​Prof Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak reflects on globalisation, the role of universities in educating students and planning for failure at IPSA's recent Gender, Politics and the State conference at Stellenbosch University.

“We should pray to be haunted by the other."

These were the words of Prof Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a leading literary theorist and feminist critic from Colombia University, who is known across the world as the person responsible for a thorough and careful 1967 translation of philosopher Jacques Derrida's De la grammatologie into its English version, Of Grammatology.

Spivak was one of the keynote speakers at the conference hosted by the Research Committee 07 (Women and Politics in the Global South) of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) that was hosted by Stellenbosch University's (SU) SARChI Chair in Gender Politics, Prof Amanda Gouws.

Through the translation of Derrida's work, Spivak opened up deconstruction theory to many scholars across the world. Deconstruction, according to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy “is to take a text apart along the structural “fault lines" created by the ambiguities inherent in one or more of its key concepts or themes in order to reveal the equivocations or contradictions that make the text possible". 

Spivak was responsible for introducing a panel discussion at the RC07 conference focused on “The Vanishing Present at the Global University". The panel included Prof Vasti Roodt, an Associate Professor in the Philosphy Department at SU with a research focus on modern political philosophy and questions relating to the public/private distinction and the social contract, and Ms Lovelyn Nwadeyi, an SU alumnus, former radio presenter at 702 and a social justice activist who participated in the first wave of the #FeesMustFall movement in 2015.

“When I speak about the Global University, I am not saying 'think globally, act globally'," said Spivak, who was hosted in South Africa by the Stellenbosch University Business School. “The local is global and so we have to really rethink how we think about these words."

“I have taught teachers living on the Jharkhand border of India and PhD students at Columbia University in the United States and so my experience comes from the top and the bottom. I teach teachers in the poorest and most outback areas of India and I teach them in Bengali and some of my students there have never seen a white person, some have not even seen trains. So I talk of experience at both ends. And even there, in those poor forgotten areas, the situation is globalised."  

She also reflected on the university's inability to help shape enquiring minds who are able interrogate their own privilege and perspectives.

“Last semester I taught a group of seniors on the global university and I interviewed students for this course. What I found, is that because of the way that we teach now, many of those students did not know how to “read". They could describe and summarise what was in the literature we read, they could present their own thoughts and then cull examples from the text to support their own thoughts, yet they could not understand what was happening within the text. Even my best student, a senior at Columbia University, a bright student, he would give back the words I had just shared with him. So every week I would make them write a response paper based on what they had read and upon it, I would build my class.

“At the end of the class, this bright student came to my office and no matter how he tried, he knew he had still not mastered “reading", because he could not understand the other. He sat there crying and I looked at him and I said, I am not your mother and I am not your shrink, so I am not going to comfort you, but I am glad that you are not only responding with rage. He understood in that moment what he had lost by not understanding the other."

Reflecting on this situation and her own work as a literary theorist, Spivak said that she believed that the “humanities should cook the souls" of students and that literary analysis should flex the scholar's imagination beyond what is possible.

“Learning without character is dangerous. In order to be able to use any kind of learning you are obliged to have a soul that is prepared."

The vanishing present she referred to her in topic, said Spivak, alluded to “the limits of planning".

“As much as I believe planning to be important, we must always plan as if we will not succeed, because no matter what we plan for, something will happen or change along the way, but on the one hand, you need to plan as if you will succeed too. This is what I call the vanishing present, the future is not ever certain."

During her introductory remarks Spivak also engaged with comments from Roodt who touched on issues around the decolonisation of knowledge and the importance of not holding up some forms of knowledge as better merely because of where they originate from as well as Nwadeyi who reflected on her experiences as a student at Stellenbosch University only learning about knowledge produced by Western scholars.

“Based on the fact that education shapes our identity, knowledge that makes its way into the classroom and is then imparted to students already carries power and privilege based on its positionality. Therefore teaching knowledge only produced by one set of scholars reinforced the notion that people that look like, and sound like me, as a person of colour, do not produce knowledge. This in turn impacted mine and many others' sense of self as students of colour," explained Nwadeyi.

This form of learning at the university, said Nwadeyi, created the impression that persons of colour are not producers of knowledge, when in fact, examples like the Basotho game, diketo, played by young children, proved the opposite.

