A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination Author(s): JennySharpe and GayatriChakravortySpivak Source: Signs,

Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter 2003), pp. 609-624 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/342588 . Accessed: 28/03/2013 11:57
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Jenny Sharpe Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

A Conversation with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Politics and the Imagination

has been instrumental in introducing a feminist agenda to the eld of postcolonial studies and, in doing so, forcing womens studies to interrogate the underlying principles traditionally relied on for gender analysis. Whether addressing the language of feminist individualism or the surreptitious subject of power and desire, she has never lost sight of the women on the other side of the international division of labor, while at the same time refusing an all-too-easy recuperation of their subjectivities. I rst met Spivak in Austin, Texas, a little more than twenty years ago. As an entering freshman at the University of Texas, I was instructed to take a class with a new English professor, who, like me, was from India. I, resenting the assumption behind the recommendation, avoided studying with Spivak. But her reputation as a Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist (as she was known at the time) soon caught up with me, and I decided to pursue a graduate degree and write a dissertation under her direction. It was the early 1980s, when the now-familiar terms postcolonial and colonial discourse analysis were beginning to enter an academic vocabulary, and Spivak was at the forefront of dening the emergent eld. Since she left the University of Texas shortly thereafter, I continued working with her only by traveling to places as scattered as Urbana-Champaign, Toronto, London, Houston, Middletown, and Ithaca. I still remember sitting in a classroom at Cornell University, where she was a senior fellow at the Society for the Humanities, and being transxed by the most remarkable critique of the subject of knowledge and semiosis of woman in Foucault and Hindu law. Little did I know that she was working through the argument that would become Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988)perhaps the most wellknown, if misunderstood, of her writings. Spivaks critics took her phrasing of the subaltern cannot speak to be a denitive statement rather than an interrogation of the academic effort to give the gendered subaltern a voice in history. On revising the essay for
ayatri Chakravorty Spivak

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2002, vol. 28, no. 2] 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2003/2802-0008$10.00

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her book, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), she characterizes her passionate lament: the subaltern cannot speak! as an inadvisable remark (308). But she also notes that so many of the examples her critics gave of the subaltern speaking tended to equate subalternity with women in the third world or ethnic minorities in the United States, a conation that her essay was intended, in part, to critique. Indeed, one of the concerns of her recent work is to show the complicity of diasporic South Asians with a corporate globalization that maintains subaltern women in a position of subalternity. I asked Spivak to return to the problem of speaking about the gendered subaltern that she rst introduced in Can the Subaltern Speak? She spoke to me of a need to attend to intranational cultural differences between an elite South Asian bourgeoisie and the rural poor who have been bypassed by decolonization. She described what it meant to engage the everyday lives of subalterns, characterizing eldwork as the only model for such an engagement. As Spivak spoke, it became clear to me that what is often identied as her pessimism about social change is intended to offset the euphoria of the political activist who thinks that she is transforming rural womens everyday lives. Spivaks deconstructive thinking is evident in her characterization of social change as being more provisional than one would like to believe. But it is an afrmative deconstruction that nds value in the need for the ongoing work of a constant critique. This conversation took place in Los Angeles in June 2001, while Spivak was en route to her home in New York from Hong Kong via Sonoma, California, where she had just attended the Crossing Borders Initiative, a Ford Foundation meeting to consider the future of area studies. The imprint of her travels is clearly visible in the discussion we had. As Spivak described to me her interaction with small farmers in rural Bengal, postdoctoral Chinese students at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and her students at Columbia University, her strategic use of what one might call a politics of the imagination started to emerge. The Signs editors and I decided to call this conversation Politics and the Imagination because we wanted to emphasize the argument that Spivak is making about the imaginative power of corporate globalization and how it requires an equally forceful appeal to the imagination for contestation. Jenny Sharpe (JS): You have been most vocal against the tendency of academics to equate globalization with migrancy and diaspora. You insist that the rural is the new front of globalization through seed and fertilizer control, population control, microloans to women, to name a few instances. Can you elaborate some more on how you see the rural as the

