An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization

During past twenty years, world's most renowned critical theorist--the scholar who defined field of postcolonial studies--has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting globalized present, she turns elsewhere to make her central argument: that aesthetic education is last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy. Spivak's unwillingness to sacrifice ethical in name of aesthetic, or to sacrifice aesthetic in grappling with political, makes her task formidable. As she wrestles with these fraught relationships, she rewrites Friedrich Schiller's concept of play as…