Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Quotes
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Nationalism can only ever be a crucial political agenda against oppression. All longing to the contrary, it cannot provide the absolute guarantee of identity.
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Autobiography is a wound where the blood of history does not dry.
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Love is just a four letter word! Because that’s what it is for me! I don’t know what it means... I mean, love didn’t work, whatever the hell that is, in my life. Alone I am. I’m not particularly into self-love either. I’m quite prepared to die. And all the objects of my love slowly trail off.
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When we seem to have won or lost in terms of certainties, we must, as literature teachers in the classroom, remember such warnings - let literature teach us that there are no certainties, that the process is open, and that it may be altogether salutary that it is so.
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If one really thinks about the body as such, there is no possible outline of the body as such.
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Cultural Studies and Ethnic Studies are on the rise, and many minority protests that I have witnessed say, in effect, “Do not racially profile us, we are Americans.
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Deconstruction seems to offer a way out of the closure of knowledge. By inaugurating the open-ended indefiniteness of textuality-by thus 'placing in the abyss' (mettre en abime), as the French expression would literally have it-it shows us the lure of the abyss as freedom. The fall into the abyss of deconstruction inspires us with as much pleasure as fear. We are intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom.
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The social science fear the radical impulse in literary studies, and over the decades, we in the humanities have trivialized the social sciences into their rational expectation straitjackets, not recognizing that, whatever the state of the social sciences in our own institution, strong tendencies toward acknowledging the silent but central role of the humanities in the area studies paradigm are now around.