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new front of globalization and what this says about the kind of face we are giving to globalization in our critical discourse? Gayatri Spivak (GS): Things have become more specic since I wrote about globalization understood as or presented as the movement of people. It seems to me that now there are four models of globalization that are in circulation. First, that there is nothing new about it, in other words, that globalization is simply a repetition. Second, that globalization as such can be identied with the efforts of global governance signaled by the Bretton Woods conference remotely inaugurating the postcolonial and the postnational world. This is the more sophisticated face of the old identifying-with-the-people movement. And the third model is that the entire globe is in a common culture x, and its signature is urbanism. Its against this one that I bring up the question of the rural. Finally, I distinguish globalization from lets say world trade. It is true that the tendency towards expansion is as old as the hills, but information technology has given it a dimension which deserves a special name. The globe signies some more abstract, more virtual thing, distinguished from world systems by relating to the ascendancy of specically nance capital, competitive markets in negotiable instruments. This technological phenomenon is the condition and effect of the fall of the Berlin wall. In other words, at that point, globalization is seen as a rupture. In these four models we have a view of globalization from repetition to rupture. In the fourth one, were not looking so much at the movement of money as the movement of data. Given this, I point out the virtualization of the rural, the conversion of the rural into data through the patenting of indigenous knowledge and through pharmaceutical interests in seeds and population control. Indigenous peoples, for example, are ned by trade-related investment and intellectual property measures, because they obviously had not patented their knowledge over the last few thousand years and so thats retroactively seen as an illegal trade practice. Through the conversion of the phenomenon of the rural, not blue skies and green trees, into data, the rural front is a real front of globalization. The urban phenomenon, which is much more spectacular, is what is visible and instrumental. Donna Landry has recently commented on the fact thatin Britain at leastthe countryside was recoded for consumption by the Game Act of 1681 (Landry 2001). What Im talking about displaces the consumption/production binary into a virtuality that can include consumption as tourism.1 JS: Is it the visibility of urban centers that accounts for rural areas falling off the map of our critical discourse on globalization? I ask this because
1

See Meyda Yegenoglus work on Turkey (forthcoming).

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if, as you indicate, the rural is a site of intensied globalization, it is what we should be talking about. GS: But you dont need them on an old-fashioned map, you need them on geographical information systems. Ive been talking about this for some time, and it doesnt seem to register. This relates very strongly to women because rural practices, especially at the grassroots level, were quite often shared by women and men equally. Whereas eld labor sometimes went to men, though not exclusively, more of the conserving practices seems to have gone to women. Im not romanticizing the indigenous communities, what one might call aboriginal communities; Im just saying that cultural conformity within those areas shows us patterns where women are not necessarily inferior persons who are not active in what one would call the public sphere, even if its not the public sphere as we know it through European and colonial history. In that context, the virtualization of the rural and its transformation into data within nance capital involves and does indeed obliterate womens practices. As a major phenomenon within globalization, this does not seem to ring a bell because it does not resemble the colloquial meaning of the word in the dictionary, which is then translated into simply immigration patterns. And then of course you can move into the usual lines that have been in place now for twenty-odd years for describing those patterns. JS: It is well known that, as one of the largest developers of biotechnology, the Monsanto Company patents its genetically engineered seed so that farmers who use it are prevented from holding back a few seeds to plant the next year, which is a traditional practice. You have written about how the incursion of biotechnology giants like Monsanto into South Asia has affected women. GS: After a certain ood incident in Bangladesh, the handing out of loans was made incumbent upon accepting only these engineered seeds. But thats just one instance. The way in which chemical fertilizers are inserted into the life cycle of rural folks as reward is quite staggering. JS: So what is transpiring under the rubric of loans to rural areas is a certain kind of traditional domain, to use that phrase, of women being taken away from them. GS: Well, its been recoded into another kind of discourse. And ultimately its the transformation into data that interests me because it is not only a source of human interest stories but an example of a much bigger systemic change. And thats what Ive been trying to say about the rural. Its not just women as we understand them as human beings of a certain kind but a kind of systematization of a certain way of being into this

