Bushranger Bay

Still reading Gayatri Spivak’s new book, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Its difficult, but actually great. I think her argument is somehow (anyhow) to keep working at the patient effortful non-coercive project of education for epistemic change and rearrangement of individual desire (careerism) towards a collective responsibility (planetary perspective), where the wealth of productive capacity [...]

Red Tape discussion on Culture for RCA design students

Red Tape #2 Local/ Global from deshna mehta on Vimeo. my bit is from 20:10 mins to 41:00, then the discussion. The Red Tape site is here: http://redtape.rca.ac.uk/2012_02.html All thanks to Deshna Mehta and the fine people that make up the Red Tape gang.

Re-read Spivak’s Ghostwriting for this week’s lecture on Capital. Spivak uses the occasion of Derrida saying ‘hello to Marx’ (Spivak 1995:78) to make some key points about women in the contemporary condition of financialised capitalism, and offer a reading of Assia Djebar’s Far From Medina and the ghosts of many women that must be retrieved [...]

Matilal and Mahabharata

In response to a request from Jai … Gayatri Spivak has also done work on Indian traditions/texts. This in particular was with Prof Bimal Krishna Matilal – on the Mahabharata. She has written somewhere about Karna, but maybe I am just remembering a conversation we had about it, that is more vivid. I remember her [...]

A new book from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in 2012: AN AESTHETIC EDUCATION IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION – harvard uni press

AN AESTHETIC EDUCATION IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION During the past twenty years, the world’s most renowned critical theorist—the scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studies—has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting the globalized present, she turns [...]

Recently, at the Centre for Cultural Studies

In June we hosted a hugely successful kind of double event, taking place in two locations London and Gothenberg, Sweden. The first part was a discussion of race and politics with keynote speakers Professors Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Fred Moten in conversation. Over 300 attended, and the highlight was Gayatri Spivak’s three hour examination of the 7 [...]

Black Skin White Marx – 4 June 2010 Goldsmiths

*Black Skin White Marx?* Goldsmiths Centre for Cultural Studies present a special intervention: Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (University Professor and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, USA) and Professor Fred Moten (Professor of English, Duke University, USA) will be speaking in dialogue with Karl Marx on issues of race, critique [...]

11 theses on art and politics #8 & #9

8. The cartoon is contained in the frame, and can safely say so much more because of that protection. Oftentimes what is illustrated in art and comedy can be far more critical than the editorials or headline ‘breaking news’. But as we also know, even in Denmark, politics can spill over the border of this [...]

Terrorvisionaries (part two)

A talk at Nottingham University Politics department last night gave me a chance to elaborate my worries over new media anthropology in South Asia, pantomime terror and the hanging channel – following on from the talks I’ve given about the Mohammed Afzal case and the DIY Cookbook video from Fund^da^mental. The notes below presume you [...]

Spivak – critique of postcolonial reason 1.2

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is visiting Goldsmiths – Some of us have returned to reread her Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Such a great, difficult, suggestive book. These are some subjective comments and reading notes on the Philosophy chapter. The first part is on Immanuel Kant here. 2. Hegel The section on Hegel is more a section [...]

Spivak – critique of postcolonial reason 1.1

Gayatri Spivak is visiting Goldsmiths – so some of us have returned to reread her Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Such a great, difficult, suggestive book. These are some subjective comments and reading notes on the Philosophy chapter. The first part is on Immanuel Kant. 1. Kant Although this is at best an inverse aside (p.6), [...]

Thought Crime – its a joy!

At dinner the other day, KK told the story of his recent meeting with a ‘community copper’ on a bicycle who accosted him walking along the street. KK was wearing a beard and a back-pack, and the accusation was “you’e looking a bit serious, lad”. He was in fact thinking of buying fireworks, it being [...]

Notes for Devi

I want you, To write poetry, To compose songs, To form an organisation, I want you to race your horses, Through the blood of the workers, Let the workers come out from their factories With a pledge to mobilize!If you accept this proposal, Well and good! If not, You will remain in my world A [...]

correspondences of theory – citation

- a reply to a fav student on our MA Postcolonial in CCS who asked about ways to present his work on charity/WTO etc. My reply turned out to be as much for me as for him, got me thinking about how trinketization in anthropology left us adrift, bereft of purpose and value, and how [...]

I am a lazy Marxist…

Think dirty. Muck in. For all the effort that goes into refining the analysis and debating the correct line and tactic, it may still be that a Bad Marxist will send out critical missives unworried about their destination. Sure, sometimes worry, but not obsess about what circulates out of immediately calculable control today. ‘Leave it [...]