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"Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's long career as teacher, theorist and activist has been characterised by a sustained commitment to pedagogy, and in particular by an awareness of how the dilemmas and problems that teaching throws up - whether in the classrooms of subaltern communities in West Bengal or in the seminar rooms of Columbia University - can offer a beginning for theoretical reflection. Such problems, which often serve as anecdotal starting points in her essays as Spivak describes moments of problematic encounter with resistance, confusion, privilege and silence, often work to trip up, in enabling ways, the kinds of paradigms that theory might otherwise want to impose, whether onto notions of cultural, social or gender difference, or onto ideas of development and globality. They are occasions for Spivak to draw attention to the ideological conditions in which differing forms of education (elementary and tertiary, Southern and Northern, public and private) operate, sutured as they are in their different ways to the nation-state. Yet an equally longstanding insistence of Spivak's work, from earlier essays such as her review of Derrida's Limited Inc, 'Revolutions that as Yet Have No Model' (1980) through to later works such as Other Asias (2008) has been that the classroom, whether located in rural West Bengal or in New York, offers a crucial site for the training of the imagination into the possibility of a different, collective political life of the future."