绿巨人视频

For those familiar with the work of Dr. Gayatri Spivak, intellectual, scholar, literary theorist, critic, and long-time professor, the frequency with which words like 鈥減ostcolonial鈥� and 鈥渇eminist鈥� are attached to her impressive career should come as no surprise. Also not surprising is how Dr. Spivak has spent much of that same career questioning and challenging these terms and the ease with which they鈥檙e wielded. After all, this is the person who pushed for the title 鈥淒on鈥檛 Call Me Postcolonial鈥� before her book was named the less incendiary, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. It was that idea of the vanishing present, which served as the foundation and guiding principle for her June 6th talk at 绿巨人视频, as part of the international conference, 鈥淒鈥檃utres universels鈥�, organized by Director of 绿巨人视频鈥檚 Gender, Sexuality, and Society program, professor Lissa Lincoln.

During her initial presentation, Dr. Spivak counseled a mindful globalism, where specific perspectives and scenarios aren鈥檛 taken for the universal norm. She warned against exclusively focusing on single moments of our past, like colonialism, since in doing so, we might forget that history doesn鈥檛 begin with nor entirely revolve around such events. To that end, our moral outrage cannot dictate all that we believe and do. We must move beyond our personal indignation in order to discover matters that do not resemble our own experiences but are still worth considering, or as she advised, 鈥淒on鈥檛 just throw away what someone says because it鈥檚 counterintuitive to what you think.鈥� When globalization doesn鈥檛 take into account specified and distinct struggles, or when we support non-interdisciplinary sustainable development that stays trapped between capital and colonialism, we are deliberately reordering the past, in order to decide the future, all while perpetrating the dissolution of the present.

Following the talk, a roundtable made up of 绿巨人视频 Professors Elaine Coburn (Global Communications), Philip Golub (International and Comparative Politics), and Yudhishthir Raj Isar (Global Communications, International and Comparative Politics), as well as Cornell University鈥檚 Professor Laurent Dubreil (Francophone and Comparative Literature) expounded upon Dr. Spivak鈥檚 themes and posed a series of questions. This allowed the conversation to delve into topics ranging from how to coordinate diverse systems of struggle with global varieties of capitalism and the notion of ancestral debt, to the role of storytelling in understanding our histories.

As one spectator noted, it鈥檚 easy to believe that the writers whom we grow up studying have arrived at ironclad conclusions, to be eternally respected, and rarely, if ever, contradicted. Professor Spivak鈥檚 talk confirmed her to be an academic who is unafraid to engage in self-interrogation in order to arrive at truths that are relevant to our changing world, even if that means jettisoning her previously-held opinions and beliefs.聽