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abstract average knowledge power, if you like, which is data, which does in fact signal a much bigger change than just womens oppression. JS: If you consider data collecting to signal something larger than simply womens oppression, how would you respond to the argument that the new electronic technology is giving third-world women a direct access to global markets? GS: Supercially of course its true. Capital in its newer formations seems more socially productive, but when people speak about this, they are speaking very abstractly. They are not thinking about actual people. Im now going 180 degrees from inviting people to understand the virtualization of the rural as a huge systemic change, a recoding, a reterritorialization. But at the same time, in order to understand the terrifying power of the abstract as such, one must supplement it with the human beings within these kinds of situations. The enthusiasm for these abstract groups of women accessing the marketplace through the Internet leaves completely untouched what happens to these women on the ground. Even when you interview the women, you are not getting the whole picture. First of all, the questions produce the answers. Secondly, the subaltern is so disarmed by attention that in fact the answers are pathetically untrustworthy. If you actually involve yourself into the life detail of these women who are accessing the market, you would see that their access may supercially bring in a better income, but it does nothing else for the human quality of the womans life. Then, you come to the third point: have these people made a broad-range qualitative analysis of what group has access to global markets through the Internet? What class stratum? Where? In what kinds of societies? Because I can assure you, I have had a good deal of experience over the last twelve years with hundreds of women with whom it has been my good fortune to associate myself; the bottom layers of the rural poor have no access to the Internet. They dont even know what the Internet is. This is the largest sector of the electorate in the global South. And to access the Internet without infrastructural accompaniments does not lead to a just society. JS: You have written that the problem of international feminism today is the deployment of the upper-class hybrid female as a model for the gender training of poor rural women. You have identied, as a dening moment in this shift, a restructuring of the World Banks Women in Development programs as Gender and Development, which you see as coterminous with the Fourth World Womens Conference at Beijing in 1995. Weve been through the criticism of Third World Woman as signier and of the universalization of a certain kind of feminist model through the idea of global feminism. The language of international fem-

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inism has now shifted to terms like heterogeneity, multiplicity, decentering. Yet it appears that there is still some kind of universalizing logic at work in the Gender and Development programs. What kinds of problems does such gender training pose for feminism as an intellectual discourse and political movement? GS: I would like to say that I dont have an unexamined opposition to United Nations Womens Conferences. Im quite sure that there are things that get done there that are good things. My problem is that they are so wasteful, since they are unenforceable. JS: Wasteful? GS: In terms of resources. A huge wanton expenditure of resources for months and years in order to produce declarations that are unenforceable. And really the enthusiasm that is generated is in a class that is not really the class that we are thinking about. I was speaking to a wonderful young woman in Hong Kong, involved in various projects, one of which is schoolchildren teaching computers to older folks. So I said: Well, hows it going? And she said something to me that was so wise. She said: Its going wonderfully well for the schoolchildren. Wow! I knew this one had her head set right on her shoulders. People dont realize that even if the euphoria and enthusiasm generated in the self-styled activists, the ones who are organizing, can be shown in the subaltern women who have been collected for the occasion, it does not mean what the more fortunate women think it means. The euphoria belongs to the occasion rather than to long-term consequences. JS: Can you give an example of the kind of activist work you are criticizing? GS: Well, Im actually nishing a piece of writing for an Oxford Amnesty collection where I talk about a case. When there are human rights interventions on the lowest social stratum, the poorest of the rural poor, theres not muchand this is my basic critique in terms of all the questions you have askedthere is not much trouble taken to actually engage with the structures of feeling of the groups who are supposedly being helped. It is good to dismiss the concern to exhibit themor to forget the needs of the urban subproletariatas a politics of virtue, as Deborah Mindry does in the Signs issue on globalization (2001). But for me the point has been, what do we do with the rural poor, then?with, not for. Since no effort has been made to rearrange the mental theater of the ones who have been helped for a new production, the consequences of being helped out of a violent situation do not last. They remain perennially in a place where wrongs proliferate and have to be righted periodically. We who thought of feminism as a movement that deals with awareness and gender sensitivity

