If the humanities can produce a general will for social justice, we require large-scale mindset changes across the board: how to construct oneself (as knower) and the world (as knowable) in order to participate in the possibility of democracy. This requires learning to read. 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, an influential literary theorist and feminist scholar, will speak as part of the Suzy Newhouse Center’s Distinguished Thinkers Program. Spivak is University Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, as well as a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. She is best known for her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and for her translation of and introduction to Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie.