Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak b. 1942

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian-American literary theorist and philosopher, professor at Columbia University, and one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies. Her translation of and preface to Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology helped introduce deconstruction to the English-speaking world, and her landmark essay Can the Subaltern Speak? interrogated the conditions under which the voices of the most disenfranchised may, or may not, be heard within global academic discourse. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason and An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization have extended her concerns to philosophy, comparative literature, and humanities pedagogy under conditions of globalization.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was born at Calcutta in February 1942 into a middle-class Bengali family. She took her bachelor's in English at Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1959, was supported by a loan from a Bengali writers' fund to take her master's at Cornell, and completed her doctorate there in 1967 with a dissertation on W. B. Yeats supervised by Paul de Man. After teaching at the University of Iowa, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Pittsburgh, and Emory, she joined Columbia University in 1991, where since 2007 she has been University Professor and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.

Her 1976 translation of Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie, with a long preface, made her the principal Anglophone vector of deconstruction; her later books include In Other Worlds (1987), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), the long Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2008), An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), and Readings (2014); the 1988 essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' is among the most cited texts in the human sciences.

Spivak combines deconstruction with Marxist and feminist critique to read literature, history, and the global division of labour as a single field, insisted with the Subaltern Studies group that the voice of the colonised subject is structurally inaccessible to the metropolitan archive, and proposed 'strategic essentialism' and 'planetarity' as resources for a postcolonial criticism that has not abandoned political solidarity.