Some knowledge of critical theory is recommended as a prerequisite. Professor Gayatri Spivak requests a ten-minute informal interview for those who are interested in taking her spring seminar. To that end, please email her assistant, Kristen, at ker2152@columbia.edu to schedule an appointment.
In the contemporary world, it has become very important for us to be able to distinguish between “global” and “universal.” This course will try to confront this problem through cartography, fiction, film, and political writing.
One of my interests for the last decade or so has been to look at the word “Development.” This has led me to the word “Research,” in what is universally referred to as “R&D,” that is to say “Research and Development” – to people as unlike us as possible and connect to the fact that democracy as bodycount majority requires the presence of a democratic society. I prefer “general to “universal.” All human social groups, including children as a separate social group, think that something resembling the sphere of life they consider “experience” applies to the generality of humankind: however vaguely defined or not defined at all. We have to work with this if we want to consider what to do with universals, rather than simply with the imposition of Eurocentric universals globally. If tracking the universalizable without universalizing is an approach, who can collectively teach or learn this approach? We require uniformity for the functioning of democratic structures and ethical obligations. Statistics are not unnecessary for the operation of social justice.
In this context, we have to think how the everyday “supplements” these requirements. This will oblige us to ask the question: who is the generalized subject or “I” of our classroom? I will consider the subaltern, those who are being globally denied the right to intellectual labor, today and for millennia, and what our obligation is when we generalize from our own limited context. Disability as part of the definition of the democratic subject, and the fact that the presence continually vanishes will be issues in our class.
