Born: 1942.

Education: Presidency College, Kolkata, BA, 1959; University of Cambridge and Cornell University, PhD, 1967.

Spivak is a theorist, feminist critic, originary postcolonial theorist, and professor of comparative literature. She sustained her critique of phallogocentric historical interpretation, including bourgeois feminism, throughout her career, comprising professorships at the University of Iowa; the University of Chicago; the University of Texas, Austin; the University of Pittsburgh; and Columbia University.

Publications

Her dissertation, advised by Paul de Man, was on W. B. Yeats and titled Myself Must I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W. B. Yeats. She published Of Grammatology (1976), an English translation of Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie (1967). Her other publications include In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), The Post-colonial Critic (1990), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), and An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012). Added to these are her translations: Imaginary Maps (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1994), Breast Stories (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1997), Old Women (translation with critical introduction of two stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1999), Song for Kali: A Cycle (translation with introduction of Ramproshad Sen, 2000), and Chotti Munda and His Arrow (translation with critical introduction of a novel by Mahasweta Devi, 2002). Spivak's book Du Bois and the General Strike is forthcoming. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography” (1985) was an important article, as was “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1984).

She has been an activist in rural education and feminist and ecological social movements since 1986.

Gayatri Spivak was interviewed by Veeser on January 14, 2019.

HAV: Let me ask you the biggest question. Did theory affect ordinary people's lives in a beneficial way?

GCS: No. No! In no way. Neither beneficial nor maleficial.

HAV: Are you suggesting it is strictly of interest to the professionals who deal with it?