Introduction of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
By John Mowitt, Professor of English
Greetings. On behalf of the Beach family, the English department and the department of which I am chair, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, I welcome you to the 44th convening of the Beach Lecture in Literature at the University of Minnesota.
Tonight’s lecture will be given by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the Avalon Foundation Professor of Humanites, University Professor, and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.
As your ample presence here attests, our speaker in fact needs no introduction. However, having agreed to provide one, indulge me as I persist in the effort to make a virtue of the lack of necessity. I promise to be brief.
In preparing these remarks I first stumbled over the task of saving, and therefore naming, this file on my computer. My first thought: “Spivak, an Introduction.” No, too pedestrian. Besides, wrong genre. Second thought: the all purpose and ever ready, “Can the Subaltern Lecture?” No, too predictable. After briefly entertaining the impish and even slightly perverse, “Spivak at the Beach,” I settled for “TBA,” or in French, Titre à préciser. As our lecturer will surely recognize, a quiet, even withdrawn allusion to a lecture given by Jacques Derrida in 1979, a figure whose all too recent passing deserves acknowledgement, however muted, on this occasion. For it was through Gayatri Spivak’s introduction to her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology that I came to know of her and began to follow her extraordinary career.
This is a career now entering its fifth decade during which time she has published eight books (with three others on the way), three edited volumes, six translations, and over 200 articles and interviews. Her work has appeared in and/or been translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Bengali, Arabic, Hebrew and, less it slip past unmarked, English. She has lectured virtually around the world, and taught in some of the leading universities in the United States, Canada, Ireland, France, and Saudi Arabia. The quintessential comparatist, this is a woman who obviously has a great deal to say, and, just as important, a great many people to say it to. Tonight, happily, this includes us.
The question: why she has so much to say, is a matter better left between her and her gods. The other question: why she has so many people to say it to will in part be answered in what she has to say tonight. Speaking for my self this has everything to do with a subject upon which she has written: timing. Not fashion, but a commitment, a passion for—to put a complex matter glibly—thinking ahead. She is typically characterized as a deconstructive Marxist, feminist, post-colonialist, a polysyllabic mouthful that misdirects attention to the patently silly matter of how large one’s head would have to be to wear so many hats. Let me suggest instead that deconstruction, Marxism, feminism and post-colonialism actually serve as the conceptual flints she has long been striking to spark the fire that will illuminate the space and time of an intellectual who is at once public, organic and specific—in short, an intellectual aligned with the party of what in Death of a Discipline (her recent searching reflection on comparative literature) she calls “planetarity.” As this term implies, we are all—however unevenly—in this together, and when someone proposes to make a difference here and now, especially when that someone presents herself a warrior of the word, we pay attention. Gayatri Spivak is precisely this someone.
I will end on a personal note. One of our earliest meetings took place during my first year of graduate school at the annual meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association convened that year in Chicago. We met in the middle of the all too familiar bustling hotel lobby in the presence of my advisor, one of her former students. After greeting her and shaking her hand I sunk back in a nearby chair assuming the real conversation would proceed without me. I was wrong. In minutes she and I were deeply caught up in a conversation about, of all people, Nietzsche and Yeats. Somehow I mattered. Indeed, and this is my point, this exchange implanted in me the abiding delusion that I actually had something to say to the academic profession. For some, of course, this means that Gayatri Spivak has much to answer for, but for me I simply want publicly to acknowledge this debt.
Thus, without further ado, please join me in welcoming Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
March 7, 2007
Coffman Memorial Theater