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as well as material solutions nd these solutions hardly feminist, except insofar as they involve people who can be physically diagnosed as female. There is a difference between the two things: between woman-centered philanthropy and democratic pedagogic involvement. Thats what Im talking about. JS: So, what youre talking about is a real need for infrastructural changes, for instance? Or something that is more than simply the quick x? GS: Yes, involvement with broader infrastructural changes. You and I both teach in the humanities. If one thinks about humanities education as a sustained, uncoercive rearrangement of desires with no guarantees, that is what Im talking about. If we really feel that we are in our profession because we want to do what were doing, then our engagement with the worlds disenfranchised women has to be as thick as the engagement with our students. JS: You have said on several occasions that you are only a literary critic and are very clear about intellectual work not being the same as political activism. Yet you seem to be describing a kind of political activism that has a paucity of imagination. Would you say that there is a need for work to be done not only on the political front but also on the imagination? GS: One not without the other. My friend gave me a name, which is Miss Supplementarity. And this is quite appropriate! I truly feel the moment one emphasizes the one over the other, it is a bad scene. And I think one of the problems with Marxism was that quite often one would, in a kind of doctrinaire way, emphasize or dismiss anything that seemed not to be amenable to that adjective. Let me give you an example that relates to pharmaceutical dumping. When one is speaking to a group of grassroots farmers, one nds oneself using a very bad concept metaphor that has been thoroughly criticized by bourgeois feminism. This is the metaphor of the land or the soil as mother, which is an extremely powerful and strategic instrument if it works completely through the imagination. On the one side are the seed and fertilizer companies with their ferocious push upon the rural poor. And on the other side is a metaphor that says, if you buy this fertilizer and put it in the soil, next year you cannot raise anything in the soil if you dont use it again. The soil is our mother, your mother and mine. We are making our mother addicted. This metaphor is used in an area where, by drinking urea-contaminated cheap liquor, people die quite often. And urea is a big ingredient in chemical fertilizers. JS: This metaphor is used by? GS: I use it! Ive never heard anyone else use it! For ecological agriculture, you know. What am I doing there? Im being disingenuous, using

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this powerful politically incorrect metaphor. Im not someone who believes in the sanctity of truth. For me, an appeal to the imagination is material practice. I knowingly use a metaphor completely disapproved of by mainstream feminism. I knowingly use some kind of attitude from temperance movements. I knowingly use the notion of family values among the rural poor; you know the notion of sin against the mother, et cetera. I knowingly use these strategically. This is the kind of thing whereby rather than use fear of punishment, you use a certain kind of imaginative terror in terms of the consequences of putting foreign seeds and fertilizers in the soil. I also detail exactly what happens: the hardening of the soil, the dying of the insects, the dying of all the things that actually help keep the soil alive, the loss of taste, the poisoning of products, the fact that we in the afuent countries now choose to buy organic materials, et cetera. I mean you can give them a lot of hard information but to make the very poor turn away from high-yield grain, you have to use a certain kind of imaginative discourse. I dont want people to think that when I use the word imagination, I mean some kind of incredibly pure, holier-than-thou effort. No, Im not Martha Nussbaum. Im not reading Dickens with them. JS: Your use of imaginative discourse is especially contaminated because you say you knowingly use a metaphor that is disapproved of by mainstream feminism. That statement shows a disjuncture between knowledge and strategy. It would be interesting to place your deployment of a contaminated metaphor alongside a gender training that is intended to render such metaphors useless. GS: I am an education person, you know; Im a teacher. Just as sitting here in the Signs ofce at UCLA Ive been talking about hiring, about departmental styles and teaching, when you sit among farmers, you talk about agriculture. And so, one year, when it became clear to some of these farming friends of mine that I knew something about the other side of ecological agriculture, I was asked to address a larger group of farmers. I was very nervous at rst, thinking Im not really an ecological agriculture activist. But then I thought that if asked one should speak, because nobody comes to these areas. I should make clear that among my audience are women. I shouldnt really even say audience; I should say interlocutors because they do speak themselves about farming practices. So, its not as though Im addressing a group of men with this contaminated metaphor. What Im trying to say is that the association of certain kinds of tenors and certain kinds of vehicleswe are literary folks and so refer to the textbook denition of tenor and vehicle, underlying idea or principal subject, and the gure, which is the way metaphors seem to workis

