An aesthetic education in the era of globalization

This book comprises a substantial introduction and 25 essays. Many have been published in the US, the UK, or less accessibly, India; others were delivered as lectures over the past 23 years. Many are not easily accessible, so to collect them in this substantial volume makes sense. Spivak (Columbia) is one of the most creative and influential scholars of the humanities of the past four decades; this volume shows the range and variety of her interests in topics ranging from Jacques Derrida, postcolonial studies, women in the Global South, migration in a global (arguably "planetary") era, translation, and aesthetic education. These issues have mattered and will continue to matter, despite the unchecked centrifugality of Spivak's prose. She brings a profound knowledge of literary and cultural theory to her studies of "culture on the run, the vanishing present." Some of the essays here are classics, others will become so. Some (like "The Stakes of a World Literature," "Imperative to Re-imagine the Planet," "Rethinking Comparativism") gather strength and intellectual momentum from their co-presence in this volume; others ("Acting Bits/Identity Talk," "The Double Bind Starts to Kick In") point to important ideas she has elsewhere seeded into several autonomous contemporary discourses of criticism. Summing Up: Essential. Graduate students, researchers. K. Tololyan Wesleyan University

A dense but rewarding series of meditations on the possibility of reading, learning, and teaching that would encourage the full flowering of cultural, sexual, and linguistic diversity and resist the homogenizing force of globalization. Working primarily in the field of postcolonial studies and comparative literature, Spivak (The Post-Colonial Critic) also draws on her experience as a trainer of elementary school teachers in West Bengal as she considers figures as diverse as Friedrich Schiller, Rabindranath Tagore, and J.M. Coetzee to argue how "an aesthetic education" prepares individuals for participation. As usual, with its tortured grammatical structures and addiction to academic jargon, the author's writing style makes few concessions to the unprepared reader. Nonetheless, patience and a passing acquaintance with the work of some of the writers she draws on are all that is necessary to penetrate the formidable depths of her thought. The gathered texts are a testament to a fundamental faith in the power of literature that is never less than inspiring. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.