3.09.2006
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Title
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 199.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
At its outset, Spivak proposes this book, divided into four sections (Philosophy, Literature, History and Culture) is a tracking of the native informant and its relationship to the colonial subject. Further, as Spivak says, “my book charts a practitioner’s progress from colonial discourse studies to transnational cultural studies.” (x) The chapter on Philosophy contains Spivak’s reading of the native informant within Kant, Hegel and Marx. “In my estimation, these source texts of European ethico-political selfrepresentation are also complicitous with what is today a self-styled postcolonial discourse. On the margins of my reading is the imagined and (im)possible perspective of the native informant. Ostentatiously to turn one’s back on, say, this trio, when so much of one’s critique is clearly if sometimes unwittingly copied from them, is to disavow agency, declare kingdom come by a denial of history.” (9) Spivak, through what she calls a mistaken reading of Kant, asserts that Kantian ethics performs its own deconstruction, “signaling to us its own vulnerability to the system it describes.” (21) This reading of Kant (via Tierra del Fuego and New Holland) does not try to get at the secrets underlying the text, but rather, “to read a few pages of master discourse allowing for the parabasis operated by the native informant’s impossible eye makes appear a shadowy counterscene.” (37) Or – “it is the foreclosure of the native informant that permits Kant’s text to bridge nature and freedom.” (135) After Kant, Spivak reads Hegel’s discussion of the Gita alongside the Gita – “It is my hope that to notice such a structural complicity of dominant texts from two different cultural inscriptions can be a gesture against some of the too-easy West-and-the-rest polarizations sometimes rampant in colonial and postcolonial discourse studies. To my mind, such a polarization is too much a legitimation-by-reversal of the colonial attitude itself.” (39) Finally, Spivak looks at Marx’s discussion of the Asiatic Mode of Production, not to dismiss it as embarrassment (as many have done before), but as “the name and imaginary fleshing out of a difference in terms that are consonant with the development of capitalism and the resistance appropriate to it as “the same.” (79) The second chapter examines the native informant in literature as Spivak looks at Jane Eyre, Wild Sargasso Sea, Defoe and Coetzee’s Foe, Frankenstein, and Mahasweta Devi’s work. Through her readings she speaks against the nostalgia of the reader for “lost origins…The stagings of Caliban work alongside the narrativization of history: claiming to be Caliban legitimized the very individualism that we must persistently attempt to undermine from within.” (118) Further, “no perspective critical of imperialism can turn the other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been an incommensurable and discontinuous other into a domesticated other that consolidates the imperialist self.” (130) Spivak also uses this chapter on Literature to offer two important disciplinary critiques: “Our own mania for ‘third world literature’ anthologies, when the teacher or critic often has no sense of the original languages, or of the subject-constitution of the social and gendered agents in question (and when therefore the student cannot sense this as a loss), participates more in the logic of translation-as-violation than in the ideal of translation as freedom-in-troping. What is at play there is a phenomenon that can be called ‘sanctioned ignorance,’ now sanctioned more than ever by an invocation of ‘globality’-a world serving to hide the financialization of the globe, or ‘hybridity’-a word serving to obliterate the irreducible hybridity of all language.” (164) “We know the ‘correction’ of a performative deconstruction is to point at another troping, and thus to another errant performance, that the critique must be persistent. We want the chance of an entry into that vertiginous process. And this can perhaps begin to happen if, in terms of disciplinary standards, you grant the thoroughly stratified larger theatre of the South, the stage of so-called de-colonization, equal rights of historical, geographical, linguistic specificity and theoretical agency. If Feminism takes its place with ethnic studies as American studies, or postcolonialism as migrant hybridism, the South is once again in shadow, the diasporic stands in for the native informant.” (169) The chapter on History is a reworking of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” essay and is as far as I can see, an ethics of the writing of the history of the other. She suggests, “that to disclose only the