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not transcendental; it is historical. Thats something that has to be understood. The particular line from specic tenor to specic vehicle is not common to all cultural production, so one has to be able to distinguish between things that have been coded one way for us and another way for them. But for this you have to be patient. I think thats the universalization that is really not much use in gender training. There is also an assumption of bureaucratic egalitarianismthe assumption that people are units that are mechanically equal. This is not a bad thing, but in a culturally different eld it is counterproductive if not supplemented by other kinds of efforts. Cultural difference is spoken of but, by enthusiasm or convenience, a common human essence is assumed which denies the procedural importance of the difference. There is a related assumption: that the history of a sharing of the public and the private is the same among all groups of men and women as the one that follows through in terms of northwestern Europe or sometimes even Britain. This is the problem it seems to me. Its not so much a universalization as seeing one history as the inevitable telos as well as the inevitable origin and past of all men and women everywhere. Thats the problem. Incidentally, I went to a Peoples Alliance ofce in Kolkata (Calcutta) before going, to get some tips, since they have international publicity with ecological agriculture, and they too used metaphors, but metaphors that would ring no bell with the farmers, such as natural balance, et cetera, in the most ornate Bengali prose. I left them feeling altogether cheered up! JS: But the assertion of things being coded one way for us and another way for them risks reifying cultural difference. I am thinking about cultural defense as a legal strategy for defending immigrant Asian men living in the United States against charges of gender violence. This is an attention to difference that insidiously reinscribes an older colonial model of othering. GS: Of course it does. And the question that really comes up is: different from what? I would say that the culture of the rich and the culture of the poor in these countries are marked by a cultural difference that is larger than the cultural difference we self-consciously invoke when we diasporics speak to the metropolitan white folks. The question of cultural difference for some years now has become exacerbated in other ways, by the difference between intellectual labor and manual labor. There is an extreme difference in educational techniques used for the poor and the middle class. And Im now able to convince the ones who suffer from the consolidation of very bad educational techniques by using another metaphor, which is a metaphor of class apartheid. That is to say, the ones who are going to work their heads (in Bengali there is an expression) are taught in one way, and the ones who are going to work their bodies are taught

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in another way. Metaphorically, this cultural difference, the cultures of class, is much more signicant than cultures identied by crudely dened national difference. Thats what the cultural difference question means to me now, not just the heritage of colonialism. JS: So in fact the national cultural difference is . . . GS: Intra-national! JS: Yes, there is a kind of ideological work being done by the concept of cultural difference, one of eliding class. GS: Intranational cultural difference, for me, is now as signicant and as important, as it works in the interest of international cultural difference. And of course to make the big difcult statement, the international civil society crosses borders in the name of woman. And this difference is now eshed out mostly in terms of violence against women, womens rights, all that kind of stuff. Thats how I understand it today. Im much more xated, xed on intranational cultural difference of class as it is at work for and with the international cultural differences. There is an internal line of cultural difference within the same culture, apart from the usual mechanisms of class formation. It is related to the formation of the new global culture of management and nance and the families attached to it. It marks access to the Internet. It also marks the new culture of international nongovernmental organizations, involved in development and human rights, as they work upon the lowest strata in the developing world. Before the advent of modernity, the country-to-town movement, the eldto-court movement, the movement along the great trade routes operated to create the kind of internal split of cultural difference within the same culture that may be the real motor of cultural change. Across the spectrum of change, it is the negotiation of sexual difference and the relationship between the sacred and the profane that spell out the rhythms of culture, rhythms that are always a step ahead of its denitions and descriptions. JS: You have told the story of the only female member of the Lodha tribe who managed to make it to university and who hanged herself for reasons unknown. There were rumors of her involvement in illicit love affairs. This story is clearly intended to resonate (and it does) with the one you tell about Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri in Can the Subaltern Speak? She hanged herself because she had been unable to carry out a political assassination on behalf of the armed struggle for Indian independence. The suicide was a mystery because people presumed that the reason was an illicit pregnancy, but she was menstruating at the time. I found the resemblance between the two scenes of female suicides separated by class, caste, temporality, and space to be, and I use the Freudian term, uncanny. Is there a story to be told in that resemblance?

