Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Chakrabarty (C) in his essay "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts" puts forth interesting and intriguing thoughts concerning the relationship between European ideological, political, economic notions of development, citizenship, modernization and the corresponding influence these positions, lines maintain upon "third world" areas such as the Indian Subcontinent.


Through outlining various points C puts forth an assertion of an interpretation of history that sees the world as radically heterogeneous. Further, his article is situated in a larger context that argues of an interconnection between "History" as an academic subject, and its influence upon "real" life. This argument puts us into a conversation that coincides with the understanding that the development of philosophy as an academic subject has and continues to develop in such an isolated manner. C's fundamental dissagreement that the development of academic subjects occurs within a self-contained geographic environment ties to his assertion of an "honest" history. History may be honest in the recognition that themes, and trends are inherently oppressive, informative, and subjective toward other histories. This is outlined in Hutcheon's essay we read earlier in the year, along with Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak', and even is connected to Norris' article concerning the political power and swayance of the academic field of Postmodernism. I quote C at length to illustrate this connection:

"Histories that aim to displace a hyperreal Europe from the center toward which all historical imagination currently gravitates will have to seek out relentlessly this connection between violence and idealism that lies at the heart of the process by which the narrative of citizenship and modernity come to find a natural home in "History." I register a fundamental disagreement here with a position taken by Richard Rorty in an exchange with Jurgen Habermas. Rorty criticizes Habermas for the latter's conviction "that the story of modern philosophy is an important part of the story of the democratic societies' attempts at self-reassurance." Rorty's statement follows the practice of many Europeanistis who speak of the histories of these "democratic societies" as if these were self-contained histories complete in themselves, as if the self-fashioning of the West were something that occurred only within its self-assigned geographical boundaries. At the very least Rorty ignores the role that the "colonial theater" (both external and internal)--where the theme of "freedom" as defined by modern political philosophy was constantly invoked in aid of the ideas of "civilization," "progress," and latterly "development"--played in the process of engendering this "reassurance." This task, as i see it, will be to wrestle ideas that legitimize the modern state and its attendant institutions, in order to return to political philosophy--in the same way as suspect coins returned to their owners in an Indian bazaar-- its categories whose global currency can no longer be taken for granted. "

Much of this argument pivots on the understanding of a transition narrative that C understands, roughly, as a schema that encompasses the political, social, economic, historical situation of "modern" India. Within this transition narrative there are specific themes that guide and inform the manner in which persons are to "develop," "modernize," and most importantly act as "citizens." Further, this transition narrative and the themes mentioned are guided by a sort of bourgeois domesticity and public behavior, position. The division of the bourgeois public and private is pivotal for C. in this article primarily because of the connection between economic, political, historical, ideological narratives provided through this division of the bourgeois public and private. C. demonstrates this connection through a closer look at the familial structures in Bengal:

"What the Bengali literature on women's education played out was a battle between a nationalist construction of a cultural norm of the patriarchal, patri-local, patrilineal, extended family and the ideal of the patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family that was implicit in the European/imperialist/universalist discourse on the "freedoms" of individualism, citizenship, and civil society."


Here, C demonstrates how the bourgeois division between public and private is intimately connected to specific definitions of "citizenship," "modern," and so on. This argument is further stressed in previous essays we've encountered last semester concerning the collective groupings of the third world female by first world feminists, along with accounts given concerning the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized in Africa, and finally, and in a more nuanced manner, the relationship (informing politics, ideology, history, position and development toward modernity) between the colonizer and the colonized as demonstrated in Bhabha's hybridity and mimesis.


C's essay is intelligent, well written and addresses important and logical issues. Those issues include the historical development of a geographic locations "modernizing" and the assertion and adoption of certain definitions of "citizenship" and family and the manner in which the public and private is guided and informed.


C's final point in worth noting and attempting to connect to our readings of the Shadow Lines and Pterodactyl.

"I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own representative strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narrative of citizenships in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity. The politics of despair will requires of such history that it lays bare to its readers the reasons why such a predicament is necessarily inescapable. This is a history that will attempt the impossible: to look toward its own death by tracing that which resist and escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous."


This new history is most obviously seen as being denied within Pterodactyl. Further, within The Shadow Lines, the method of story telling: one that breaks conventional narrative, that jumps in time, location, and demonstrates differing motivations and points (at points seeming like series of vignettes that are disjointedly connected) coincides well with C's proposal. Most obviously, the Shadow lines, defeats itself as a typical novel, story. It turns itself inside and out, and questions the narrative truth. In a larger sense, C's new history is violent unto itself and is created in such a way as to destroy itself: as noted by C, the possibility of creating such a history in the academic environment is impossible, primarily due to the inability to "provincialize" europe and disconnect informative, influential lines of politics, economics, history, and ideology.







Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Said, Orientalism: Orientalism Now

I haven't completely finished the reading as of yet, but I wanted to get out some of my initial reactions to the reading and trying as much as possible to offer concrete connections and examples within the three works that we are working off: MC, Pterodactyl and The Shadow Lines.

By lifting up quotes from Said, and offering comments I hope to effectively approach this large section of text. This will allow me to get a more specific points Said makes as opposed to speaking in generalities.

Said begins by recounting what he has already accomplished and set out: that Orientalism (O) is a system of truths that operate in multiple realms: politics, culture, religion and so on. Certainly, and this was a point that I tried to raise last meeting, was that although all societies and individuals tend to operate within a schema of generalities, and labels, what seems to be important are the power systems that give base to O. The basic fact that there is domination within the system of O from the Western to the East, suggests the political creditability of O.

The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations frame by a whole set of forces that brought the orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire. If this definition of O seems more political than not, that is simply because I think O was itself a product of certain political forces and activities.