race-class-gender determinations of social practices is to see overdetermination as only many determinations. If we notice that explanations and discourses are irreducibly fractured by the epistemic violence of monopoly imperialism, we being to entertain the possibility of a determination whose ground is itself a figuration: a ‘determination otherwise.’” (219) What is really lovely about Spivak’s writing on history is the way she places the story of a woman at the center while continually negotiating a critique of the poltics of margins and centering. It is really neat. She says of her argument on Sati: “I will work toward the conclusion that widow-sacrifice was a manipulation of female subject-formation by way of a constructed counter-narrative of woman’s consciousness, thus woman’s being, thus woman’s being-good, thus the good woman’s desire, thus woman’s desire; so that, since Sati was not the invariable rule for widows, this sanctioned suicide could paradoxically become the signifier of woman as exception. I will suggest that the British ignore the space of Sati as an ideological battleground, and construct the woman as an object of slaughter, the saving of which can mark the moment when not only a civil but a good society is born out of domestic chaos. Between patriarchal subject-formation and imperialist object-constitution, it is the place of the free will or agency of the sexed subject as female that is successfully effaced.” (235) Spivak goes on to clarify two of the more famous sentences and pronouncements of the first version of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” She says of her sentence “White men are saving brown women from brown men:” “I am, in other words, not suggesting that “White men are saving brown women from brown men” is a sentence indicating a collective fantasy symptomatic of a collective itinerary of sadomasochistic repression in a collective imperialist enterprise. There is a satisfying symmetry to such an allegory, but I would rather invite the reader to consider it a problem in ‘wild psychoanalysis’ than a clinching solution…my insistence on imperialist subject-production as the occasion for this sentence discloses a politics that I cannot step around.” (284) And of the subaltern speaking: “As I have been saying all along, I think it is important to acknowledge our complicity in the muting, in order precisely to be more effective in the long run. Our work cannot succeed if we always have a scapegoat. The postcolonial migrant investigator is touched by the colonial social formations…All speaking, even seemingly the most immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception. That is what speaking is…It is not a mere tautology to say that the colonial or postcolonial subaltern is defined as the being on the other side of difference, or an epistemic fracture, even from the groupings among the colonized. What is at stake when we insist that the subaltern speaks?” (309)
The final chapter, Culture, deals with the vanishing present referenced in the title. Spivak states, “the nominalist theoretical practice in the use of the word ‘culture’ is to be learnt from underclass multiculturalism in metropolitan civil societies. The ‘dialectic’ may be a philosophical dominant that disqualifies and excludes the inconvenient as its other and vice versa.” (316) She begins by taking up Jameson’s argument in Postmodernism and teases out the difference and conflation of postmodern and poststructural and what is at stake in both in terms of modernism figured transnationally. “Our task as reader is to take a risky decision in the ‘night of non-knowledge,’ not just to learn to think plus and minus at the same time. Otherwise, the discourse of postmodernism here functions to suggest that the cultural (not merely economic) logic of microelectronic capitalism is universal, that the cultural logic that holds for London and Paris and Liverpool and Nevada City also holds for Hong Kong or Bankura or Beirut. This apparently descriptive gesture is, alas, a performative: the thing is done with words; culture is cultural explanation; to say everything is cultural is to make everything merely cultural. Radical multiculturalism thinks of ‘culture’ as the name of a complex strategic situation in a particular society – residual moving into the dominant as emergent.” (334)
“Simply put, culture alive is always on the run, always changeful. Our task is to look at the two strategies: culture as a battle cry against one culture’s claim to Reason as such, by insider as well as outsider; and culture as a nice name for the exoticism of the outsiders.” (355)
Keywords
Postcolonial, Aporia, Shuttle, Deconstruction, Narrative, Foreclosure, (Im)possibility, Other, Differance, Pharmakon, Human, Lever, Catachresis, Reading, Strategy, Persistence, Critique, Overdetermination.
