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| Professor Gayatri Spivak giving the plenary |
Questioning Identity
[Speech transcripted by this blogger]
Let me say two things which are really about me but not
really good for academics. I was the first and only woman of colour to have
been offered the University Professorship in its 258 years of history. I would
like to emphasise here on the depravitude of a world-class university that it
could find only one of us in so many years, and I am also the first Indian to
be offered the Kyoto Prize. I want to make a case to the prize-giving organizations
in the United States that, among the many who have received from the US, only
Gayatri Spivak in India could be able to receive this prize. Now, that is
incorrect.
I begin with the understanding that the ethical is the
unconditional call of all 'others’ and the democratic is a politics based on
training in judgment. Education and democratic habits of mind, relate most
importantly to primary education of the children of the largest sector of the
electorate, which in the case of our country is the millions of children of the
landless electorate.
The call of ‘the others’ asks the ethical subject to resist
identity. Identity is not going to go away. We can be very sure about it. We
can’t resist it because it is very strong. I love my identity because I am very
firmly placed in Bengali.
In 2000, When the University of Toronto was about to shut down
its Comparative Literature program, I went to talk to the President and it got
a lot of publicity on the internet also. I told him that it was “health care
for a culture”. You can never think of doing moral metrics by indulging in knowledge management tecniques! The true aim of the Humanities is to train the soul! And yes! you've got to do it slow! Not fast!
What then constitutes a healthy culture?
The condition and... [couldnt follow Ms. Spivak here - sorry about it]… It’s a culture, not a philanthropy. It means, to
suspend the interest of the self in the interest of the other. This morning, my
old friend tells me, “they have to be told”.
This is the exercise given to the imagination, where
literary reading is taught in a robust way. And this cuts across schools of
criticism and so, you need not be a structuralist to do it this way. As
some of you might know, the great divide in literary criticism came to the
United States in the critic Rene Wellek at the start of the II World War. This
was the big divide in literary criticism in the United States. In college, we
were given a good foregrounding in texts and in criticism. We were taught the
historical approach, and when we did that, we were able to construct the
original vision of the author. Later on, our imaginations were being trained to
suspend our imaginations in the interest of the other.
A healthy culture then is produced by the training of the
imagination by the humanities. We should thus be taught to get into a text by
suspending our interests. Here, we are talking about the institution. I have
actively looked for a distracted theory of the double bind. In literary
criticism, when you set out to look for something, you find it. Following this
rule, I now feel that a double bind is rather more than the suggestion that
having found it, you can play with it. The humanities should somehow learn to
serve the double binds.
Servants and women have been taught to fit into these
coercive gender structures. This morning I chided a girl for bringing me a
chair to sit on. That, I feel is coercive gender behavior. Gender is the last
word. Figure out the double binds there.
Looking homeward, I reminisce on my first professional
presentation at an institution of tertiary education in India. The double bind
here is between caste and class, necessarily also understood as race and class.
There are certain contradictions here between the preserved performatives of
indegeity and civilisationism which cannot even enter into the security of a
double bind.
Comparative literature perceived from a field of desires,
that thinks of globalization, that thinks of the experiences shared by the
first language learners among the overwhelming majority of infants, …
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