Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization

During the past twenty years, the world’s most renowned critical theorist Mrs. Spivak —the scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studies—has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting the globalized present, she turns elsewhere to make her central argument: that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s unwillingness to sacrifice the ethical in the name of the aesthetic, or to sacrifice the aesthetic in grappling with the political, makes her task formidable. As she wrestles with these fraught relationships, she rewrites Friedrich Schiller’s concept of play as double bind, reading Gregory Bateson with Gramsci as she negotiates Immanuel Kant, while in dialogue with her teacher Paul de Man. Among the concerns Spivak addresses is this: Are we ready to forfeit the wealth of the world’s languages in the name of global communication? “Even a good globalization (the failed dream of socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues must challenge,” Spivak writes. “The tower of Babel is our refuge.”

A dense but rewarding series of meditations on the possibility of reading, learning, and teaching that would encourage the full flowering of cultural, sexual, and linguistic diversity and resist the homogenizing force of globalization. Working primarily in the field of postcolonial studies and comparative literature, Spivak (The Post-Colonial Critic) also draws on her experience as a trainer of elementary school teachers in West Bengal as she considers figures as diverse as Friedrich Schiller, Rabindranath Tagore, and J.M. Coetzee to argue how “an aesthetic education” prepares individuals for participation. As usual, with its tortured grammatical structures and addiction to academic jargon, the author’s writing style makes few concessions to the unprepared reader. Nonetheless, patience and a passing acquaintance with the work of some of the writers she draws on are all that is necessary to penetrate the formidable depths of her thought. The gathered texts are a testament to a fundamental faith in the power of literature that is never less than inspiring.