Other Thoughts
“It is my belief that a training in a literary habit of reading the world can attempt to put a curb on such superpower triumphalism only if it does not perceive acknowledgement of complicity as an inconvenience. My book is therefore a ‘critique’ in that it examines the structures of the production of postcolonial reason.” (xii)
“I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break the rules.” (xiii)
“I think of the ‘native informant’ as a name for that mark of explusion from the name of Man – a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation.” (6)
“The crucial anatomy is that we must think a final purpose and yet we can not know it.” (22)
“And although Shakespeare was great, we cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban. One task of deconstruction might be a persistent attempt to displace the reversal, to show the complicity between native hegemony and the axiomatics of imperialism.” (37)
“To repeat, neither the colonial, nor the postcolonial subject inhabits the (im)possible perspective of the native informant or the implied contemporary receiver.” (62)
“It is in order to take a distance from this reasonable binary opposition that we might be able to make use of the (im)possible perspective of the native informant. The possibility of the native informant is, as I have already indicated, inscribed as evidence in the production of the scientific or disciplinary European knowledge of the culture of others: from field-work through ethnography into anthropology. That apparently benign subordination of ‘timing’ (the lived) into ‘Time’ (the graph of the Law) cannot of course be re-traced to a restorable origin, if origin is to be found. But the resistant reader and teacher can at least (and persistently) attempt to undo that continuing subordination by the figuration of the name – ‘the native informant’ – into a reader’s perspective.” (67)
“My readings here do not seek to undermine the excellence of the individual artist. If even minimally successful, the readings will incite a degree of rage against the imperialist narrativization of history, precisely because it produces so abject a script for a female we would rather celebrate.” (116)
“Sometimes, with the best of intentions and in the name of convenience, an institutionalized double standard tends to get established: one standard of preparation and testing for our own kind and quite another for the rest of the world. Even as we join in the struggle to establish the institutional study of marginality we must still go on saying, ‘And yet…” (171)
“In the face of this question, deconstruction might propose a double gesture: Begin where you are; but, when in search of absolute justifications, remember that the margin as such is the impossible boundary marking off the wholly other, and the encounter with the wholly other, as it may be figured, has an unpredictable relationship to our ethical rules. The named marginal is as much a concealment as a disclosure of the margin, and where s/he discloses, s/he is singular.” (173)
“I have tried to argue that a critical intimacy with deconstruction might help metropolitan feminist celebration of the female to acknowledge a responsibility toward the trace of the other, not to mention toward other struggles. That acknowledgement is as much a recovery as it is a loss of the wholly other. The excavation, retrieval, and celebration of the historical individual, the effort of bringing her within accessibility, is written within that double bind at which we begin. But a just world must entail normalization; the promise of justice must attend not only to the seduction of power, but also to the anguish that knowledge must suppress difference as well as differance, that a fully just world is impossible, forever deferred and different from our projections, the undecidable in the face of which we must risk the decision that we can hear the other.” (199)
“Yet we might consolidate our critique in the following way: the relationship between global capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state alliances (domination in geopolitics) is so macrological that it cannot account for the micrological texture of power. Sub-individual micrologies cannot grasp the ‘empirical’ field. To move toward such an accounting one must move toward theories of ideology-of subject formations that micrologically and often erratically operate the interests that congeal the micrologies and are congealed macrologies. Such theories cannot afford to overlook that this line is erratic, and that the category of representation in its two senses is crucial. They must note how the staging of the world in representation – its scene of writing, its Darstellung – dissimulates the choice and need for ‘heroes,’ paternal proxies, agents of power – Vertretung.”(264)
“Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling that is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization, culturalism, and development.” (304)
“I want, I can, I will. Throughout this book, my point has been that the subject-position of this I is historically constructed and produced so that it can become transparent at will (even when belonging to the indigenous postcolonial elite turned diasporic like the present writer). (343)
“I have proposed in this book that a different standard of literary evaluation, necessarily provisional, can emerge if we work at the (im)possible perspective of the native informant as a reminder of alterity, rather than remain caught in some identity forever.” (352)
