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My PhD advisor used to write "you wouldn't say that to Gayatri Spivak" in the margins of my diss. She was right. And I wouldn't say any of this to Spivak, either. But here's my essay "'Can the Subaltern Speak' to my Students?" in the latest @FemFormations https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/42437
I ask: "who among us only ever teaches texts over which we have total mastery, texts we are able to translate fluently into other languages, texts whose every reference & intertext we can speak to with unambiguous authority, which we can explain to students once and for always?"
really grateful to @samanthanpinto and @pornoscholar for editing this tremendous issue on "Stories that Matter Now: Feminist Classics & Feminist Desire in the Contemporary Classroom." It's a particular thrill to be in an issue w the brilliant RWiegman, who I worked w in undergrad
with thanks and apologies to @dee_bee_h for the inspirational tweet; thanks to @possiblynasia @syxiang @p8ja @knadimintea (+PSundar and RKantor) for sharing w me their experiences teaching Spivak; thanks to @_saikatmajumdar and @amitavakumar who I cite here.
there's a Rooney connection, in the form of an endnote, for those reading the awesome-looking @AtPost45 dossier on Sally Rooney
and I have to thank @BecomingChiara as well, who, while I was writing this on Spivak, invited me to contribute to her incisive and vital issue of @philosopher1923 called "Questioning Power" https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/current-issue
"What question should we be be asking?" asked @BecomingChiara I wrote for her issue on the question "What is 'We'?" but this @FemFormations essay provides another answer. What question should be asking? Of ourselves and of our students? Spivak's.
and after you've read the fantastic @FemFormations issue edited by @samanthanpinto & @pornoscholar check out the @AtPost45 dossier I co-edited w @jdanielelam "1990 at 30" w essays on feminist classics by JButler, PHill Collins, ESedgwick, bell hooks & more http://post45.org/sections/contemporaries/1990-at-30/
"1990 at 30" includes my short take on reading Homi Bhabha now, which it occurs to me (belatedly, in proper postcolonial fashion) is also a fitting companion piece to my essay on teaching GC Spivak now http://post45.org/2020/05/the-nation-we-knew-after-homi-bhabhas-dissemination/
