ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a feminist thinker. Renowned for her English translation and indispensable introduction to Derrida's Of Grammatology, as a founding feminist force of postcolonial studies, and as a philosopher of globality forging theory and practice, Spivak resists autobiography. In Spivak's thought, a commitment to the other cannot rest upon top-down benevolence, or any claims to the easy recovery and representation of subaltern subjects. Feminist analytics fuel the consistent supplementation of a politics of identity with an ethics of alterity that marks Spivak's thought. Spivakian readings of international civil society and economic do-gooding have thus offered a loving critique of the abstract, universal concept of the human built on the idea of self-sameness. Spivakian pedagogy challenges global habits of hegemony in which education for the subaltern means enforcing rote memory to reproduce social immobility and inequality.
