ABSTRACT

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1942-) is a Bengali cultural and literary critic. Born in Calcutta, India to a middle-class family during the waning years of British colonial rule, she attended Presidency College of the University of Calcutta, graduating in 1959 with a degree in English literature. She moved to the United States in 1962 and attended graduate school at Cornell University, where she received her PhD in comparative literature under the direction of Paul de Man, who introduced her to the work of Jacques DERRIDA. Her 1977 translation of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1967) into English made Derrida’s work available to a wider audience. She gained initial notoriety from her outstanding introduction to that work, quickly becoming recognized among English-speaking academics seeking help in understanding Derrida’s text. Spivak is currently Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.