spivak and the other signatories called the case a "legal nightmare" for Ronell and charged Reitman with conducting a "malicious campaign" against her. The letter also suggested that Ronell should be excused on the basis of the significance of her academic contributions. Many signatories were also concerned of the utilisation of feminist tools, like Title IX, to take down feminists.^[37] Judith Butler, the chief signatory, subsequently apologised for certain aspects of the letter.^[38][39] NYU ultimately found Ronell guilty of sexual harassment and suspended her for a year.^[40]

In May 2024, Spivak repeatedly corrected the pronunciation of W. E. B. Du Bois' name by a Dalit graduate student, Anshul Kumar, who asked her a question as part of a discussion at an event in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Kumar shared in a blog post about feeling humiliated and insulted during the incident.^[41] Spivak remarked in an interview that Anshul Kumar "had not identified himself as a Dalit."^[42] Dalit scholar Anilkumar Payyappilly Vijayan called the student's reaction "a strategy of counter-violence" against "the structural violence built into the very edifice of postcoloniality on which many dominant class intellectuals [like Spivak] have been comfortably placed."^[43]

"Can the Subaltern Speak?" and postcolonial theory

Her essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988), established Spivak among the ranks of feminists who consider history, geography, and class when thinking about women. In "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak discusses the lack of accounts of the Hindu practice of sati (the burning of widows), leading her to reflect on whether the subaltern can even speak.^[50] Spivak writes about the focus on the Eurocentric subject and how by invoking the subject of Europe, intellectuals constitute the subaltern "other" of Europe as anonymous and mute. In all her work, Spivak's main effort has been to try to find ways of accessing the subjectivity of those who are being investigated. She feminises and globalises the philosophy of deconstruction, considering the position of the subaltern.

In the early 1980s, she was also hailed as a co-founder of postcolonial theory, which she refused to accept fully. Her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, published in 1999, explores how major works of European metaphysics (e.g., Kant, Hegel) not only tend to exclude the subaltern from their discussions, but actively prevent non-Europeans from occupying positions as fully human subjects.^[51] In this work, Spivak launched the concept of "sanctioned ignorance" for the "reproducing and foreclosing of colonialist structures." This concept denotes a purposeful silencing through the "dismissing of a particular context as being irrelevant."^[52]

Spivak coined the term strategic essentialism, which refers to a temporary solidarity for the purpose of social action. For example, women's groups have many different agendas that potentially make it difficult for feminists to work together for common causes. Strategic essentialism allows for disparate groups to accept temporarily an essentialist position that enables them able to act cohesively and "can be powerfully displacing and disruptive."^[53] While others have built upon the idea of strategic essentialism, Spivak has been unhappy with the ways the concept has been taken up. In interviews, she has disavowed the term, although not completely the concept itself.^[54][55]

In speeches given and published since 2002, Spivak has addressed the issue of terrorism and suicide bombings. With the aim of bringing an end to suicide bombings, she has explored and "tried to imagine what message [such acts] might contain," ruminating that "suicidal resistance is a message inscribed in the body when no other means will get through."^[56] One critic has suggested that this sort of stylised language may serve to blur important moral issues relating to terrorism.^[57] However, Spivak stated in the same speech that "single coerced yet willed suicidal 'terror' is in excess of the destruction of dynastic temples and the violation of women, tenacious and powerfully residual. It has not the banality of evil. It is informed by the stupidity of belief taken to extreme."^[56]

In addition to Derrida, Spivak has also translated the fiction of the Bengali author Mahasweta Devi, the poetry of the 18-century Bengali poet Ramprasad Sen, and A Season in the Congo by Martinique writer Aimé Césaire. In 1997, she received a prize for translation into English from the Sahitya Akadami in India.^[58]

Academic roles and honours

She has been a Guggenheim Fellow.^[59] She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007.^[60]

Spivak serves on the editorial board of Boundary 2^[61] and Diaspora;^[62] on the advisory boards Janus Unbound,^[63] differences,^[64] and Signs;^[65] and as a consultant editor for Interventions.^[66]

