Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Quotes
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? The quotes below are attributed to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, organized by topic.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Knowledge
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Attributed to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:
“The role of the postcolonial intellectual is to learn how to learn from below.”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Love
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Attributed to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:
“An ethical relation to the other begins in the imagination.”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Politics
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Attributed to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:
“Can the subaltern speak?”
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Attributed to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:
“Strategic essentialism is a temporary, self-conscious use of identity for political purposes.”
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Time
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“Chakravorty-Spivak, 1991,quoted in Chakrabarti, D. K., 1997. Colonial Indology: Sociopolitics of the Ancient Indian Past. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd. page 5”
I am at the moment a Fellow in the History department at a famous US University. And there are historians of colonialism who know more about this stuff than I could know in two lifetimes. But all through this year, the thing that have fell most strongly and have said, to general embarrassment, is that it is almost as if we didn't exist....
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Truth
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Attributed to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak:
“Deconstruction is the experience of the impossible.”