By Dhaka Tribune
Spivak gave the
audience a cognitive timeline of how she encountered the Rohingya people as an
individual during a closing keynote presentation at the Dhaka Art Summit
The condition of the
Rohingya people should be placed within the general crisis of the movement of
people in the world, reiterated literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
during a closing keynote presentation at the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) on Saturday.
Asked to address the
precarious situation of the Rohingya in relation to indigeneity in the world
today, Spivak gave the audience a cognitive timeline of how she encountered the
Rohingya people – to emphasize on bringing their condition to the forefront of
the world’s problems along with Palestine, Syria, Iraq, the disappearance of
academic freedom and secularism in her own country as well as with the
tremendous ethnic conflict in many African nations.
She emphasized that
the real work of placing the Rohingya within “developing the will to social
justice” lies in a space that cannot now be “imagined,” however, as much as
imagination is a separator, she said, it also brings people together.
Spivak, citing a
conversation with academic and activist Maung Zarni, said there was absolutely
no excuse for ignoring the phenomenon of “genocidal denial” of democratic
rights of the Rohingya. She reiterated that there has to be “greater engagement
in order to help the cause of social justice” in this regard and simply circulating
the barrage of information online would not suffice.
She cited her
keynote presentation in Berlin titled “Solidarity beyond boundaries,” where she
insisted that if one person changed from top-down work, there would be a
hundred.
Spivak, while outlining
her relation with Dhaka, said she first encountered the Rohingya people in the
1980s when she was in Bangladesh as a member of
“Unnayan Bikolper Nitinirdharoni Gobheshona” (UBINIG). In Teknaf, she witnessed many of these people
swimming across the Naf river from Myanmar.
Earlier, the
professor and literary theorist congratulated the DAS’s Rajeeb Samdani for
bringing the local to the global – connecting the artwork of so-called
“developing” countries to the global arena, “creating an equality that is
altogether unique.” However she suggested that this kind of effort should be
“supplemented” by another kind of work, otherwise we could not go forward in
engaging with the “impossible possibility of a socially just world.”
Spivak is known for
40 years of work that has been focused on “the tiniest possible units –
sub-individuals” in the interest of social justice which she calls an
“impossibility.”
She set the mood for
her presentation by reinstating her conviction that “no self-declared summit”
could ever touch the topic of “subaltern – small social groups on the fringes
of history” – the collectivity of which constitutes the largest electorate
sector in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
She urged all to be
“inside our language rather than displaying upward class-mobility by false
modesty about inadequate proficiency,” adding, that we also must understand how
we have lexicalized the old imperial languages.
This presentation
was a part of Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA)’s project “Sovereign Words:
Critical Writing Ensembles” – a platform of panel discussions, lecture performances, group debates and
readings committed to the “strengthening of critical writing within and across
communities of the world.” It was launched in 2016 at DAS and its preface was
presented in Baroda in 2015.