Teaching Spivak-Otherwise

Grounded in the revolutionary Marxist view that "e;theory ... becomes a material force when it has seized the masses,"e; Teaching Spivak-Otherwise: A Contribution to the Critique of the Post-Theory Farrago activates the practice of critique as a mode of "e;teaching otherwise"e; for transformative social change. Taking the post-theory teachings of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as its central focus, author Jerry D. Leonard meticulously unpacks Spivak's fashionably dense writings and "e;talks."e; His analyses reveal that what passes for "e;radical"e; thought in the dominant humanities is actually a sustained mystification that attempts to erase class struggle and class critique from the realm of knowledge. One of the book's most significant interventions is its powerful appropriation of "e;close reading"e; as a strategy in the broader project of ideology critique. Teaching Spivak-Otherwise does for Spivak what Frederick Engels did for Eugen Duhring and Mao Zedong did for Deng Xiaoping: it teaches the class lesson that Spivak's thought is a complexly obscured articulation of "e;new"e; ruling class ideas in what Lenin called "e;a farrago of contrasting principles ..., an urge to rise verbally to the higher spheres and conceal the conflicts between the historical groups of the population with phrases."e; This book will be a useful supplementary text for undergraduate and graduate courses in contemporary critical theory and pedagogy.