Du Bois, Du Bwa, Du Boyss, Dubya, Du Lit

Meanwhile, in Academia La La Land, scholar, critic, pronouncer of the last word Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (pronounced Ga-ye-tri Chok-ro-bor-ti Spee-vaak) set the diphthong among vowels last week, after she called out a student during a Q&A session at JNU. Anshul Kumar (pronounced Un-Shool Koo-maar), asking the Columbia professor about her ‘positioning’ herself as ‘middle-class’, made the cataclysmic mistake of pronouncing the name of sociologist WEB Du Bois wrong. Instead of enunciating it correctly as ‘Dew Boyss’, he overfrancophoned the name, and committed postcolonial nomicide by calling him ‘Du Bwa’, eliciting memories of George ‘Dubya’ Bush in the phonetician’s mind. Spivak pointed out, with unbridled ‘middle-class’ scorn, that Du Bois was very finicky about how his name was pronounced, as it meant a lot ‘post-colonially’ to the American scholar of Haitian (Black)-French (White) descent (his grandfather was the child of a slave owner and slave). Unlike the rest of us who apparently don’t care how our names are pronounced.

But Spivak took the bread (middle-classes don’t eat cake) when she explained that Kumar hadn’t disclosed he was dalit while introducing himself as ‘founder of a Brahmin Studies Institute.’ So, she presumed he was a ‘brahminist’, ripe for some Spivaking. For a dalit can, presumably, get away by pronouncing Du Bois as, say, ‘Spivak’.