Spivak, Gayatri (1942—)
Indian-born collocation, post-structuralism, Marxism literary critic and theorist. The daughter of middle-class parents, she was born in Calcutta at a time when India was still part of the British Empire. Borrowing money, she moved to the US to attend graduate school at Cornell, where she did comparative literature because that was the only school to offer her a scholarship. She wrote her PhD on William Butler Yeats, under the direction of Paul de Man. Her first job was at the University of Iowa, which she started a full two years before her dissertation was defended in 1967. Around the same time she happened to read about a certain book by Derrida, Jacques, whom she had not at that time heard of, and was so struck by it she decided to translate it. That book was De la grammatologie (1967); her translation of it as Of Grammatology (1974) literally changed her life. She was suddenly propelled into the spotlight right at the moment when deconstruction was the height of intellectual fashion. Although she uses deconstructive ideas and motifs in her work, Spivak is not a Derridean. Her work is diverse in its outlook but concentrates on a handful of key problematics underpinning what, in her magnum opus A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), she terms postcolonial reason, particularly agency, identity, and subjectivity. These three themes are brought together to stunning effect in what is undoubtedly Spivak’s best-known work, the 1988 essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (incorporated into A Critique of Postcolonial Reason), which offers a powerful meditation on and theorization of the practice of sati (the ritual immolation of widows). Spivak’s answer to this vexed question is quite straightforward: the subaltern cannot speak insofar as he/she remains a subaltern---by definition the subaltern is politically mute, unable to voice their perspective on the way things are and expect to be heard. But in true deconstructive fashion, she also questions the possibility of the ‘pure’ voice of the subaltern. It is in this context that she has argued that it is sometimes necessary to adopt a stance she calls strategic essentialism, as a means of finding a speaking voice. In later works, she has admitted that this essay is largely autobiographical; she has also amended her position with regard to Deleuze, Gilles and actual and softened her often misdirected critiques of their work. Not one to pull punches, Spivak has also written blistering critiques of so-called French feminism, especially of Kristeva, Julia, for the blithe way it treats non-European others, placing it in a long line of western appropriations of the East (the honourable exception in her view is Cixous, Hélène). Mindful of her comparatively privileged position and the necessary complicity with the global capitalist system it entails, Spivak has used her status to set up foundations in India to support literacy campaigns for indigenous women. She has also translated a series of works by Indian novelist Mahasweta Devi. Further Reading: B. Moore-Gilbert Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (1997). M. Sanders Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory (2006). Stanislavsky, Konstantin Sergeyevich (1863—1938) Russian theatre director, best known as the ‘father’ of so-called ‘method acting’ (Hollywood devotees include Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Paul Newman). Born to a very wealthy family, Stanislavsky had a very privileged upbringing. Incredibly, given his bourgeois background, Stanislavsky survived both the revolutions of 1917 and Stalin’s purges. Although his family disapproved of acting as an occupation for their son, it being considered too low class, they were wealthy enough to have their own private theatre in which he could experiment. His access to family money enabled him to establish first the Moscow Society for Literature and then, more importantly, the Moscow Art Theatre, whose touring performances to Europe and America were the real source of his global influence. The Moscow Art Theatre staged works by many of the leading lights of Russian literature, e.g. Isaac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anton Chekhov, and Maxim Gorky. It is however for his contribution to acting methodology that Stanislavsky is best known. Several of his works are available in English, for example: An Actor Prepares (1936), Building a Character, Creating a Role (1961), and the autobiography My Life in Art (1925). Stanislavsky’s ‘method’ or ‘system’, as it is variously known, teaches actors to ‘live’ their parts either by calling on their own memories and experiences, or by ‘inhabiting’ the imagined world of their character. Stanislavsky famously used to ask his actors to perform theatrical exercises and games designed to estrange them as individual actors from their selves, to better enable them to ‘become’ their characters. This naturalistic style was explicitly rejected by Brecht, Bertolt, but it is virtually the standard mode in contemporary cinema. There is probably no more influential theorist of theatre in the twentieth century. Further Reading: J. Benedetti Stanislavski: An Introduction. (1982). J. Benedetti Stanislavski: His Life and Art (1998).