All disciplines produce knowledge and the students learn to know. The humanities – literature and philosophy – teach the practice of learning. In knowing, you know an object.
Five PhD candidates in the Nordic countries are invited to participate in a masterclass with Holberg Laureate Gayatri C. Spivak. Each participant will be asked to prepare a 5-minute presentation related to the theme chosen by the Laureate. After the presentations there will be a panel discussion.
This event is part of the 2025 Holberg Week, which takes place from 3rd to 6th June, in Bergen and Oslo.
Abstract
In the practice of learning, as taught by the humanities, you attempt to hold yourself effaced, suspending judgment, in order to displace yourself into the space of what you are trying to learn. This is imaginative activism. The literary or philosophical text stages a field of desire. Uninstructed reading usually takes the text to be a fulfilment of those desires. This Masterclass will discuss these and related issues.
Participants
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. (Photo: Alice Attie.)
Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is the 2025 Holberg Laureate. She has held the position of University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University since 2007, where she has been a faculty member since 1991, and where she is also a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Spivak has published nine books and translated many others. Her works have been translated into over 20 languages. Spivak’s key works include In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1987), A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Death of a Discipline (2003), An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), and Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee and Certain Scenes of Teaching (2018). Her latest book is Spivak Moving (2024).
More information on participants will follow.
Curriculum
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 1999. Can the subaltern speak? Section from Chapter 3 “History” in Critique of postcolonial reasonstarting with the line “At the other end of the spectrum…”. Harvard University Press, pp. 244-311.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2010. “In response”, in Can the subaltern speak? Reflections on the history of an idea, Rosalind C. Morris (ed.). Columbia University Press, pp. 227-236.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2017. “Global Marx?”, in Knowledge, Class, and Economics: Marxism without Guarantees, Richard McIntyre, Robert Garnett Jr. and Theodore Burczak (eds). Taylor and Francis, pp. 265-287.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2023. “Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition”, in Death of a Discipline. Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Columbia University Press, pp. 1-8.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2015. “Crimes of Identity”. In Juliet Mitchell and the Lateral Axis: Twenty-First-Century Psychoanalysis and Feminism, Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker (eds). Palgrave Macmillan US, pp. 207-227.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2003. “Foucault and Najibullah”, in “Other Asias”. Wiley pp. 132-161.
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2016. “Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Here, Now”, in Constellations of a contemporary Romanticism, Jacques Khalip and Forrest Pyle (eds). Fordham University Press, pp. 309-322. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1c99996.17
- Spivak, Gayatri C. 2020. “Being Human”. Keynote given at MLA 2020. DRAFT DO NOT QUOTE.
- Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2024. “Teaching for a Broken World.” ANGLICA-An International Journal of English Studies 33.3 (2024): 11-26.
