Had he been polite, made it clear he was Dalit, it would have been different: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on JNU row

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak said that she was not picking on people’s accents, and had stressed on the pronunciation of American sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’ last name only because he was Haitian and not French.

Responding to the controversy that erupted after one of her talks at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on May 24 said that she was not picking on people’s accents, and had stressed on the pronunciation of American sociologist W.E.B Du Bois’ last name only because he was Haitian and not French.

This comes after videos of the question-and-answer (Q&A) session during Ms. Spivak’s talk at JNU on May 21, showed her shutting down a Dalit student over his pronunciation of DuBois’s last name as he attempted to ask her a question about her positioning herself as middle-class and also seemingly took issue with introducing himself as the “Founding Professor of the Centre for Brahmin Studies”.

Speaking to The Hindu on the incident, Ms. Spivak on Friday said that had the student, 28-year-old Anshul Kumar, been polite and made it clear that he was Dalit and coming from a place of interrogating Brahminism, the interaction “would have been different”. She insisted, “It wasn’t that he was not allowed to finish the question.”

When asked about the interaction, Ms. Spivak said, “He started saying something very rude. I, as an 82-year-old, a much senior person, said ‘Do not be rude to me, I cannot speak to you’. First of all, if he had said he was Dalit, and this is what he was trying to say, I would have been different. And if he had said whatever he said, in a polite way, I would have been different. But as a teacher who has been a professor for 60 years, it is not my custom with students, especially male students, to hear rudeness from an auditorium. That is why it wasn’t [a case of] not allowing him to... he didn’t allow himself to ask the question because he was rude.”

On insisting on the pronunciation, Ms. Spivak said, “What I had said was that DuBois was a Haitian. His father was from Haiti. And you see, since the French colonised Haiti, therefore, to give DuBois’s name the French pronunciation, shows something about our own predilection toward racism against Black Africans. If someone, say in America, mispronounces Ambedkar’s name as something else, then we would correct them that it is Ambedkar. So, that’s what I was doing. I was saying it’s not DuBois. It’s DuBois because he was Haitian, and not French.”

On the way Mr. Kumar had introduced himself, Ms. Spivak said he should have known that inquiries have been made into Brahminical discourse for a while now, towards which many scholars have contributed, including herself.

She further went on to distance this particular interaction at JNU from what is meant by “subaltern” interaction in scholarship. Ms. Spivak said, “We are talking about the definition of subaltern, which is Antonio Gramsci’s, which is small social groups in the margins of history, not the upwardly class mobile people with a surname, who can be sitting in the most elite university in India, and talking to a very well-known scholar who teaches in the United States, that ain’t a subaltern exchange.”