Overview
The proper training of the Humanities is our best weapon for producing problem-solvers. If they are acknowledged as imaginative activists, rearranging desires, building the possibility of constructing self and world differently as objects of knowing, producing the intuitions of democracy outside of the demands of electoral politics, the power and difficulties of the task emerge. To implement this is an uphill road, since the priorities for developing societies seem to be located elsewhere. My paper will consider this problem as practically as possible, considering, along the way, such typical criticisms as individualism, mere liberalism, etc.
Biography
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is University Professor, the highest honor given to a handful of professors across the university, and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. She is considered the world’s most renowned critical theorist and the scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studies. Her latest book, An Aesthetic Education in An Era of Globalization (2012), explains a radical reorientation of her thinking. Professor Spivak trains teachers and guides ecological agriculture in western Birbhum district, West Bengal, India. She has many other globalization projects which concentrate on and in: consortial initiatives in continental Africa; Himalayan Studies initiatives, Kathmandu-Kolkata- Kunming, and thinking globality together in French India and Senegambia.