“In the broad strokes of cultural-political narrativizing, I will risk a generalization here. Elite ‘postcolonialism’ seems to be as much a strategy of differentialing oneself from the racial underclass as it is to speak in its name.” (358)
“However important it is to acknowledge the affective subspace in which migrants, especially the underclass, must endure racism, if we are talking globality, it is one of the painful imperatives of the impossible within the ethical situation that we have to admit that the interest of the migrant, however remote, is in dominant global capital. The migrant is in First World space. I am altogether in support of metropolitan activism against the race- gender- class-exploitation of the migrant underclass, but we are talking globality here. There are some severe lessons that one must learn.” (382)
Other QE Works Cited
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (History and Theory of the Body)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Said, Edward. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text (Narrative)
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Spivak, G. C. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Bhabha, H. The Location of Culture (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Chatterjee, P. The Nation and Its Fragments (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Jameson, F. The Political Unconscious (Film and Media Studies)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 199.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary
At its outset, Spivak proposes this book, divided into four sections (Philosophy, Literature, History and Culture) is a tracking of the native informant and its relationship to the colonial subject. Further, as Spivak says, “my book charts a practitioner’s progress from colonial discourse studies to transnational cultural studies.” (x) The chapter on Philosophy contains Spivak’s reading of the native informant within Kant, Hegel and Marx. “In my estimation, these source texts of European ethico-political selfrepresentation are also complicitous with what is today a self-styled postcolonial discourse. On the margins of my reading is the imagined and (im)possible perspective of the native informant. Ostentatiously to turn one’s back on, say, this trio, when so much of one’s critique is clearly if sometimes unwittingly copied from them, is to disavow agency, declare kingdom come by a denial of history.” (9) Spivak, through what she calls a mistaken reading of Kant, asserts that Kantian ethics performs its own deconstruction, “signaling to us its own vulnerability to the system it describes.” (21) This reading of Kant (via Tierra del Fuego and New Holland) does not try to get at the secrets underlying the text, but rather, “to read a few pages of master discourse allowing for the parabasis operated by the native informant’s impossible eye makes appear a shadowy counterscene.” (37) Or – “it is the foreclosure of the native informant that permits Kant’s text to bridge nature and freedom.” (135) After Kant, Spivak reads Hegel’s discussion of the Gita alongside the Gita – “It is my hope that to notice such a structural complicity of dominant texts from two different cultural inscriptions can be a gesture against some of the too-easy West-and-the-rest polarizations sometimes rampant in colonial and postcolonial discourse studies. To my mind, such a polarization is too much a legitimation-by-reversal of the colonial attitude itself.” (39) Finally, Spivak looks at Marx’s discussion of the Asiatic Mode of Production, not to dismiss it as embarrassment (as many have done before), but as “the name and imaginary fleshing out of a difference in terms that are consonant with the development of capitalism and the resistance appropriate to it as “the same.” (79) The second chapter examines the native informant in literature as Spivak looks at Jane Eyre, Wild Sargasso Sea, Defoe and Coetzee’s Foe, Frankenstein, and Mahasweta Devi’s work. Through her readings she speaks against the nostalgia of the reader for “lost origins…The stagings of Caliban work alongside the narrativization of history: claiming to be Caliban legitimized the very individualism that we must persistently attempt to undermine from within.” (118) Further, “no perspective critical of imperialism can turn the other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been an incommensurable and discontinuous other into a domesticated other that consolidates the imperialist self.” (130) Spivak also uses this chapter on Literature to offer two important disciplinary critiques: “Our own mania for ‘third world literature’ anthologies, when the teacher or critic often has no sense of the original languages, or of the subject-constitution of the social and gendered agents in question (and when therefore the student cannot sense this as a loss), participates more in the logic of translation-as-violation than in the ideal of translation as freedom-in-troping. What is at play there is a phenomenon that can be called ‘sanctioned ignorance,’ now sanctioned more than ever by an invocation of ‘globality’-a world serving to hide the financialization of the globe, or ‘hybridity’-a word serving to obliterate the irreducible hybridity of all language.” (164) “We know the ‘correction’ of a performative deconstruction is to point at another troping, and thus to another errant performance, that the critique must be persistent. We want the chance of an entry into that vertiginous process. And this