Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, (born February 24 1942), is a postcolonial literary critic and theorist of Indian extraction. She is best-known for the article "Can the Subaltern Speak?", which is a founding text of postcolonialism, and also for her translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology . Spivak currently teaches at Columbia University, though she teaches abroad and travels frequently.
She was born Gayatri Chakravorty, in Calcutta, West Bengal, 24 February 1942, to a middle class family. She did her undergraduate in English at the University of Calcutta (1959), graduating with first class honours. After this she completed her Master's in English from Cornell University and then pursued her Ph.D. while teaching at University of Iowa. Her dissertation was on Yeats, directed by Paul de Man, titled .
It was her subsequent translation of Derrida's "Of Grammatology" which brought her to prominence, after which she carried out a series of historical studies and literary critiques of imperialism and international feminism. She has often referred to herself as a "Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist", seeing each of these fields as necessary but insufficient by themseleves but productive together. Her overriding ethico-political concern has been the tendency of institutional and cultural discourses/practices to exclude and marginalize the subaltern, especially women.
Spivak coined the term "strategic essentialism" which is critical for understanding how post-modernists can achieve a sort of temporary solidarity for the purpose of social action. For example, most feminists refuse to recognize "woman," or terms or concepts that portray woman as a collection of "essences." In other words, all women are individuals, and all attempts to make generalizations about them is wrong. This attitude makes it difficult for feminists to work for causes that may help fight oppression. "Strategic essentialism" allows feminists to temporarily accept an "essentialist" position about women specifically for the purpose of social action.
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