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Everybody’s Afraid of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Reading Interviews with the Public Intellectual and Postcolonial Critic

In April 1963, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak was interviewed for Newsweek magazine. Since then, she has commented and written on almost every event of sociopolitical significance that has followed the disintegration of a colonial world and is related to the rise of a neocolonial one, making such commentary legitimate, indeed necessary, fodder for literary, textual, and institutional discussion. Her body of work is a testament to, and continuing commentary on, our times—or, as she would say, it is a gesture toward a history of the vanishing present. Spivak has also granted a remarkable number of interviews: at last count, I had found fifty published interviews in English alone. The interview, for Spivak, is an enabling violation that allows the interviewee subject to produce a narrative of the self through a responsive encounter with the other, as well as produce an ethics of accountable transformation. This article reads Spivak through her interviews, a formidable body of work in itself, where she not only articulates strategic essentialism but performs it. I argue that it is no coincidence that Spivak inaugurates the most influential aspect of her work in two interviews, two situations in which she has had to acknowledge the strategy of responding to the time and space she occupies, as well as pay heed to the affective demands of the task. Spivak coined the term “strategic essentialism” in her 1984 interview with Elizabeth Grosz, a term that has subsequently come to be synonymous with her name, fame, and reputation, as one of the most cited concepts in contemporary theories of identity, be it feminism, postcolonialism, or cultural studies. She revised and updated the concept in an interview again, in 1993, with Ellen Rooney, when she was compelled by the shift from a strategic use of essentialism to considerations of institutional agency in the university. Spivak’s interviews offer an interpretive frame for understanding the leading theorist of interpretive frames in our time. Herself a consummate spinner of strategic identity making, Spivak hops from one malleable category to another—Indian, South Asian, feminist, literary theorist, public intellectual, modernist, deconstructionist, and so on—in order to theorize what has come to be known as the diasporic and the postcolonial condition. It is in the interviews that Spivak fashions again and again her interlocutory voice and speaking position. It is also in the interviews that her work as a social interpreter is most radically subject both to interpretation and to framing. Finally, the interviews radically problematize the ways in which Spivak makes use of herself and her psychobiography in order to deconstruct the politics of the subaltern voice and of institutionally sanctioned citational power. Thus, Spivak’s interviews make palpable the affective and performative modality of postcolonial criticism and indeed of any identity‐based critique. This is where her feminist interventions are most productive for us as students and scholars of contemporary subjectivity.