{"id":192,"date":"2012-03-11T13:10:00","date_gmt":"2012-03-11T17:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.montclair.edu\/crdirector\/?p=192"},"modified":"2019-05-20T09:51:52","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T13:51:52","slug":"the-imperative-new-work-by-gayatri-chakravorty-spivak-an-aesthetic-education-in-the-era-of-globalization-crc-must-read-for-spring-by-neil-baldwin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/2012\/03\/11\/the-imperative-new-work-by-gayatri-chakravorty-spivak-an-aesthetic-education-in-the-era-of-globalization-crc-must-read-for-spring-by-neil-baldwin\/","title":{"rendered":"The Imperative New Work by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization – CRC “Must-Read” for Spring – by Neil Baldwin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Full disclosure: I am coming late to the formidable, omnivorous sensibility of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.<\/a> However, as soon as I saw the title of this book <\/a>in an advertisement for Harvard University Press, I had to read it. The release date was only two weeks ago but, contrary to the normal metabolism of publishing, a heightened sense of urgency drives me to write about it; and to say, in emphatic terms, that this is a singularly important book for all who care about the situation<\/em> of education in this country and the world at large \u2013 especially those who (like me) may not have heretofore comfortably defined themselves as politically expert.<\/p>\n

I was thrilled to discover Spivak\u2019s embracing inclusive message. \u201cThat literature and the arts can support an advanced nationalism is no secret\u2026,\u201d she writes, in the core essay, Nationalism and the Imagination <\/em>[originally published in 2007]. \u00a0\u201c[T]he literary imagination can impact on transcendentalized nationalism\u2026Nationalism is the product of a collective imagination constructed through rememoration.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I have written elsewhere<\/a>, my journey as an author began in American poetry and poetics.\u00a0 For me, \u201cthe imagination\u201d has been an omnipresent concept \u2013 hundreds of years of literary tradition enlivened countless times by the workings of an undefinable inner complex.\u00a0 Most persistently, William Carlos Williams taught me that \u201cOnly the imagination is real,\u201d and that dictum has propelled me along and will continue to do so.<\/p>\n

When I reference the \u201cpolitical\u201d in the context of Spivak, like many, I turn to her seminal 1988 essay, Can the Subaltern Speak?<\/a><\/em>\u00a0 My takeaway from that piece has been with reference [via Foucault] to \u00a0\u201csubjugated knowledge,\u201d and the stigma that accompanies hierarchical disciplined systems of any kind \u2013 most pertinent, now, to me, being the Academy; but resonating beyond into Spivak\u2019s rootedness in the Colonial mentality of her native India — those who have been dominant, and those who are The Others.<\/p>\n

That dynamic helps explain why, until now, I did not think that Spivak — brilliant and innovative as she has always been — was\u00a0for me. Because my life had been entrenched in the institutionalized mainstream culture industry, thus governed by a daily rhythm too preoccupied with survivalism to have time to consider the purely intellectual implications of my behavior.<\/p>\n

As a new citizen of the University, now I have cleared a mental space within which to linger over Spivak\u2019s thoughts.\u00a0 So that when she insists that \u201cHigher education in the humanities should be strengthened so that the literary imagination can continue to de-transcendentalize the nation\u201d I am empowered.\u00a0 Indeed, she insists, \u201ca literary training\u2026is a very important thing today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once one has accepted this liberating mandate, the question quickly arrives \u2013 how to pick up the gauntlet in praxis<\/em>?\u00a0 Spivak helps me in the subsequent essays of her new book. For example, Ethics and Politics<\/em> says the teacher \u201cmust share the steps of the reading.\u201d\u00a0 Explication de texte <\/em>is actually of use when brought to bear upon a room full of [subjugated?] teenagers whose inherent impulse is to shy away from the book,\u00a0to\u00a0be silent.<\/p>\n

Imperative to re-Imagine the Planet <\/em>asks me to \u201canswer\u2026the call of the wholly other,\u201d where the “others” are my students,\u00a0for if I do not set the tone, who will?\u00a0\u00a0 In Reading with<\/em> Stuart Hall in \u201cPure\u201d Literary Terms,<\/em>\u00a0Spivak extends the demands of alterity by raising the point that Cultural Studies as such has overstayed its welcome;\u00a0 this strikes me as a casualty of the disciplines,\u00a0 segmentation of knowledge in the corporate University straying from organicism. In Terror: A Speech After 9\/11<\/em>, Spivak calls for re-engaging the \u201cpublic sphere deeply hostile to the humanities,\u201d taking the argument outside the Academy and proposing a moral stand in increasingly unpopular circles.<\/p>\n

In a mesmerizing promotional video for An Aesthetic Education<\/em>,<\/a> Spivak refers to the uselessness of the \u201cold terms\u201d of globalization no longer operant, advocating, in today\u2019s\u00a0vast and atomized\u00a0social sphere where \u201ceverything is modern,\u201d that we need to \u201crethink, retool, relocate.\u201d\u00a0 We need to start being more at home, she says, with a concept of world literature<\/em>, a boundaryless celebration of cacophonous voices that \u201cembraces all of us\u201d [The Stakes of a World Literature]<\/em>.<\/p>\n

To conclude with the penultimate essay \u2013 and then with an originating work: The illustrated piece\u00a0Sign and Trace<\/em> is a poetics of space grafted onto the massive topography of Anish Kapoor\u2019s monumental steel sculptural work, Memory<\/em>.\u00a0 I saw Memory at the Guggenheim Museum four years ago,<\/a><\/em> and I remember, all too well, extending my arm into the window-shaped aperture, feeling through the black expanse in search of a boundary to the thing itself \u2013 and the guard tapping me on the shoulder, forcing me to pull back \u2013 to withdraw.<\/p>\n

Any incursion into the unknown\u00a0will be accompanied by prohibitions meant to be ignored.<\/p>\n

This redemptive action helps us come full circle, remembering that Spivak\u2019s first major published work was a 1974 literary biography of W.B.Yeats,<\/a> Myself Must I Remake<\/em>.\u00a0 Yeats, indeed! \u2013 the private man who sallied forth into public life, forging a new personality in his latter years to try to meet the madness of the times.<\/p>\n

Read in this spirit, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization <\/a>sounds a clarion call to action.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Full disclosure: I am coming late to the formidable, omnivorous sensibility of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. However, as soon as I saw the title of this book in an advertisement for Harvard University Press, I had to read it. The release date was only two weeks ago but, contrary to the normal metabolism of publishing, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-director-s-essay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1103,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192\/revisions\/1103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.montclair.edu\/creative-research-center\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}