Harlem - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

W. E. B. Du Bois has described the African American at the end of
the nineteenth century as \u201ctwo souls in one dark body, whose dogged
strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.\u201d In the United States
today, the hyphen between these two souls-African and American,
African-American-is still being negotiated.In Harlem, Spivak engages with thirty-four photographs by photographer Alice Attie as she attempts teleopoiesis,
a reaching toward the distant other through the empathetic power of the
imagination. In the hands of Spivak, teleopoiesis is a kind of identity politics in which one disrupts identity as
a result of migration or exile. For the last two decades, Spivak notes,
Harlem has been the focus of major economic development. As the
old Harlem disappears into a present that simultaneously demands and
rejects a cultural essence, Spivak dwells in Attie's images, trying to navigate some middle ground
between the rock of social history and the hard place of a seamless
culture.\u201cGayatri Chakravorty Spivak
has probably done more long-term political good in pioneering feminist
and postcolonial studies within global academia than almost any of her
theoretical colleagues.\u201d-Terry Eagleton\u201cNot
only does her world-renowned scholarship range widely from critiques of
post-colonial discourse to feminism, Marxism, and globalization; her
lifelong search for fresh insights and understanding has transcended the
traditional boundaries of discipline while retaining the fire for new
knowledge that is the hallmark of a great intellect.\u201d-Lee Bollinger,Columbia University