Spivak has received honorary doctorates from the University of Toronto,^[67] University of London,^[5] Oberlin College,^[68] University of Rovira i Virgili,^[69] Rabindra Bharati University,^[27] Universidad Nacional de San Martín,^[5] University of St Andrews,^[70] Paris 8 University,^[71] Presidency University,^[5] Yale University,^[72] University of Ghana-Legon,^[27] and University of Chile.^[73]

In 2012, she received the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy,^[9] while in 2021 she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.^[74] In 2025, Spivak received the Holberg Prize.^[13]

Spivak has advised many significant post-colonial scholars. Jenny Sharpe and Mark Sanders are among her former students.^{[51]: xxiii [75]}

Books

• Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats. Crowell. 1974. ISBN 9780690001143.
• In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. Methuen. 1987. ISBN 9780415389563.
• Selected Subaltern Studies. Co-edited with Ranajit Guha. Oxford University Press. 1988. ISBN 9780195052893.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Edited by Sarah Harasym. Routledge. 1990. ISBN 9781134710850.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• Outside in the Teaching Machine. Routledge. 1993. ISBN 9780415904896.
• The Spivak Reader. Edited by Donna Landry and Gerald M. MacLean. Routledge. 1995. ISBN 9781135217129.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard University Press. 1999. ISBN 978-0-674-17764-2.
• Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press. 2003. ISBN 9780231503235.
• Conversations with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. With Swapan Chakravorty, Suzana Milevska, and Tani E. Barlow. Seagull Books. 2006. ISBN 9781905422289.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging. With Judith Butler. Seagull Books. 2007. ISBN 9781905422579.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• Other Asias. Wiley. 2008. ISBN 9781405102070.
• Nationalism and the Imagination. Seagull Books. 2010. ISBN 9780857423184.
• An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Harvard University Press. 2012. ISBN 9780674051836.
• Harlem. Photographs by Alice Attie. Seagull Books. 2012. ISBN 9780857420848.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• Readings. Seagull Books. 2014. ISBN 9780857422088.

Articles and book chapters

• "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism". Critical Inquiry. 12 (1). 1985. doi:10.1086/448328.
• "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives". History and Theory. 24 (3). 1985. doi:10.2307/2505169.
• ."Speculations on Reading Marx: After Reading Derrida". Post-Structuralism and the Question of History. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington, Robert Young (eds.). Cambridge University Press. 1987.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• "Can the Subaltern Speak?". Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.). Basingstoke: Macmillan. 1988.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• "Woman in Difference: Mahasweta Devi's 'Douloti the Bountiful'". Nationalisms and Sexuality. Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, Patricia Yaeger (eds.). Routledge: Routledge. 1992.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
• "Responsibility". Boundary 2. 21 (3). 1994. doi:10.2307/303600.
• "Ghostwriting". Diacritics. 25 (2): 65–84. 1995. doi:10.7916/D85M6HBR.
• "'Woman' as theatre: United Nations Conference on Women, Beijing 1995". Radical Philosophy (75). January–February 1996.
• "A Note on the New International". Parallax. 7 (3). 2001. doi:10.1080/13534640110064084.
• "Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular". Postcolonial Studies. 8 (4). 2006. doi:10.1080/13688790500375132.

Translations with critical introductions

• Derrida, Jacques (2016) [1967]. Of Grammatology. The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 9781421419954.
• Devi, Mahasweta (1995) [1993]. Imaginary Maps. Routledge. ISBN 9780415904636.
• Devi, Mahasweta (1997). Breast Stories. Seagull Books. ISBN 9788170461401.
• Mazumdar, Nirode; Sena, Rāmaprasāda (2000). Song for Kali: A Cycle. Seagull Books. ISBN 9788170461555.
• Devi, Mahasweta (2002) [1999]. Old Women. Seagull Books. ISBN 9788170461449.
• Devi, Mahasweta (2002) [1980]. Chotti Munda and His Arrow. Seagull Books. ISBN 9780857426772.
• Césaire, Aimé (2010) [1966]. A Season in the Congo. Seagull Books. ISBN 9781905422944.