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GS: I think its the other side of the heterosexual reproductive norm as family values, which is about as close as one comes to a universal. Although it is not a universal because of what I have talked about in both these situations. I saw Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri as a subaltern, and indeed she was a subaltern, but if one is being very strict about the term, then she was a lower-middle-class urban person, and therefore she was not really subaltern. And as for Chuni Kotal, the woman from the Lodha tribe, by going to university, she had become sort of upwardly mobile, and therefore strictly speaking she too was not a subaltern. But one notices, in many subalternized female societies, a certain phenomenon that I have described as originary queerness, which is a thing different from the heterosexist reproductive norm. It may be that from which sexual difference differs. It will not be disclosed in a subject elaboration that I know to theorize. But when the heterosexist reproductive norm works, then it is right from the positive articulation of family values. Now this should not make us argue that therefore its all right for international feminism to go and interfere, because what we just talked about is the heterosexist reproductive norm, not an entire cultural fabric. Ive discussed in a recent piece the way in which destitute widows in Vrindavan are terribly ironic against the institution of marriage. So, while we are pointing at the operation of a heterosexual reproductive norm, we can also locate critical moments. A dominant that operates across divides does not sanction unexamined cultural interference in the name of international feminism. JS: You said that neither of these women were subaltern in a strict use of the term. But if we are talking of the subaltern in the strict sense, then, what kinds of narratives can we rely on? Or are we already bringing them into a particular kind of logic? Does subalternity have to remain unnameable? GS: When one thinks about subalternity in the sense of no lines of mobility into upward social movement, its still not unnameable. We must, however, take a moratorium on naming too soon, if we manage to penetrate there. There is no other way for you and me to penetrate there. Whatever the hell else we are doing, we have to be earning trust. Unfortunately thats also the model of good eldwork. That is why I say eldwork without transcoding to describe this other approach, a eldwork whose end is not producing discourse for our equals by bringing back news. Theres nothing particularly good about penetrating into subalternity. Im not in search of the primitive or anything. But if we are going to talk about it, then I will say that if one manages to penetrate in there, and its not easy, then I think what we have to do is take a moratorium on speaking too soon. I used to be against information retrieval years ago, but now Ive thought it through in greater detail. We hear a lot of talk

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nowand Im not particularly happy about itabout intellectual capital and cultural capital. And its a nice, trendy, sexy metaphor. If we are going to use that metaphorology, then I would say that this is like mercantile capitalism: buying cheap and selling dear because nobody can go there. So thats something one really must be careful about. Its not unnameable. In many ways, its only too easily nameable! JS: Well, I suppose I meant unnameable in the sense of avoiding a transcoding and a quick conversion into a particular logic. But I am interested in what you say about inevitably nding oneself doing eldwork. GS: There is no other model. You are a person who is clearly not a subaltern person, who has moved into a group which clearly is subaltern with no kind of mobility. And you are earning trust so that you can do whatever it is that you are there to do. So Im thinking of the best models of eldwork. One is tempted, when one is not an anthropologist oneself, to equate anthropology with its worst examples. You know what I mean? That patient effort to learn without the goal of transmitting that learning to others like me, it seems to me, can be described by others as eldwork, and I would not have a way of saying no. My goal is not to produce wellwritten texts about those experiences. If that were so, then I would not be able to learn because my energies would be focused toward digesting the material for production. Its as simple as that. There is nothing mysterious there. If your energies are focused toward that, you are constantly processing, and you are processing it into what you already know. Youre not learning something. So this is why I say that you should perhaps call it eldwork, because learning from below is too pious sounding. And today, I would accept the word eldwork because its less self-ennobling than learning from below. JS: What about the teaching you have just nished in Hong Kong? Do you consider that eldwork? GS: I think in a certain sense, everything, for me now, has become eldwork. So the word has lost its interest. JS: Are you a wild anthropologist? GS: Well, I have always been; we have always been. Thats how I talked about colonial subjects and postcolonial subjects. And today it is very true of the new immigrant. Very true indeed. We internalize the folkways of the metropolis without disciplinary authorization. Hong Kong for me is a very interesting case. As you know, Im not really yet fully back. Ive been teaching for ve months at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Im just on my way back to New York. This university is among the top forty in science and technology in the world, and the humanities component is much more old-fashioned, because its clearly

