The Kwara State University will explore areas of collaboration between it and the Columbia University, United States of America with which it has a Memorandum of Understanding. To this end, a renowned lecturer of literature and Professor of humanities at the Colombia University, Professor Gayatri  Chakravorti  Spivak who is on tour of selected Universities in South, East and West Africa will visit the Kwara State University ,Malete.

Described as ‘The World’s Most Renowned Critical Theorist’, Professor Spivak will deliver a lecture on Tuesday 4^th of October 2011, at the Auditorium of the Kwara State University, Malete. The title of the Lecture is “Education in The Era of Globalization”.

Gayatri  Spivak’s translation of Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology propelled her into prominence and helped to establish French theory at the centre  of intellectual life in the English speaking world. She is best known, however, for the long essay entitled “Can the Subaltern Speak?” which is considered a founding text of the field of literary scholarship that goes under the name of post colonialism. In this essay, Spivak undertakes an extensive and trenchant critique of the works of pcontemporary western philosophers and cultural theorists in their bearing on the problems of existence and states of consciousness in the Third world in the wake of imperialism. Spivak describes herself as a “practical Marxist-feminist-deconstructionist,” and her work constitutes a radical challenge of the “legacy of colonialism.

Professor Spivak has just published a translation of Aime Cesaire’s A Season in the Congo, a dramatic reconstitution of the ordeal of Patrice Lumumba and the drama of decolonization in what is today the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It ought to be noted in this connection that translation, which Spivak has described as “the most intimate form of reading,” represents a major area of her interests. Also forthcoming are two new works, the first containing the text of her Du Bois lectures delivered in 2009 at Harvard University, and the second a book of reflections on the phenomenon of Globalization. The inspiration for this book is captured by the blurb put out by the publisher, Harvard University Press: “Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and post colonial,  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.”

Professor Spivak was born in 1942 in Calcutta, India, where she received her elementary and secondary education. She went on to obtain a Bachelor’s degree in English with first class honours at the University of Calcutta in 1959, after which she proceeded to the US, completing her Master’s degree in English at Cornell University the following year. While teaching at Iowa University, she studied with Paul de Man for her doctorate degree at Cornell, for which she wrote a dissertation on the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats.