Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Relevance for Communication Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raka Shome
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Communication Studies ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
The West ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Radical Alterity ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Spivak is one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries. Although a literary critic, her work can be seen as philosophical as it is concerned with how to develop a transnational ethical responsibility to the radical “other,” who cannot be accessed by our discursive (and thus institutionalized) regimes of knowledge. Regarded as a leading postcolonial theorist, Spivak is probably best seen as a postcolonial Marxist feminist theorist, although she herself does not feel comfortable with rigid academic labeling. Her work is significantly influenced by the deconstructionist impulses of Jacques Derrida. Additionally, the influence of Gramsci and Marx is prominent in her thinking. Spivak’s work has consistently called attention to the logics of imperialism that inform texts in the West, including in Western feminist scholarship. Relatedly, she has also written significantly on how the nation, in attempting to represent the entirety of a population, cannot access otherness or radical alterity. This is best seen in her work on the subaltern and in her intervention into the famous Indian group of Subaltern Studies scholars. Other related foci of her work have been on comprehending translation as a transnational cultural politics, and what it means to develop a transnational ethics of literacy.

Beneath Improvisation

2019 ◽  
pp. 759-780
Author(s):  
Vijay Iyer
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
The West ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Critical Model

Improvisation has been construed as Western art music’s Other. This chapter urges music theorists to take the consequences of this configuration seriously. The decision to exclude improvisation as inherently unstable is not neutral, but is bound up with the endemic racism that has characterized social relations in the West and that is being brought to the fore in Black Lives Matter and other recent social and political movements. Traditional music theory is not immune from such institutional racism—its insistence on normative musical behaviors is founded on the (white) phallogocentrism of Western thought. Does the resurgent academic interest in improvisation offer a way out? No, at least not as it is currently studied. Even an apparently impartial approach such as cognitive science is not neutral; perception is colored by race. To get anywhere, this chapter argues, improvisation studies must take difference seriously. Important impetus for a more inclusive critical model comes from such fields as Black studies, Women’s studies, subaltern studies, queer studies, and disability studies.

scholarly journals Interrogating Western Modernity: Postcolonial Reflections on Occidental Claims and Action

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Kerner
Keyword(s):  
Western Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
The Way

This paper deals with the way in which European modernity, and the West more generally, are reflected upon in the field of post- and decolonial theories, which generally question those representations of the European/Western tradition of thought and politics that only focus on their positive aspects, but differ greatly with regard to the way in which they frame and formulate their critique of this tradition. I discuss three major positions in this field. They are characterized by the rejection of Western modernity (Walter Mignolo), by a deconstruction of core text and principles of the European Enlightenment (Gayatri Spivak), and by attempts at a renewal and hence a radicalization of some of its core normative claims, particularly humanism (Achille Mbembe).

scholarly journals Relocating Colonial Women in Resistance: An Interpretation of Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh and Chaturanga

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
T. K. Krishnapriya ◽  
◽  
Padma Rani ◽  
Bashabi Fraser ◽  
◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
New World ◽  
Social Dilemma ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
The West ◽  
The Social ◽  
Marginalized Women ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Third World Women

The Colonial Bengal of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a place of contradictions. For instance, despite certain evident advancements in the resolution of the women’s question, some of the emancipatory attempts of the period marked a rather dubious account of women’s liberation as patriarchal underpinnings hegemonized the efforts. Amid this complex backdrop, the colonial women’s position is further jeopardized by the western feminist scholarship that contrives colonial third world women as perennial victims and beneficiaries of emancipatory actions from the West. The paper attempts to relocate the colonial women and their resistance by negotiating the fissures in their construction. This study, informed by bell hooks’ (1990) postulations on margin and resistance, simultaneously seeks to form a bridge between the experiences of marginalized women beyond borders. Rabindranath Tagore’s Nastanirh (1901) and Chaturanga (1916) are chosen for close textual reading to examine the experiences of colonial women. The author’s women protagonists often embody the social dilemma of the period. Tagore’s Damini and Charu exist in the margin of resistance whilst Nanibala occupies the margin of deprivation. Significantly, Charu and Damini traverse the precarious “profound edges” of the margin to imagine a “new world” free of subjugation. Thus, the resistance offered by these women subverts the predominant conceptions of victimhood of colonial women, and it enables them to be posited as active agents.

From the 1880s to 1945

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tony Kushner
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
First Case ◽  
Jewish Refugees ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
Nazi Era ◽  
Second World ◽  
Female Migrant

This is the first of two chapters exploring female migrant domestic work and it starts by considering which refugee stories are remembered and why asking why the women who came to Britain during and after the Nazi era have been especially neglected and forgotten. It then explores whether the voices of neglected migrants and minorities can be successfully recovered, utilising the work of Gayatri Spivak and subaltern studies. As its first case study is analyses the involvement in Jewish migrant women in the ‘white slave trade’ or organised prostitution from the 1880s through to the 1920s. It then explores how female Jewish refugees wrote about their experiences as domestic servants in Britain from the 1930s through to the end of the Second World War from placing adverts through to correspondence and other early narratives.

Old Testament Realism in the Writings of Erich Auerbach

2018 ◽  
pp. 187-224
Author(s):  
James I. Porter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Old Testament ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
The West ◽  
The Real ◽  
Historical Thought

This chapter studies the work of the German literary critic Erich Auerbach, who wrote in response to the historical upheaval of the mid-twentieth century as a form of historical engagement. In his work, Auerbach endeavors to portray the evolution of historical consciousness in the West and the discovery of the human and social worlds it yielded. He reflects on this evolution in relating the narrative of realism. In this account, realism is not a literary genre, but rather the evolving recognition of human consciousness of its own conditions, the growing awareness, that is, that reality and the real inhere in the sensuous, the mundane, and the human. At the center of this narrative, Auerbach places Judaism and its heritage rather than Christianity. For Auerbach, history and historical consciousness first appear in the Jewish biblical stories, which provide in turn the structure and the framework for all subsequent expressions of historical thought and experience.