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not a radical humanities university. I was asked to teach poststructuralism. When I went there, I saw that in factwell, the students themselves told me in a preliminary meetingthey didnt know the rest of Western literary tradition. So, I scrapped my course immediately, and I started teaching from Aristotle on down. What I was interested in doing was speaking as an Asian to Asians, because the languages used in Hong Kong are Chinese and English. So, with my miserable classical Greek, Im pushing Aristotle in Greek, with my miserable Italian, Im pushing Dante in Italian. I kept telling themYou read the West not because everything Western is good, so that you can theoretically apply it to your raw material. Do not read the West because everything Western is bad, so that you can show how Chinese was better. Both are the same thing. Read it because it is there and, in certain respects, it won. Then youll see that its interesting. And then, when we began to read all these other languages, and of course, they didnt read these languages at all, I would try extremely hard to push through. I would say to them, remember, its not only Chinese that loses by translation; these languages also lose by translation. There was no English when Aristotle wrote. You have to think about that. And within that, to always keep my head straight on gender. That was much more difcult, because in a postgraduate seminar at a science and technology university, you cant make the usual kinds of gender pronouncements. So you have to think through the ways in which you are going to make this gender analysis not just relate to U.S. feminism and Hong Kong feminism, or to Asia Labor Monitor. I remember the class where we did Hrotswitha von Gandersheim; for me the question is why must we read a piece of literature by a woman in order to get to the beginnings of feminist theory, but the oral presentations related to a Filipina pointing at how Catholicism oppresses women, and a Hong Kong Chinese woman doing characterology because her teachers are inuenced by mainstream Euro-U.S. feminism. I found, without planning, that I could only undo this by showing, by example, that an Asian could take Europe as the object of investigation. Is this to be interpellated as an Asian? This was, for me, an incredibly interesting learning experience. JS: In saying that you were an Asian teaching Asians about the Western tradition, are you saying that you didnt teach the course the same way you would at Columbia? GS: Its not that I would not teach it differentlybecause I didnt go in thinking I would teach it any different. But this was an unusual situation of one kind of Asian teaching another kind of Asian the traditions of the West, but in the original languages. I did not feel disenfranchised in the way in which . . . It amuses me, I dont really feel disenfranchised at

