Lägg till bokmärkeA Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
Are the "culture wars" over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world's foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave.
"We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban," Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more respon... (show more)
Are the "culture wars" over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world's foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave.
"We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban," Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the "native informant" through various cultural practices--philosophy, history, literature--to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on.
A major critical work, Spivak's book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.
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Consider what Spivak says about the two-handed engine of the colonialist palimpsest - the structure of the "Carceral", which underlies and predetermines the development of all social forms. As we begin fully to think through the various ways that colonial rule subjugated native populations: making certain indigenous bodies into "$ubjects" by educating them and training them for governmental service, while simply overtly oppressing the vast majority. If we can grasp the dif... (show more)
Consider what Spivak says about the two-handed engine of the colonialist palimpsest - the structure of the "Carceral", which underlies and predetermines the development of all social forms. As we begin fully to think through the various ways that colonial rule subjugated native populations: making certain indigenous bodies into "$ubjects" by educating them and training them for governmental service, while simply overtly oppressing the vast majority. If we can grasp the difference between Fanon's (the foremr) and Spivak's (the latter) uses of the term "subaltern", suddenly it becomes possible for us to see that the same complex institutionalization which veritably manufactured colonial subjectivity is not something that "happened" only to other people - and I put 'happened' in scare quotes because in fact there was no $ubject prior to its inception date. This same process of subjugation is also exactly what happened to us. It is by way of a radical dialectical encounter with the "other" than we come to discover just how much we have in common with her, not because we share any universal human nature, but rather because her subjugation and subjectivity reveal to us the startling truth of our own inception.
The problem Spivak (and elsewhere Bhabha) try to address is this, What happens when the "$ubject" learns that the most insidious and powerful shackle of all is Education, which is to say the very process of Progress and Self- or Mutual-Improvement whereby the $ubject came to consciousness and developed an identity at all? What does one do once one has removed one's own education? - as if this could be done at all! What then is left? Once we - fully equipped with the stock of corporately manufactured memories we call "national character," "cultural memory," "ethnic heritage" and "regional history" - discover that we are all replicants; "What [to quote Spivak and Bhabha quoting Lenin] is to be done?" The answer to that question is no easy one. (show less)
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