Quoting Zulumathabo Zulu from the Basotho Origins of Mathematics, Nwadeyi said: “The game involves the distribution of a bunch of stones between the players in the game and the hole in the ground where stones are played. This game is based on an algebraic formula f(x)=x-1. Five year olds play this game and understand the mathematical principle, but when Sotho children are taught maths in high school nothing about their lived experiences of playing this childhood game is incorporated into their learning of mathematics. So many black children grow up thinking they can't do Algebra or Cartesian maths because no one tells them that a version thereof exists in their own language or culture. This is why it's critical to make educational curricula relevant and reflective of the experiences of those who must internalise them.

“Of course the argument then is not to say that African knowledge is valuable because it comes from Africa, or that Western knowledge is valuable because it comes from the West. The argument is that it is critical for students to be able to find and situate themselves in the knowledge being imparted to them because of the way that knowledge consumption, production and application shapes the identity of students/learners and by extension society as a whole."

Reflecting on India's caste system and how even education is denied to the lowest classes, Spivak explained why she realised that teaching literature in the villages she taught in would prove fruitless.

“In India, in the area where I teach, even the right to intellectual labour is denied. There is no cultural programme there and even there, amongst the lowest classes, they are also riddled with class prejudices. So teaching literature there is useless, but by teaching them the literary, you are teaching the lowest of the low how to think and judge and think about democracy," explained Spivak.

“Democracy is not just about fixing, but also about equality of others who do not resemble me at all and who is not part of the nation state, the most marginal of the marginal.

“I am not interested in teaching literature and philosophy, I am interested in practising the literary, which is wanting to go as far as possible. To decide what is specifically good is a hopelessly evil thing. Who are you to know? In the literary you are asked to also hang out with murderers – yet I am not saying that murderers are good – but can you go there? The idea to be able to say yes to the enemy is the idea of the imagination.

“At the top, I say to my students, before you decide you are going to help the whole world, think about who you are helping and whether this is real help. They have this idea that those they help are just like them, that to be equal is to be the same. The first right is the right to refuse, but the idea of a ruling class is based on the idea of [of those in lower positions always] agreeing with them. So often, when they the ruling class are amongst the [poor], they take photos of their achievements, the things they have done for these poor people, and then walk off feeling good about themselves."

Spivak went on to describe how she also teaches the teachers she educates in India about the importance of agency. “Agency requires you to take into account that there is a future and that there are other generations to come and that whatever you are planning in good faith something else will happen. But how do you work for agency? If my students are going to vote, then they have to learn that democracy is not just me, me, me, but it is still a difficult thing to teach because I run their schools and pay their salaries," explained Spivak as she touched on the inability of the lower classes to have real agency in a situation where their income is derived from someone from a higher class who are also teaching them about agency.

“It is about moving towards those whose minds have been killed by knowledge management."

“We need remember that having a democratic structure does not produce a democratic country.

“National liberation is not a revolution, it is essentially where the failure of decolonisation begins."

The RC07 conference was the first to be held on South African soil and was attended by a number of high profile academics and delegates from Africa, Asia and Latin America specialising in gender politics.

Gouws, who is the Chair of RC07 and a Political Science professor that specialises in gender politics in the Political Science Department said at the start of the conference that it “was important because it brings together women from developing countries, or what is known in academic circles as the Global South, to talk about issues that are important to them".

Other than Spivak, keynotes were also delivered by Prof Josephine Ahikire, an Associate Professor and Dean in the School of Women and Gender Studies at Makerere University in Uganda; and Prof Gabeba Baderoon, an Extraordinary Professor in the English Department at SU and Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality and African Studies in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University in the United States.

Photo: Prof Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (fourth from the left), a leading literary theorist and feminist critic from Colombia University, was a keynote speaker on a panel discussion focused on “The Vanishing Present at the Global University" and which included Prof Vasti Roodt (second from the left) from the Philosophy Department and Ms Lovelyn Nwadeyi (third from the left), a former BA International Studies student at SU. With the three participants are (from the left) Prof Nico Koopman, Vice-Rector: Social Impact, Transformation and Personnel at SU, Prof Amanda Gouws, who holds the SARChI in Gender Politics and was the organiser of the IPSA conference, and Prof Daniel Malan, Director: Centre for Corporate Governance in Africa at Stellenbosch University Business School. (Anton Jordaan, SSFD)