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 …
An obsession with correcting other people’s pronunciation, especially words of foreign origin, is a favourite hunting game of a certain kind of Indian. The usual vibrations that this produces became a loud buzz recently when renowned academic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and a student at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University engaged in a stand-off over the name of American sociologist W.E.B. Check …
