The Imperative New Work by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak – An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization – CRC “Must-Read” for Spring – by Neil Baldwin

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 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 of education in this country and the world at large – especially those who (like me) may not have heretofore comfortably defined themselves as politically expert.

I was thrilled to discover Spivak’s embracing inclusive message. “That literature and the arts can support an advanced nationalism is no secret…,” she writes, in the core essay, Nationalism and the Imagination [originally published in 2007].  “[T]he literary imagination can impact on transcendentalized nationalism…Nationalism is the product of a collective imagination constructed through rememoration.”

As I have written elsewhere, my journey as an author began in American poetry and poetics.  For me, “the imagination” has been an omnipresent concept – hundreds of years of literary tradition enlivened countless times by the workings of an undefinable inner complex.  Most persistently, William Carlos Williams taught me that “Only the imagination is real,” and that dictum has propelled me along and will continue to do so.

When I reference the “political” in the context of Spivak, like many, I turn to her seminal 1988 essay, Can the Subaltern Speak?  My takeaway from that piece has been with reference [via Foucault] to  “subjugated knowledge,” and the stigma that accompanies hierarchical disciplined systems of any kind – most pertinent, now, to me, being the Academy; but resonating beyond into Spivak’s rootedness in the Colonial mentality of her native India — those who have been dominant, and those who are The Others.

That dynamic helps explain why, until now, I did not think that Spivak — brilliant and innovative as she has always been — was for 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.

As a new citizen of the University, now I have cleared a mental space within which to linger over Spivak’s thoughts.  So that when she insists that “Higher education in the humanities should be strengthened so that the literary imagination can continue to de-transcendentalize the nation” I am empowered.  Indeed, she insists, “a literary training…is a very important thing today.”

Once one has accepted this liberating mandate, the question quickly arrives – how to pick up the gauntlet in praxis?  Spivak helps me in the subsequent essays of her new book. For example, Ethics and Politics says the teacher “must share the steps of the reading.”  Explication de texte 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, to be silent.

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

In a mesmerizing promotional video for An Aesthetic Education, Spivak refers to the uselessness of the “old terms” of globalization no longer operant, advocating, in today’s vast and atomized social sphere where “everything is modern,” that we need to “rethink, retool, relocate.”  We need to start being more at home, she says, with a concept of world literature, a boundaryless celebration of cacophonous voices that “embraces all of us” [The Stakes of a World Literature].

To conclude with the penultimate essay – and then with an originating work: The illustrated piece Sign and Trace is a poetics of space grafted onto the massive topography of Anish Kapoor’s monumental steel sculptural work, Memory.  I saw Memory at the Guggenheim Museum four years ago, 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 – and the guard tapping me on the shoulder, forcing me to pull back – to withdraw.

Any incursion into the unknown will be accompanied by prohibitions meant to be ignored.

This redemptive action helps us come full circle, remembering that Spivak’s first major published work was a 1974 literary biography of W.B.Yeats, Myself Must I Remake.  Yeats, indeed! – 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.

Read in this spirit, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization sounds a clarion call to action.