Showing all 9 books
I had but that one arrow, says Chotti Munda, the hero of this epic tale. A ‘magic’ arrow that stood for the pride, the wisdom, the culture, of their society, a society threatened with inevitable disintegration as its traditional structures crumbled under the assault of ‘national development’. The wide sweep of this important novel encompasses many layers. It ranges over decades in the life of Chotti—the central character—in which India moves from ...
Are the ‘culture wars’ over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world’s foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave. “We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban,†Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to ...
For almost three decades, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, has been ignoring the standardized ‘rules’ of the academy and trespassing across disciplinary boundaries. Today she remains one of the foremost figures in the study of world literature and its cultural consequences. In this new book she declares the death of comparative literature as we know it and sounds an urgent call for a ‘new comparative literature’, in which the discipline is given new life—one ...
The two stories in this collection, ‘Statue’ (Murti) and The Fairy Tale of Mohanpur’ (Mohanpurer Rupkatha) are touching, poignant tales, in both of which the protagonists are old women. In the first, a tragic, for bidden love returns to haunt Dulah, now an old woman pre-occupied only wih filling her stomach and surviving from day to day. In the second, Andi loses her eyes through a combination of poverty, societal indifference and governmental apathy, even ...
Ram Proshad (c. 1720–1781) is a much-loved, much-sung mystic poet of Bengal, whose violently intimate relationship with his goddess, the awesome Kali, inspired spiritual love poetry which lives and breathes on the skin. Nirod Mazumdar (1916–1982), a painter whose own quest led him deep into the myths and values of his heritage, responded with visuals evoked by his passionate feeling for these fervid lyrics. A bilingual Bengali-French edition emerged, with the ...
Influential enough to have affected the entire French critical scene, Jacques Derrida has been hailed as the most important philosopher in France today. "without a knowledge of Of Grammatology the American scholar has a simply inaccurate view of the French critical advance-guard," Spivak writes. "For in the final analysis, Derrida, even as he questions the notion of 'correction', corrects the common assumption of the two mutually opposed French ...
What is contained in a state has become ever more plural while the boundaries of a state have become ever more fluid. In a world of migration and shifting allegiances--caused by cultural, economic military and climatic change--the state is a more provisional place and its inhabitants, more stateless. This spirited and engaging conversation, between two of America's foremost critics and two of the most influential theorists of the last decade, ranges widely across ...