Quotes from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Autobiography is a wound where the blood of history does not dry.

When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings -- let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.

Love is just a four letter word! (laughter) Because that's what it is for me! I don't know what it means... I mean, love didn't work, whatever the hell that is, in my life. Alone I am. I'm not particularly into self-love either. I'm quite prepared to die. And all the objects of my love slowly trail off.

The social science fear the radical impulse in literary studies, and over the decades, we in the humanities have trivialized the social sciences into their rational expectation straitjackets, not recognizing that, whatever the state of the social sciences in our own institution, strong tendencies toward acknowledging the silent but central role of the humanities in the area studies paradigm are now around.

Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies are on the rise, and many minority protests that I have witnessed say, in effect, "Do not racially profile us, we are Americans.

Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it cannot provide the absolute guarantee of identity.

Reich implied notions of collective will rather than a dichotomy of deception and undeceived desire: "We must accept the screams of Reich: no, the masses were not deceived; at a particular moment, they actually desired a fascist regime" (FD 215).

Neither Deleuze nor Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within globalizing capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor by making one model of "concrete experience" the model. We are witnessing this in our discipline daily as we see the postcolonial migrant become the norm, thus occluding the native once again.

Imperialism's (or globalization's) image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind. How should one examine this dissimulation of patriarchal strategy, which apparently grants the woman free choice as subject? In other words, how does one make the move from "Britain" to "Hinduism"?

always squinting around the corner for the future that is already with us, at our ease, elsewhere

Where possible, this [Foucault's] model of [localized] resistance is not an alternative to, but can compliment, macrological struggles along 'Marxist' lines. Yet if its situation is universalized, it accomodates unacknowledged privileging of the subject. Without a theory of ideology, it can lead to a dangerous utopianism.