Gayatri Spivak will address the problem of political representation amid the forces of international democracy through a discussion of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of postcolonial Congo, who was assassinated by Belgian forces not long thereafter. Spivak will propose a new epistemology for engaging the contemporary by working through the inter-animation between postcoloniality and democracy.

Gayatri Spivak is a literary theorist, philosopher, and University Professor at Columbia University, where she is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" is considered a founding text of postcolonialism. In 2012 she was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for being "a critical theorist and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in relation to the globalized world." She received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award given by the Republic of India, in 2013.

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