Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the leading and also one of the most intellectually exciting philosophers and literary theorist of our times. She is University Professor, and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, at Columbia University, New York. She has also been a committed activist in rural education and feminist and ecological social movements since 1986. Her 1985 text, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak’ is widely regarded as one of the founding texts of postcolonial scholarship and in the thirty years since its first publication continues to influence and raise philosophical, historiographical, epistemic and political questions across the humanities and the social sciences. She is the author of numerous books including Of Grammatology (translation with critical introduction of Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie, 1976), In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987; Routledge Classic 2002), Selected Subaltern Studies (ed., 1988), The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (1990), Thinking Academic Freedom in Gendered Post-Coloniality (1993) Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993; Routledge classic 2003), Imaginary Maps(translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1994), Breast Stories (translation with critical introduction of three stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1997), Old Women (translation with critical introduction of two stories by Mahasweta Devi, 1999),Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet / Imperative zur Neuerfindung des Planeten (ed. Willi Goetschel, 1999; 2d ed. forthcoming), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), Other Asias (2005), An Aesthetic Education in the Age. 

In 2012 she was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for being "a critical theorist and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in relation to the globalized world". She received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award given by the Republic of India, in 2013. 

Dr Ayça Çubukçu is Assistant Professor in Human Rights in the Department of Sociology and the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the LSE.

ICPS research group presents this lecture, which is co-sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Human Rights, and the Department of Government (@LSEGovernment), Department of Law (@LSELaw), Department of Anthropology (@LSEAnthropology), Department of International Relations (@LSEIRDept), Department of Sociology (@LSEsociology) and the Chair in Contemporary Turkish Studies. 

Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Solidarity (ICPS) is constituted as an interdisciplinary research group. It aims to explore the politics of transnational solidarity by addressing the complications that arise in attempts to define, critique, and practice various strands of internationalism and cosmopolitanism.  

The Centre for the Study of Human Rights at LSE (@LSEHumanRights) is a trans-disciplinary centre of excellence for international academic research, teaching and critical scholarship on human rights. 

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSESpivak

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