Mahasweta Devi’s short stories attracted a wide Western audience due to the literary fame of one of her translators, Gayatri Chakavorty Spivak (for her translations of Devi and other writers such as Aime Cesare, the Sahitya Akadami, the Indian National Academy of Letters, bestowed upon her a translation award in 1997). Spivak is a literary critic, feminist theorist, and postcolonial theorist who holds a position as Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and is a founding member of Columbia’s Institute for Comparative Literature and Society.
Spivak was born in 1942 in Kolkata (Calcutta then) to a family of intellectuals and moved to the United States in 1962 for graduate school at Cornell, where she received her M.A. and PhD. Her dissertation was on the poet W.B. Yeats. In 1965 she became Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, and taught at numerous universities and colleges before going to Columbia. In 1967 she translated Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie and almost immediately attained fame. In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books Spivak spoke of what drew her to Derrida, who was unknown in the United States at the time: “I managed to read it and thought it was an extraordinary book. This was before the internet, so nobody was telling me anything about Derrida. My teacher had not met Derrida when I left Cornell, so I truly didn’t know who he was. So I thought, ‘Well, I’m a smart young foreign woman, and here’s an unknown author. Nobody’s going to give me a contract for a book on him, so why don’t I try to translate him?’ And I had heard at a cocktail party that the University of Massachusetts Press was doing translations, so I wrote them a very innocent query letter in late 1967 or early 1968. They told me later that they found my query letter so brave and sweet that they thought they should give me a chance. [Laughs.] It’s really ridiculous, but there it was.”
Her most famous essay was “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” given as a conference paper in 1983 and published in 1988. Emory University’s Michael Kilburn explains the article’s content and notoriety: “In it, she describes the circumstances surrounding the suicide of a young Bengali woman that indicates a failed attempt at self-representation. Because her attempt at ‘speaking’ outside normal patriarchal channels was not understood or supported, Spivak concluded that ‘the subaltern cannot speak.’ Her extremely nuanced argument, admittedly confounded by her sometimes opaque style, led some incautious readers to accuse her of phallocentric complicity, of not recognizing or even not letting the subaltern speak. Some critics, missing the point, buttressed their arguments with anecdotal evidence of messages cried out by burning widows. Her point was not that the subaltern does not cry out in various ways, but that speaking is ‘a transaction between speaker and listener’ . . . Subaltern talk, in other words, does not achieve the dialogic level of utterance.”
Other works include The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (edited by Sarah Harasym, 1990), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1992), Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2008), An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization (2012), and Readings (2014). She has won numerous awards and honorary doctorates.
