So clearly, there was a connection. So you read it in the original French and then thought maybe there should be an English translation? In 1947 I was too young — I was five years old — to sense the difference between Hindus and Muslims since I was in a very ecumenical household. There was something very attractive for him about that situation. So this had become part of my way of moving. It had a focus on being dominant for centuries without change. And my father’s Muslim students were so supportive, even to come to him dressed as Hindus and tell him not to answer a phone call in the evening. And that part of deconstruction which said that you do not accuse what you are deconstructing. Whole groups get excluded because a certain kind of dominant discourse is established. It’s coded so that other people, even if they’re not present, can understand what we are saying. When I began, I didn’t notice how critical the book was of “Eurocentrism” because the word in 1967 was not so common. All Rights Reserved. Part II Deconstruction and postcolonial Africa, Chapter 1 Deconstruction in Algeria (Derrida ‘himself’), Chapter 3 Spivak reading Derrida: an interesting exchange, Chapter 5 Reprendre: Mudimbe's deconstructions, Chapter 6 Violence and writing in the African postcolony: Achille Mbembe and Sony Labou Tansi, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial: At the Limits of Theory, Chapter 1 Deconstruction in Algeria (Derrida ‘himself’), Chapter 3 Spivak reading Derrida: an interesting exchange, Chapter 6 Violence and writing in the African postcolony: Achille Mbembe and Sony Labou Tansi. And it’s a very long introduction. I was born in Calcutta. Opening the small house, he would stand with Muslim men on the terrace and women and children inside the house, saying, “As long as I’m alive, nobody is going to touch you.” We didn’t think of the difference so much. They just wore a metal ring around their middle. So I wrote in my contract, I will not do the translation if I cannot write a monograph-length introduction. When he did well in his high school graduating exam, his father said to him, “Ah, then you can be postmaster in the county town,” and my father was much more ambitious, so ticketless, he ran off to Calcutta in 1917. As Spivak is incredibly open the entire interview is great, but her thoughts on what it means to be inside–or for many, outside–academia (as well as her take on Derrida’s identity as an Algerian Jew), are particularly profound. considering that as a self-labeled “deconstructivist,” Spivak attributes her own work to be heavily influenced by Jacques Derrida, another iconoclast of his time. FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please You enter it. So I turned around to think differently. Yet these two people really were both intellectuals and later led lives of intellectuals and brought up their children for the life of the mind. But when that started in our neighborhood, you would hear Allahu akbar and then Hara hara Mahadeo and you knew that someone was being killed. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Vll . Theorizing is a practice. Now it just fills me with shame and embarrassment. [Spivak's] situating of Derrida among his precursors―Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Husserl―and contemporaries―Lacan, Foucault, and the elusive animal known as structuralism―is very lucid and extremely useful. Remember that critical intimacy? So this is why I came to the United States. I did not want to go to Britain because I would have had to take a second BA and I was just immediately post-independence. But I write in the hope that for at least some of the readers of this volume Well, I didn’t know who Derrida was at all. I got my degree at the University of Calcutta, and I was working on my MA. She speaks about what it was like to first translate Derrida’s Of Grammatology in the '60s as a young woman shortly after immigrating from India, as well as her new afterward for the 40th anniversary edition of that book, and everything that happened in between. Proto-feminist dad, feminist mother. It’s critical intimacy, not critical distance. It was there in the Hindu-Muslim riots, which were very unusual because until then there had been a sort of conflictual coexistence for centuries. You see, one of the things he understood, perhaps more than I did at that point, was the meaning of this Asian girl who really didn’t have much French, launching this book into the world in her own way, so far out of the European coterie of high philosophy. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. deconstruction, Specters of Marx, deconstructive thinking, subaltern women, globalization, multinational finance capital. But I assume you got to know him quite well after that. No, no. I was 25 and an assistant professor at the University of Iowa in 1967, and I was trying to keep myself intellectually clued in. So I thought, “Well, I’m a smart young foreign woman, and here’s an unknown author. Did you have much contact with Derrida himself as you were working on the translation? My mother was married at 14, and my brother was born when she was 15. My introduction was a humble introduction because I had never even had a course in philosophy. And you locate a moment where the text teaches you how to turn it around and use it. Deconstruction, a critical practice introduced by French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida, ostensibly serves to interrogate the assumptions of Western thought by reversing or displacing the hierarchical "binary oppositions" that provide its foundation. GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK: When I translated it, I didn’t know who Derrida was or anything about his thinking. I was in my mid-20s when I wrote that letter. Well, it marked my relatives more than my immediate family because my father had in fact run away from East Bengal, which is now Bangladesh.