can perhaps begin to happen if, in terms of disciplinary standards, you grant the thoroughly stratified larger theatre of the South, the stage of so-called de-colonization, equal rights of historical, geographical, linguistic specificity and theoretical agency. If Feminism takes its place with ethnic studies as American studies, or postcolonialism as migrant hybridism, the South is once again in shadow, the diasporic stands in for the native informant.” (169) The chapter on History is a reworking of Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” essay and is as far as I can see, an ethics of the writing of the history of the other. She suggests, “that to disclose only the race-class-gender determinations of social practices is to see overdetermination as only many determinations. If we notice that explanations and discourses are irreducibly fractured by the epistemic violence of monopoly imperialism, we being to entertain the possibility of a determination whose ground is itself a figuration: a ‘determination otherwise.’” (219) What is really lovely about Spivak’s writing on history is the way she places the story of a woman at the center while continually negotiating a critique of the poltics of margins and centering. It is really neat. She says of her argument on Sati: “I will work toward the conclusion that widow-sacrifice was a manipulation of female subject-formation by way of a constructed counter-narrative of woman’s consciousness, thus woman’s being, thus woman’s being-good, thus the good woman’s desire, thus woman’s desire; so that, since Sati was not the invariable rule for widows, this sanctioned suicide could paradoxically become the signifier of woman as exception. I will suggest that the British ignore the space of Sati as an ideological battleground, and construct the woman as an object of slaughter, the saving of which can mark the moment when not only a civil but a good society is born out of domestic chaos. Between patriarchal subject-formation and imperialist object-constitution, it is the place of the free will or agency of the sexed subject as female that is successfully effaced.” (235) Spivak goes on to clarify two of the more famous sentences and pronouncements of the first version of “Can the Subaltern Speak?” She says of her sentence “White men are saving brown women from brown men:” “I am, in other words, not suggesting that “White men are saving brown women from brown men” is a sentence indicating a collective fantasy symptomatic of a collective itinerary of sadomasochistic repression in a collective imperialist enterprise. There is a satisfying symmetry to such an allegory, but I would rather invite the reader to consider it a problem in ‘wild psychoanalysis’ than a clinching solution…my insistence on imperialist subject-production as the occasion for this sentence discloses a politics that I cannot step around.” (284) And of the subaltern speaking: “As I have been saying all along, I think it is important to acknowledge our complicity in the muting, in order precisely to be more effective in the long run. Our work cannot succeed if we always have a scapegoat. The postcolonial migrant investigator is touched by the colonial social formations…All speaking, even seemingly the most immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another, which is, at best, an interception. That is what speaking is…It is not a mere tautology to say that the colonial or postcolonial subaltern is defined as the being on the other side of difference, or an epistemic fracture, even from the groupings among the colonized. What is at stake when we insist that the subaltern speaks?” (309)
The final chapter, Culture, deals with the vanishing present referenced in the title. Spivak states, “the nominalist theoretical practice in the use of the word ‘culture’ is to be learnt from underclass multiculturalism in metropolitan civil societies. The ‘dialectic’ may be a philosophical dominant that disqualifies and excludes the inconvenient as its other and vice versa.” (316) She begins by taking up Jameson’s argument in Postmodernism and teases out the difference and conflation of postmodern and poststructural and what is at stake in both in terms of modernism figured transnationally. “Our task as reader is to take a risky decision in the ‘night of non-knowledge,’ not just to learn to think plus and minus at the same time. Otherwise, the discourse of postmodernism here functions to suggest that the cultural (not merely economic) logic of microelectronic capitalism is universal, that the cultural logic that holds for London and Paris and Liverpool and Nevada City also holds for Hong Kong or Bankura or Beirut. This apparently descriptive gesture is, alas, a performative: the thing is done with words; culture is cultural explanation; to say everything is cultural is to make everything merely cultural. Radical multiculturalism thinks of ‘culture’ as the name of a complex strategic situation in a particular society – residual moving into the dominant as emergent.” (334)
“Simply put, culture alive is always on the run, always changeful. Our task is to look at the two strategies: culture as a battle cry against one culture’s claim to Reason as such, by insider as well as outsider; and culture as a nice name for the exoticism of the outsiders.” (355)
Keywords
Postcolonial, Aporia, Shuttle, Deconstruction, Narrative, Foreclosure, (Im)possibility, Other, Differance, Pharmakon, Human, Lever, Catachresis, Reading, Strategy, Persistence, Critique, Overdetermination.