1944-1958

2020 ◽  
pp. 207-278
Author(s):  
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
German Literature ◽  
Bertolt Brecht ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
The West ◽  
German Culture ◽  
Anna Seghers ◽  
The Times ◽  
Foreign Ministry

This part recounts how, after they were liberated by the Russians, the author and his wife made their way to Warsaw. He then joined the Communist Party and began working for the Foreign Ministry. But since he did not adhere to the strict policies of the Communist Party, he was eventually imprisoned and dismissed from the party. This dismissal led to his work as a journalist and his return to German culture, and it enabled him to turn his love for German culture into a profession. From 1950 to 1958, he became the foremost Polish literary critic of German literature from the East and the West, and he befriended some of the most important writers and critics of the times, such as Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Hans Mayer, Siegfried Lenz, Heinrich Böll, and many of the members of the famous Group 47.

Postcolonialism in International Relations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Wilkens
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Theory Development ◽  
Discourse Theory ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Homi Bhabha ◽  
Social Theories ◽  
Gayatri Spivak ◽  
Theoretical Paradigms

Some of the main genealogies within postcolonial scholarship are discussed, with a focus on key thinkers, such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Aníbal Quijano, and Walter Mignolo. Key concepts, such as colonial discourse theory, development, and subaltern studies are presented. The discussion of postcolonial thought is embedded in a reflection on its relation to other theoretical paradigms and social theories (e.g., poststructuralism, world-system theory, Marxism). This focus seeks to highlight some of the main contours of the field, while also pointing out the ways postcolonialism has shaped the discipline of international relations (IR).

scholarly journals Futures beyond ‘the West’? Autoimmunity in China’s harmonious world

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 156-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
ASTRID H.M. NORDIN
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Open Systems ◽  
Open Future ◽  
The West ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
Harmonious World ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
European Democracy ◽  
To Come

AbstractIt has become fashionable among International Relations scholars to draw on the concept of ‘autoimmunity’, which some call ‘the ultimate horizon in which contemporary politics inscribes itself’. To these scholars, most of whom draw on the thought of Jacques Derrida, such logics open systems up to a future to come. At the same time, they tend to identify such logics with Europe, America, Western modernity, and/or democracy. Implied, and sometimes explicit, in their accounts is the denial of autoimmune logics at work outside such an imagined configuration.This article challenges that denial through arguing that the system of ‘harmony’, deployed in contemporary China, also works on an autoimmune logic. If autoimmunity opens up a system to the future, this is not only so for European democracy or its derivatives. Moreover, the expulsion of ‘non-Western’ others from accounts of autoimmunity undermines their rethinking of difference by falling back on an immunitary logic, denying China an open future. This exclusion is their condition of possibility. At the same time, this exclusion is what keeps open their promise of its future to come. Paradoxically, the exclusion of the ‘non-West’ is what keeps the idea of an autoimmune ‘Western’ or European democracy alive.

Nonfiction Form and the “Truth” about Muslim Women in Iranian Documentary

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-111
Author(s):  
Niki Akhavan
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
Political Environment ◽  
Women Filmmakers ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Iranian Women ◽  
The West ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Veil

More than three decades of hostile relations between Iran and the West have meant that images about Iran and Iranian women circulate in a charged political environment. In this geopolitical context, Iranian women filmmakers have often found receptive audiences abroad who turn to documentaries as sites to reveal the truths of contemporary Iran. The enthusiasm for these works, however, also exerts pressures on filmmakers to adhere to familiar narratives about Iran and Iranian women or risk losing their audiences. Focusing on Nahid Sarvestani's Prostitution behind the Veil (2004) and Mahvash Sheikholeslami's Where Do I Belong? (2007), this article examines two tendencies in recent Iranian documentary. The former film exemplifies the prevalent trend of repeating troubling but familiar tropes about Islam and Muslim women, while the latter is an example of attempts to provide a more nuanced picture of Iran's social and political problems. Placing these films in the broader context of the history of nonfiction films in Iran, the article also draws from both feminist scholarship on representations of the Muslim world and longstanding debates within documentary studies to show the high stakes of producing films about Iran and to suggest that documentary works by and about Iranian women should be more rigorously interrogated for their ethical and political implications.

Conclusion: Life on the Line

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Naas
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Spiritual Life ◽  
The West ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
Line P

The conclusion argues that there is in Plato, in addition to the undeniable tendency shown in the previous chapter to think life in terms of life itself, that is, in terms of a Platonic form of life, another countervailing tendency, a less “Platonic” conception of life that is operating always in the margins of Plato’s dialogues, a notion of life that needs to be thought along the lines of what Jacques Derrida began calling in an as-yet-unpublished seminar of 1974–75 life death. The chapter suggests that what a Derridean reading of the Statesman and other dialogues on the question of life reveals is the necessity of thinking life otherwise, that is, life neither as bare, biological life, nor as real, spiritual life, as life itself, but as life death, that is, as a life that must always be woven together with and thought always in relation to death. Life death, it is claimed, is what the philosophical and religious tradition of the West has had to forget or repress in order for something like life itself to emerge, that is, a life completely detached from any life that is actually lived.

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