The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Psychology Press, 1990 - History - 168 pages

Gayatri Spivak, one of our best known cultural and literary theorists, addresses a vast range of political questions with both pen and voice in this unique book. The Post-Colonial Critic brings together a selection of interviews and discussions in which she has taken part over the past five years; together they articulate some of the most compelling politico-theoretical issues of the present.
In these lively texts, students of Spivak's work will identify her unmistakeable voice as she speaks on questions of representation and self-representation, the politicization of deconstruction; the situations of post-colonial critics; pedagogical responsibility; and political strategies.

Contents

• Criticism Feminism and the Institution: 1
• The End of Politics?: 17
• Strategy Identity Writing: 35
• The Problem of Cultural Selfrepresentation: 50
• Questions of Multiculturalism: 59
• The Postcolonial Critic: 67
• Postmarked Calcutta India: 75
• Practical Politics of the Open End: 95
• The Intervention Interview: 113
• Interview with Radical Philosophy: 133
• Political Commitment and: 152

About the author

Born in Calcutta, Spivak attended the University of Calcutta and Cornell University, where she studied with Paul de Man and completed a Ph.D. in comparative literature (1967). She has since taught at a number of academic institutions worldwide, most recently at Columbia University. Her critical interests are wide-ranging: she has written on literature, film, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, historiography, psychoanalysis, colonial discourse and postcolonialism, translation, and pedagogy East and West. She argues forcefully that these disciplinary and theoretical categories must each be articulated in ways that do not "interrupt" each other, bringing them to "crisis." Spivak's own work is resistant to any easy categorization. Her first book, Myself I Must Remake: Life and Poetry of W. B. Yeats (1974), did not have the impact of her second publication, the 1976 translation and long foreword to deconstructive philosopher Jacques Derrida's (see Vol. 4) De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology), which established her as a theorist of note. Since then Spivak has concentrated on examining deconstruction and postcolonialism, and its implications for feminist and Marxist theory. She engages not so much the specifics of colonial rule as the forms that neocolonialism currently assumes, both in the intellectual exchanges of the First World academy and in the socioeconomic traffic between the industrialized and developing nations. In the last decade, Spivak has been associated with revisionist, post-Marxist historians who have sought to challenge the elitist presuppositions of South Asian history, whether colonial or nationalist. Her contributions include theoretical essays and translations of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi. Most recently, Spivak has published essays on translation and more translations of Mahasweta Devi's stories. She has also given a number of important interviews on political and theoretical issues, many of which have been collected in The Post-Colonial Critic (1990).

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues
• Author: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
• Editor: Sarah Harasym
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Psychology Press, 1990
• ISBN: 0415901707, 9780415901703
• Length: 168 pages
• Subjects: History / Social History; Literary Criticism / General; Literary Criticism / Semiotics & Theory; Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social; Social Science / Media Studies