An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization

During the past twenty years, the worlds most renowned critical theoristthe scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studieshas experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting the globalized present, she turns elsewhere to make her central argument: that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks unwillingness to sacrifice the ethical in the name of the aesthetic, or to sacrifice the aesthetic in grappling with the political, makes her task formidable. As she wrestles with these fraught relationships, she rewrites Friedrich Schillers concept of play as double bind, reading Gregory Bateson with Gramsci as she negotiates Immanuel Kant, while in dialogue with her teacher Paul de Man. Among the concerns Spivak addresses is this: Are we ready to forfeit the wealth of the worlds languages in the name of global communication? Even a good globalization (the failed dream of socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues must challenge, Spivak writes. The tower of Babel is our refuge. In essays on theory, translation, Marxism, gender, and world literature, and on writers such as Assia Djebar, J. M. Coetzee, and Rabindranath Tagore, Spivak argues for the social urgency of the humanities and renews the case for literary studies, imprisoned in the corporate university. Perhaps, she writes, the literary can still do something. "During the past twenty years, the world's most renowned critical theorist -- the scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studies -- has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting the globalized present, she turns elsewhere to make her central argument: that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy. Spivak's unwillingness to sacrifice the ethical in the name of the aesthetic, or to sacrifice the aesthetic in grappling with the political, makes her task formidable. As she wrestles with these fraught relationships, she rewrites Friedrich Schiller's concept of play as double bind, reading Gregory Bateson with Gramsci as she negotiates Immanuel Kant, while in dialogue with her teacher Paul de Man. Among the concerns Spivak addresses is this: Are we ready to forfeit the wealth of the world's languages in the name of global communication? 'Even a good globalization (the failed dream of socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues must challenge, ' Spivak writes. 'The tower of Babel is our refuge.' In essays on theory, translation, Marxism, gender, and world literature, and on writers such as Assia Djebar, J.M. Coetzee, and Rabindranath Tagore, Spivak argues for the social urgency of the humanities and renews the case for literary studies, imprisoned in the corporate university. 'Perhaps, ' she writes, 'the literary can still do something.'"--The dust-jacket front flaps Preface Introduction The burden of English Who claims alterity? How to read a "culturally different" book The double bind starts to kick in Culture: situating feminism Teaching for the times Acting bits/identity talk Supplementing Marxism What's left of theory? Echo Translation as culture Translating into English Nationalism and the imagination Resident alien Ethics and politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and certain scenes of teaching Imperative to re-imagine the planet Reading with Stuart Hall in "pure" literary terms Terror: a speech after 9/11 Harlem Scattered speculations on the subaltern and the popular World systems and the creole The stakes of world literature Rethinking comparativism Sign and trace Tracing the skin of day. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient, this title argues that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy.