An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization

During past twenty years, world's most renowned critical theorist--the scholar who defined field of postcolonial studies--has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting globalized present, she turns elsewhere to make her central argument: that aesthetic education is last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy. Spivak's unwillingness to sacrifice ethical in name of aesthetic, or to sacrifice aesthetic in grappling with 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 concerns Spivak addresses is this: Are we ready to forfeit wealth of world's languages in name of global communication? Even a good globalization (the failed dream of socialism) requires uniformity which 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 social urgency of humanities and renews case for literary studies, imprisoned in corporate university. Perhaps, she writes, the literary can still do something.