Position without Identity: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is university professor and director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, poststructuralism, and globalization and has been a member of the Subaltern Studies Collective. Professor Spivak is active in rural literacy teacher training on the grassroots level in Aboriginal West Bengal. Among her publications are Of Grammatology (a translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida's De la grammmatologie), Imaginary Maps, Breast Stories, Old Women (translations with critical material of the fiction of Mahasweta Devi), In Other Worlds, The Post-Colonial Critic, Outside in the Teaching Machine, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, and Death of a Discipline. Her book Other Asias is forthcoming.

This conversation took place on the campus of the University of California, Irvine. It was the fourth Sunday of May, 2004, but the weather was not as warm or sunny as one might expect. To get away from noise and find a quiet and sheltered space for our conversation, which would be taped, we tried the Humanities Instructional Building. Professor Spivak had the key to an office that she borrowed, but did not have the key to the front door that locks the main office area. The only public and sheltered space available then was the restroom. We brought in two light plastic chairs from outside and made use of this space. It was fortunate for us that nobody else came in to use the restroom during our hour-long conversation.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Hairong has given me the proposal of the special issue and a number of questions related to it and I am fascinated by the proposal and I suggested that I start talking about the very first question in the proposal and then we'll go from there, and that question is: why do we need to think about "Asia" as a problematic today?

I have been asking myself this question now for some time, because I know that something has to be counterposed to the main outposts of power. On the other hand, I am deeply troubled by identity politics, so for me it cannot be India, it cannot be Bengal, as a political basis for a problematic, it cannot even be that fantasmatic phrase South Asia. On the other hand, in many ways, it cannot be, for me, Africa. I have to think Africa from a guest's position and I have to think Latin America from a guest's position. Asia can be for me a position without identity, not only because the continent itself is so regionalized, but also because by the accident of birth I am one of the claimants to its name. I thought I should articulate it as a position from which to view, yes? I'm being personal here. I will go further, but I think I have to begin here. I am a literary person, so the personal, not the personal as it relates to me, but the personal as it relates to any person, the person as a "shifter," is important for me. Therefore let me offer a narrative. After all, it is with narratives that a literary critic negotiates.

This narrative is of young schoolchildren in the forties and the fifties who wrote as they were taught that their country was independent, who wrote in their schoolbooks their names and their school, and then Calcutta, and then India, and then Asia, and then the World. What did they know about Asia? But they looked at the map. It was a cartographic position, without identity. They certainly could not imagine "Asia." I find this interesting in thinking about places in the world. If you move from the personal, you will see that it is a place for negotiation.

I want now to talk about Iraq and then about UNESCAP.

Iraq is a project for Asia. The war began in Afghanistan, which is West Asia. Iraq is also in West Asia. Pakistan is in the plan, which is Southwest Asia. Immediately...