Of her address, entitled Still hoping for a revolution, Spivak writes:
Now that the first wave of “revolution” against decrepit empires, leading to state capitalism and vanguardism, is showing its deep fault lines, I reopen the question of Marx’s real project and focus on holistic education into citizenship – as the conjuncture has moved from the central agency of the industrial proletariat – as a robust substitute for both vanguardism and techniques of pre-party formation.
This is particularly interesting for me because I have myself learned from many mistakes made since 1992, when I presented the T.B. Davie Memorial Lecture in Cape Town on “Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality.” The general response, as I heard it reported, was “we already do this.” Yet, in 2002, Joan Vincent included the piece in The Anthropology of Politics: A Reader in Ethnography, Theory, and Critique, commenting that I had been “prescient.” I therefore hope that my audience, which will be different, will also have learned from past “mistakes.”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a renowned theorist and professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University where she founded the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Spivak first came to prominence with her translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1976) and has since applied deconstructive readings to various theoretical engagements and textual analyses including feminism, Marxism, literary criticism and postcolonialism.
Her critical writings include Of Grammatology (1976), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic (1990), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1992), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), and Other Asias (2005).
The lecture, followed by an open question and answer session, will take place from 17:30 – 19:00 on Friday 22 July 2016 at Jameson Hall, University Avenue, University of Cape Town Upper Campus.
Refreshments will be served from 17:00. No booking is necessary and all are welcome.
For more information, contact the ICA office: +27 21 650 7156 or ica@uct.ac.za
Venue: Jameson Hall
Address: UCT Upper Campus, Cape Town, South Africa