Feminism and Deconstruction

Conference and seminar by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Calcutta, 1942) is known primarily as one of the principle voices of post-colonial theory. Both her conference and the seminar to follow it will focus on the axis of her work: the necessity to clearly articulate and modify Marxism, Feminism, and Deconstruction. She made this clear in her essays published throughout the 1970s in which she confronted problems related to the strategies of feminist reading, the politics of interpretation, and the institutional place of literary studies.

"When you ask Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak about the force of this "multitude" that, according to Antonio Negri, has the necessary tools (migratory fluids for breaking down borders, the disappearance of property in the immaterial working world, etc.) on hand to respond to the Empire and attain the arrival of Communism, her response is devastating and blunt; one that could only have come from a body lost in the third world of the Third World: "The use of technological information by radical sectors has precious little to do with the millions of people that find themselves outside of any possibility to gain access to it, or of any possibility to migrate. These are the ´subalterns´ described by Antonio Gramesci in his prison diaries. To be able to ‘speak' and to ‘act' means having the possibility to offer an answer." The "multitude" is a notion that can mask a fundamental heterogeneity; one that takes to broadly speaking between social groups that, in one way or another, have or do not have access to means of communication and movement. In reality, the ‘subaltern' is he or she who cannot speak and is, therefore, unable to respond."

Manuel Asensi

This activity is a part of the PEI open programming.

Organized with the collaboration of the Departament de Psicologia Social de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, el Centre Dona i Literatura, Càtedra UNESCO Dones, desenvolupament i Cultura (Universitat de Barcelona) and with the participation of the group Cos i Textualitat (UAB, UB, UdG, UM).