Finding Spivak

I recently IM’d some­one who sounded inter­est­ing on an unnamed quiz/dating site, and was pleas­antly sur­prised to find some­one who made me feel dumb. Not that feel­ing dumb is good, just that it’s eas­ier to see the next plateau when there’s some­one there wav­ing at you.

Unfortunately, reach­ing that plateau involves track­ing down a par­tic­u­lar essay by Gayatri Spivak, pro­fes­sor of Post-colonial Studies at Columbia University. The essay itself is from 1988 1985, and it’s not on the web anywhere.

Which is the real mes­sage to pro­fes­sors every­where: if you want your writ­ing to be read by peo­ple other than your­self, your col­legues, and your grant com­mit­tees, please put them online, for free. Yes, Chomsky has a cadre of fan­boys to do such things for him (or at least, that’s my under­stand­ing), but he is also prac­tic­ing what he preaches regard­ing the respon­si­bil­i­ties of intel­lec­tu­als. He may have a cushier job than most aca­d­e­mics, but to my mind that sim­ply means that you should spend a few hours a week wrestling with a com­puter instead of, for exam­ple, a kiln or bag­gie of psy­clotrop­ics. Make web design/publishing your hobby until you get decent at it, then put your shit online so any­one with a net­work hookup or a lap­top can read it.

What I’ve man­aged to glean from reviews of Spivak tends to mir­ror my thoughts any­ways. As a bit of back­ground, I was intro­duced to rad­i­cal pol­i­tics through black nation­al­ism and white anti-racism, so what she’s quoted as say­ing regard­ing the essay doesn’t seem to be any­thing open for debate — par­tic­u­larly regard­ing those known within civil rights his­to­ries as “white lib­er­als,” and their inabil­ity to speak for any­one but them­selves. White peo­ple telling every­one else what they need to be doing, osten­si­bly for every­one else’s ben­e­fit. Where have we heard this bull­shit before? (Hint: It’s the same old racist “White Man’s Burden” that under­girded the whole global colo­nial enter­prise.) White rev­o­lu­tion­ists (love that term, Emma) can’t tell every­one else how to run their rev­o­lu­tion. Yeah, no shit.

But any­ways, with­out get­ting my hands on an actual copy of the damned essay, any read­ing I can come up with is just me rant­ing and rav­ing out of my ass, by turn, so to all you pro­fes­sors: put your stuff online so peo­ple like me can grok it, mmmkay?

Seriously, if you got into acad­e­mia for the money, you really fucked up some­where — prob­a­bly in think­ing that some­thing with zero repro­duc­tion cost can (or should) be commodified.