Next Future logo

The Future as Neighbor

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

19 Jun 2010 - 18:30

Auditorium 2

This paper is based on a slight myth-translation: Proximo Futuro as "The Future as Neighbor" rather than "The Next Future" (this is how prochain is mis-translated in Levinas). If we think that in space rather than in sequence an obligation imposed upon us by the contemporaneity of the global today, we are obliged to translate Europe persistently as the site of intervention. How, then, do we think the future? I will refer specifically to Aime Cesaire, Une Saison au Congo.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (born February 24, 1942) is an Indian literary critic, theorist, and self-described "practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist". She is best known for the article "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. Spivak teaches at Columbia University, where she was tenured as University Professor in March 2007. Spivak is perhaps best known for her overtly political use of contemporary cultural and critical theories to challenge the legacy of colonialism on the way readers engage with literature and culture. She often focuses on the cultural texts of those who are marginalised by dominant western culture: the new immigrant, the working class, women and the "postcolonial subject." She is also a visiting faculty member at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.