Not Really a Properly Intellectual Response: An Interview with Gayatri Spivak

The excess of the new social movements is what I work with.

—Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, teaches English and the politics of culture. She was educated at the University of Calcutta and came to Cornell University in 1961 to finish doctoral work. Her books are Myself Must I Remake (1974), In Other Worlds (1987), The Post-Colonial Critic (1988), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), and Death of a Discipline (2003). Red Thread is in press. She has translated Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology (1976) and Mahasweta Devi's Imaginary Maps (1994), Breast Stories (1997), Old Women (1999), and Chotti Munda and His Arrow (2002). She is active in the international women's movement, the struggle for ecological justice, and rural literacy. Her influence has been felt in art and architecture, law, and political science, in curatorial practices here and abroad. Her work has been translated into all the major European and Asian languages. Her focus has remained education in the humanities as the best lasting weapon to combat imperialism.

Tani E. Barlow: You were analyzing your thinking about 9/11.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: My problem is that I am unable to give a general response. It is a pity in all of this postnational talk that this cruel nationalism—taking pleasure in the death of others—begins with the shock of the death of one's own. It is a cause for great sorrow that this event brings out the worst kind of "herd mentality"—to quote Nietzsche—in human beings, and it falls under nationalism. Bush's spin doctors have told him to say that Islam is a wonderful religion and the hijackers hijacked it. Therefore one must now endlessly be nice to Arab Americans even as there is relentless racial profiling and undercover incarceration. Feminism is showing its problems too. Why are members of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan suddenly taken to be prophets? We don't know much about their values. They are a good group. They haven't appeared all of a sudden, but they have only now been picked up because the Taliban hate their women. But people know little about their specific problems. They also cannot give them real informed sympathy because they are taken as a kind of fetish that will justify support for the war, although they themselves oppose it. On the other side, you have the picture that CNN showed of U.S. women on aircraft carriers who are actually chief programmers, wielding sextants and so on. And the guy even said that there can be no more sexist jokes about women drivers. There is this wonderful blond girl. Midwestern-looking, freckled cheeks, saying, "If I can drive an aircraft carrier, I can drive a truck." These are issues I wrote about in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" twenty years ago.

Who could question that these are terrible things? You would be foolish to say there was any justification for burning widows or stoning adulteresses. On the other hand, this sudden exposure of visible violence by people, justifying war, killing Afghans, does nothing to guarantee that the subaltern women's epistemic production will be one iota altered. I am interested not only in the fact that men do harm to women, but the fact that when it comes to the subaltern woman, nobody is interested in the patience that is required, in order to make her not acquiesce when they arrive at the point of visible violence.

TEB: I will begin with the second question, which introduces you to the title of the special issue for which you are being interviewed: "Intellectuals and Social Movements." Would you begin your response, please...