Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften Teaching Spivak—Otherwise: A Contribution to the Critique of the Post-Theory Farrago: 19 (Education and Struggle: Narrative, Dialogue, and the Political Production of Meaning)

Grounded in the revolutionary Marxist view that "theory ... becomes a material force when it has seized the masses," Teaching Spivak-Otherwise: A Contribution to the Critique of the Post-Theory Farrago activates the practice of critique as a mode of "teaching otherwise" 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 "talks." His analyses reveal that what passes for "radical" 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 "close reading" as a strategy in the broader project of ideology critique. Teaching Spivak-Otherwise does for Spivak what Frederick Engels did for Eugen Dühring and Mao Zedong did for Deng Xiaoping: it teaches the class lesson that Spivak's thought is a complexly obscured articulation of "new" ruling class ideas in what Lenin called "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." This book will be a useful supplementary text for undergraduate and graduate courses in contemporary critical theory and pedagogy. Review " Teaching Spivak--Otherwise sharply contests Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's postcolonial, feminist, and (post)Derridean deconstructive reading practice, a reading practice that, because it claims to re-read Marx in and for the contemporary moment, is widely regarded as participating in the revolutionary project of Marx's ideological critique of capitalism. Through a patient and tightly focused Marxist close reading and ideological critique of influential texts by Spivak, Jerry Leonard's book offers a necessary 'other' education: he demonstrates that Spivak's reading practice is not only not revolutionary--it is counterrevolutionary, traversed by contradiction to the point of dis-integration. Leonard argues that Spivak's lessons in reading, presented under the banner of 'irreducibility, ' are in effect 'an elaborate mystification of the transformative class politics of Marxist theory.' Such reading lessons as Spivak's have devastating consequences for the world's workers. Through a carefully sequenced series of lucid explications, Leonard shows that Spivak's pedagogy of 'irreducibility' actually reduces subjects of capital to confused readers--readers who repeatedly lose their place in Spivak's texts as they puzzle over the meaning(s) of her intellectual meanderings over and around Marx's concepts, especially the concept of class. Leonard emphasizes that the product of reading Spivak--a legion of confused readers--is precisely the way in which Spivak assists capital: confused readers who get lost in a contradictory textscape that makes a muddle of 'class' are likewise unprepared to locate themselves as class subjects in capital's brutal regime of wage labor. Teaching Spivak--Otherwise is a rigorous critical argument for the necessity of revolutionary historical and dialectical materialist thinking that alone offers a future of life-sustaining and enriching possibility, for all." --Deborah Kelsh, Professor at The College of Saint Rose (Albany, New York) About the Author JERRY D. LEONARD teaches English at Lanzhou Jiaotong University in China. He received his PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and his JD in law from Syracuse University. He is also the author of Mo Yan Thought (Peter Lang).