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Columbia, but you know metaphorically, as an Indian woman teaching Aristotle to white Americans, there is a certain peculiarity. JS: Although you can do it in the original language . . . GS: But nonetheless! So it isnt that I would have taught the course differently at Columbia, but I found myself really in a fully different teaching situation. I can say that while teaching at Columbia I have been trying hardest to emphasize the imagination as an in-built instrument of othering ourselves. Because I think the real problem at Columbia is that the student is encouraged to think that he or she lives in the capital of the world. The student is encouraged to think that he or she is there to help the rest of the world. And he or she is also encouraged to think that to be from other parts of the world is not to be fully global. And New York City can become transparent. So therefore my biggest undertaking, my biggest task, is actively to dramatize the imagination as an instrument of othering. In other words, to teach how to read in the most robust sense, that is to say, suspending oneself and entering the text and the other. If indeed we are thinking about othering as a good thing, it is a kind of chosen othering, as it were, the chosen othering through the imagination. Strictly speaking, nothing is more conducive to this than working on a cultural script that is not supposedly yours. And that is one of the reasons why I admire the directions in which your work has gone. And Ive said this to many people. I consider this to be altogether admirable. JS: I am interested in juxtaposing the different sites of your teaching in order to see how each location transforms your pedagogical practices. You have already talked about teaching in Hong Kong and New York. Correct me if my information is wrong, but I read somewhere that you organized a teachers training course in Bangladesh, and I would like you to talk about this as a third site of your teaching. GS: No, not in Bangladesh. I mean, yes, I did do it in Bangladesh, but my general focus is in India. I hope in fact in some way to move away from my own cultural inscription. I did try it for a little while in Algeria. I have other plans about which I will say nothing. But the Indian stuff is because my mother tongue is Bengali, and if you really want to involve yourself with what I calledIve said it once already, but that is my phrasethe largest sector of the electorate in the global South, then you must know their native language well. I mean, I know Hindi, but not in the way in which one can actually train extremely ill-trained teachers. JS: When you say ill-trained, what do you mean? GS: Badly educated, you know. Mostly not high school graduates. JS: They are going to be teaching in rural schools?

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GS: They are not going to; they do teach. They teach in these schools that I run. So, yes, I do train them how to teach. What else? JS: Well, can you speak a little bit more about your schools in India, because when you talked about your teaching in Hong Kong, you established a whole scenario . . . GS: Because the Hong Kong scene can be imagined. But if I talk about these places, rst of all, I think I would get the kind of approval from your readership which I would much rather earn because of my theoretical work. You know, there is a certain kind of benevolent approval which I really resist. Im being as honest as I can be. JS: Well, I was thinking more theoretically, because you are a teacher. GS: These are one-room schools, okay, so they are very different from my own upbringing. Remember what I was saying about intranational cultural difference? These people are generally aboriginal, whereas Im a metropolitan, middle-class caste Hindu. First of all, it took me the longest time to learn what the nature of the bad teaching was. Believe me, Jenny, that is a long process, because you cannot undo thousands of years of oppressing the mind through these nice kinds of Montessori-style experiments. So in fact, the real challenge is to be able to produce principles of change in teaching that can be internalized by this ridiculously feeble teaching corps. Im not at all sure of anything thats happening or not happening. When you see these things in pictures and posters and booklets or television, the protofeudal, downwardly class mobile, liberally outraged activists are always present. Im sorry that this cynicism has come up in the last ten or twelve years. The question is how long this education would last if the activists were not at all present? How long? Two years? Two months? Three years? Five years? Fifty years? Maybe seventy years, as in the case of the Soviet Union? History is much longer. So thats the way in which one learns how to teach with no guarantees. JS: The undoing is the most difcult? GS: Well, not anymore. I used to talk about the undoing before I had started this stuff. If you get into it, it gets undone. You dont even know how its getting undone. Youre surprised by it. Youre surprised by the unexpected, and it affects your other kind of writing. So its really a lot of fun although its so uncertain. There are absolutely no guarantees, so one has to remember what that young woman said so correctlyIts good for the schoolchildren. But the moment you feel its really working, you have to stop and ask yourself, for whom is it working? Give it a try; be absent. See. And you will see within the week . . . its not so easy to undo a thousand years.

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JS: Weve reached the end of the interview. I dont know if you want to add anything else at this stage. GS: I dont think so, except for what a pleasure this conversation has been. Weve known each other now for such a long time, and generally, the interview session is with a relative stranger. It was fun to speak in the presence of intimacy, past intimacy. Department of English University of California, Los Angeles (Sharpe) Department of English Columbia University (Spivak)

References

Landry, Donna. 2001. The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecology in English Literature, 16711831. New York: Palgrave. Mindry, Deborah. 2001. Nongovernmental Organizations, Grassroots, and the Politics of Virtue. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26(4): 11871211. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Larry Grossberg, 271313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. . 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Yegenoglu, Meyda. Forthcoming. Inhabiting Other Spaces: Tourists and Migrants in the Postcolonial World. In Transactions: Tourism in the Southern Mediterranean, ed. Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Reiker.

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