Gayatri Chakavorthy Spivak:A Deconstructionist

Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak was born in Calcutta (India) in 1942 in a middle class family. She received her B. A. (English) from University of Calcutta (1959, M. A. (English) from Cornell University, and then pursued her Ph. D. while teaching at University of Iowa. Her dissertation was on W. B. Yeats directed by Paul de Man titled “Myself I Remake: The Life and Poetry of W. B. Yeats.” She is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York. Gayatri Chakravorty-Spivak is one of the most influential figures in contemporary critical theory. She is perhaps best known for her overtly political use of contemporary cultural and critical theories to challenge the legacy of colonialism on the way we read and think about literature and culture. She has challenged disciplinary conventions of literary criticism and academic philosophy by focusing on the cultural texts of those people who are often marginalized by dominant western culture:the new immigrant, the working class, women and postcolonial subject. By championing the voices and texts of such minority groups, she has also challenged some of the dominant ideas of the contemporary era. She is regarded to be one of the most important representatives of this Anglo-American theoretical field. Gayatri Spivak is a literary critic and theorist. She is best known for the article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” which is considered a founding text of postcolonialism. She is also known for her translation of Jaques Derrida’s ‘Of Grammatology’. This translation brought her to prominence. After this she carried out a series of historical studies and literary critiques of imperialism and feminism. She has often referred to herself as a “Marxist, Feminist and Deconstructionist.” She is known not only as a scholar of deconstructive textual analysis of verbal, visual and social texts but also as a global feminist Marxist. Spivak being an elite intellectual, a “Third-World woman,” a “hyphenated American,” and a Bengali exile living in the West, inhabits an identity that is nothing if not heterogeneous. She brings this personal eclecticism into her work.