Other Thoughts
“It is my belief that a training in a literary habit of reading the world can attempt to put a curb on such superpower triumphalism only if it does not perceive acknowledgement of complicity as an inconvenience. My book is therefore a ‘critique’ in that it examines the structures of the production of postcolonial reason.” (xii)
“I am not erudite enough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break the rules.” (xiii)
“I think of the ‘native informant’ as a name for that mark of explusion from the name of Man – a mark crossing out the impossibility of the ethical relation.” (6)
“The crucial anatomy is that we must think a final purpose and yet we can not know it.” (22)
“And although Shakespeare was great, we cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban. One task of deconstruction might be a persistent attempt to displace the reversal, to show the complicity between native hegemony and the axiomatics of imperialism.” (37)
“To repeat, neither the colonial, nor the postcolonial subject inhabits the (im)possible perspective of the native informant or the implied contemporary receiver.” (62)
“It is in order to take a distance from this reasonable binary opposition that we might be able to make use of the (im)possible perspective of the native informant. The possibility of the native informant is, as I have already indicated, inscribed as evidence in the production of the scientific or disciplinary European knowledge of the culture of others: from field-work through ethnography into anthropology. That apparently benign subordination of ‘timing’ (the lived) into ‘Time’ (the graph of the Law) cannot of course be re-traced to a restorable origin, if origin is to be found. But the resistant reader and teacher can at least (and persistently) attempt to undo that continuing subordination by the figuration of the name – ‘the native informant’ – into a reader’s perspective.” (67)
“My readings here do not seek to undermine the excellence of the individual artist. If even minimally successful, the readings will incite a degree of rage against the imperialist narrativization of history, precisely because it produces so abject a script for a female we would rather celebrate.” (116)
“Sometimes, with the best of intentions and in the name of convenience, an institutionalized double standard tends to get established: one standard of preparation and testing for our own kind and quite another for the rest of the world. Even as we join in the struggle to establish the institutional study of marginality we must still go on saying, ‘And yet…” (171)
“In the face of this question, deconstruction might propose a double gesture: Begin where you are; but, when in search of absolute justifications, remember that the margin as such is the impossible boundary marking off the wholly other, and the encounter with the wholly other, as it may be figured, has an unpredictable relationship to our ethical rules. The named marginal is as much a concealment as a disclosure of the margin, and where s/he discloses, s/he is singular.” (173)
“I have tried to argue that a critical intimacy with deconstruction might help metropolitan feminist celebration of the female to acknowledge a responsibility toward the trace of the other, not to mention toward other struggles. That acknowledgement is as much a recovery as it is a loss of the wholly other. The excavation, retrieval, and celebration of the historical individual, the effort of bringing her within accessibility, is written within that double bind at which we begin. But a just world must entail normalization; the promise of justice must attend not only to the seduction of power, but also to the anguish that knowledge must suppress difference as well as differance, that a fully just world is impossible, forever deferred and different from our projections, the undecidable in the face of which we must risk the decision that we can hear the other.” (199)
“Yet we might consolidate our critique in the following way: the relationship between global capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state alliances (domination in geopolitics) is so macrological that it cannot account for the micrological texture of power. Sub-individual micrologies cannot grasp the ‘empirical’ field. To move toward such an accounting one must move toward theories of ideology-of subject formations that micrologically and often erratically operate the interests that congeal the micrologies and are congealed macrologies. Such theories cannot afford to overlook that this line is erratic, and that the category of representation in its two senses is crucial. They must note how the staging of the world in representation – its scene of writing, its Darstellung – dissimulates the choice and need for ‘heroes,’ paternal proxies, agents of power – Vertretung.”(264)
“Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling that is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization, culturalism, and development.” (304)
“I want, I can, I will. Throughout this book, my point has been that the subject-position of this I is historically constructed and produced so that it can become transparent at will (even when belonging to the indigenous postcolonial elite turned diasporic like the present writer). (343)
“I have proposed in this book that a different standard of literary evaluation, necessarily provisional, can emerge if we work at the (im)possible perspective of the native informant as a reminder of alterity, rather than remain caught in some identity forever.” (352)
“In the broad strokes of cultural-political narrativizing, I will risk a generalization here. Elite ‘postcolonialism’ seems to be as much a strategy of differentialing oneself from the racial underclass as it is to speak in its name.” (358)
“However important it is to acknowledge the affective subspace in which migrants, especially the underclass, must endure racism, if we are talking globality, it is one of the painful imperatives of the impossible within the ethical situation that we have to admit that the interest of the migrant, however remote, is in dominant global capital. The migrant is in First World space. I am altogether in support of metropolitan activism against the race- gender- class-exploitation of the migrant underclass, but we are talking globality here. There are some severe lessons that one must learn.” (382)
Other QE Works Cited
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. Anti Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. (History and Theory of the Body)
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Said, Edward. Orientalism (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Barthes, Roland. Image-Music-Text (Narrative)
Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality (History and Theory of the Body)
Spivak, G. C. In Other Worlds (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Bhabha, H. The Location of Culture (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Chatterjee, P. The Nation and Its Fragments (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Jameson, F. The Political Unconscious (Film and Media Studies)
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