Spivak, politics of pronunciation, and the search for a just democracy

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the noted postcolonial scholar and global public intellectual, is perhaps best known for her piece, “Can the subaltern speak?,” in which she claims that elite systems of knowledge filter out subaltern voices so that even when the subaltern does speak, it’s not heard. Spivak’s May 21 lecture on Du Bois’s “vision of democracy” was aimed at underlining the norms required for a more just democracy, one that prioritises not individual interests but the rights of “other people”, especially those of the subaltern. Given Du Bois’s own status as a marginalised Black-American scholar of Haitian origins, Spivak’s lecture repeatedly returned to the importance of correctly pronouncing his name: Du Bois himself insisted on the English, not French, pronunciation – “dew-boys”, not “dew-bwah”. Things further deteriorated when Kumar audaciously accused Spivak of herself being a Brahmin and then asking: “If this triviality is over, can I move on to the question?” Spivak responded with, “I’m an 82-year-old woman in public at your institution, and you are rude to me.” At the chair’s beckoning, Spivak then proceeded to take another audience member’s question without answering Kumar’s.