Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born 24 February 1942) is an Indian scholar, literary theorist, and feminist critic.

She is a University Professor at Columbia University and a founding member of the establishment's Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Considered one of the most influential postcolonial intellectuals, Spivak is best known for her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"

and her translation of and introduction to Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie.

She has also translated many works of Mahasweta Devi into English, with separate critical notes on Devi's life and writing style, notably Imaginary Maps and Breast Stories.

After completing her secondary education at St. John's Diocesan Girls' Higher Secondary School, Spivak attended Presidency College, Kolkata under the University of Calcutta, from which she graduated in 1959.

In 1959, upon graduation, she secured employment as an English tutor for forty hours a week.

Her MA thesis was on the representation of innocence in Wordsworth with M.H. Abrams.

In 1961, Spivak joined the graduate program in English at Cornell University in the United States, traveling on money borrowed on a so-called "life mortgage".

In 1962, unable to secure financial aid from the department of English, she transferred to a new program called Comparative Literature, although she had insufficient preparation in French and German.

Her dissertation was under the guidance of the program's first director, Paul de Man, titled Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats.

In 1963–1964, she attended Girton College, Cambridge, as a research student under the supervision of Professor T.R. Henn, writing on the representation of the stages of development of the lyric subject in the poetry of Yeats.

She presented a course in the summer of 1963 on "Yeats and the Theme of Death" at the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland.

Spivak has been married twice—first to Talbot Spivak, from 1964 to 1977, and then to Basudev Chatterji.

She has no children.

In the Fall of 1965, Spivak became an assistant professor in the English department of the University of Iowa.

In 1967, on her regular attempts at self-improvement, Spivak purchased a book, by an author unknown to her, entitled De la grammatologie.

She decided to translate this book, and wrote a long translator's preface.

She received tenure in 1970.

She did not publish her doctoral dissertation, but decided to write a critical book on Yeats that would be accessible to her undergraduate students without compromising her intellectual positions.

The result was her first book, written for young adults, Myself I Must Remake: The Life and Poetry of W.B. Yeats.

This publication was immediately a success, and the "Translator's Preface" began to be used around the world as an introduction to the philosophy of deconstruction launched by the author, Jacques Derrida, whom Spivak met in 1971.

In 1974, at the University of Iowa, Spivak founded the MFA in Translation in the department of Comparative Literature.

The following year, she became the Director of the Program in Comparative Literature and was promoted to a full professorship.

In 1978, she was National Humanities Professor at the University of Chicago.

She received many subsequent residential visiting professorships and fellowships.

In 1978, she joined the University of Texas at Austin as professor of English and Comparative Literature.

In 1982, she was appointed as the Longstreet Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Emory University.

In 1986, at the University of Pittsburgh, she became the first Mellon Professor of English.

Here, she established the Cultural Studies program.

Since 1986, Spivak has been engaged in teaching and training adults and children among the landless illiterates on the border of West Bengal and Bihar/Jharkhand.

This sustained attempt to access the epistemologies damaged by the millennial oppression of the caste system has allowed her to understand the situation of globality as well as the limits of high theory more clearly.

(She returned there in 1987 to present Yeats' position within post-coloniality.)

From 1991, she was a member of faculty at Columbia University as Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities, where, in 2007, she was made University Professor in the Humanities.

In 1997, her friend Lore Metzger, a survivor of the Third Reich, left her $10,000 in her will, to help with the work of rural education.

With this, Spivak established the Pares Chandra and Sivani Chakravorty Memorial Foundation for Rural Education; to which she contributed the majority of her Kyoto Prize.

Although associated with postcolonialism, Spivak confirmed her separation from the discipline in her book A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), a position she maintains in a 2021 essay titled "How the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies Thinks Colonialism Today", published by Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies.

Spivak was born Gayatri Chakravorty in Calcutta, India, to Pares Chandra and Sivani Chakravorty.

Spivak was awarded the 2012 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for being "a critical theorist and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in relation to the globalized world."

In 2013, she received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award given by the Republic of India.