What seems important to note within the passage above is the fact that O is overtly political. I understand this to mean in connection to power systems and hegemony certainly. Further, I do not think that Said upholds O as a system that was created and is static and has been altered into something new something different. In fact, Said, addresses this later:

"Thus O is not only a positive doctrine about the Orient that exists at any one time in the Wester; it is also an influential academic tradition (When one refers to an academic specialist who is called and Orientalist), as well as an area of concern defined by travelers, commercial enterprises, governments military expeditions, readers of novel and accounts of exotic adventure, natural historians and pilgrims to whom the Orient is a specfic kind of knowlege about specific places, people, and civilizations."

Here, it seems that O is understood again to be a way of looking at the world and acting, something that is informative of both how an individual conceives of other as well as herself.

O is informative of how an individual conceives of herself and others: specifically of how the West understood the East. This is not a relationship that operates through equalities, but rather one that exists and uses (in) absences and presences:

"I mean to say that in discussion of the Orient, the Orient is all absence, whereas one feels the Orientaist and what he says as presence; yet we must not forget that the Orientalist's presence is enabled by the Orient's effective absence.

Said raises an interesting point that becomes important in postcolonial studies: the role of voice within a colonial state. This is noted well within Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak" as well as Hutcheon's "Decentering the excentric." For Spivak, O may stand as the basis through which those power systems that establish the hierarchical relationships. Further, for Hutcheon, PM stands as a inherently political was of thinking and looking at the world. O. then stands as a as the ideology (for certainly, O. influences Westerners consciousnesses unconsciously) that PM strives to deconstruct and problematize.

Said spends time looking through historical account of the Orient, and analyzes the power systems that upheld them: It was shown that O. serves to inform the colonial state just as much as the colonized. This sort of binary, operating through unified, monolithic identities, breaks down when nation states are given histories that do not coincide with those notions but rather serve to emphasize a milieu that is not single but rather varied; not monolithic but rather influenced and informed from multiple sources. This can be seen in Pterodactyl: in this case O may be seen as permeating even the nationalist self identifications. Here, a history, an identity, a geography and even a way of life (conception of the world, evidenced through an ethos) can be heavily influenced by determining and authoritative and thus oppressive understandings. In Pterodactyl, the events described are problematic and controversial explicitly because a community's way of life, self-determined identity and so on conflict with a nationalist governments understanding of their social role. The famine is a drought, the pterodactyl doesn't exist, and individual's are not dying due to lack of governmental support, but rather natural, undetermined causes. This is explicitly political. This is explicitly informed through notions of how persons are conceived, in contrast to others, and finally how they are to act.


Hopefully, I'll have further, more concrete thoughts as I think over this later tonight.


Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Said, Orientalism: Introduction

In this introduction Said does much to define, clarify, set out, and prepare the reader for the coing discusssion. He does well in outlineing how Orientalism (O) is political, how it is presentational (in that it occupies certain positions through political presentations) and how it is inherently constructive as well.

There are several fine points in the introudction where Said offers a good defintion of O. However, I think the best may be offered here. I mean to lift up this quote in orer to highlight not simply a defintion of O, but rather to accentuate certain implications that stem from Said's understanding of how O formed and how it exists. It exists--meaning it functions more as a state rather than a lens. ( I realize this is super long. And hopefully will try and unpack what these insanely long sentences mean).

Therefore Orientalism is not a mere political subect matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarhsip, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious "Western" imperialist plot to hold down the "Oriental" world. it is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, schaolarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philogical texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of "interests" which by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscpae and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is , above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with poltical power in the raw but rather, is produced and exists in a nuneven exhcange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degreee by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern polciy sciences), power cultural (as with ideas about what "we" do and what "they" cannot do or understand as "we" do).


Much of what Said mentions above is connected to the idea of Hegemony. Said uses Gramsci's notion of hegemony, and more specifically the space that culture opperates in, to outline and explicate how O, moves or gains positions within the world. Importantly, Said notes the fact that within any sort of study, or position or outlook there needs to be a beginning. This beginning automatically excludes a certain amount of historical evnets, work, thought, basic history within itself. This choice to begin at a certain point, is something that Said notes helps delineate the notion of O itself.

Said comments upon the work of Edward Lane, along with scientific, religious, historical and cultural interest within the orient along the time of Napoleon. This is interesting in that it serves to heavily mark or outline an increase in thinking of the Orient as "other." A side note--O serves complementarilly in that it helps define and establish cultural, identity notions of the Occident as much as it helps establish an identity of the Orient.


In the end, aspects that are important in consdiering Said's conception of O are the historical, social, cultural reconstruction of the Orient; the political power that O weilds over the Orient due to the ideological, religious, social, defintions that are provided through Orientalism. Indeed, Said speaks of O as if it is impossible to think of the Orient outside or isolated from this influence. I agree. However, I would extend this not only to the Orient, but to other geographic, cultural locations as well. Interestingly, it seems that Said does not disagree with this, but rather means to hold up the point that O outlines a distinct power, and authority that O gives to the Occident over the Orient. This social and very real aspect of O is connect, yet may operate separately, from the academic theoretical ideas, foundations of Orientalism.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Gayan Prakash, "Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third-World..."

By accurately critiquing the "worlding" of the "third world" through historical accounts, Prakash, upholds a historical interpretation of India's history that centers on the subaltern. Primarily, by looking at the historical accounts given through an Orientalist (monolithic, essential, narrative) Prakash presents how India was presented as "object" through texts. Second, and in response to an Orientalist perspective Prakash outlines the Nationalist perspective of history. This line of thought, sought to destabilize any essential notion of India as an object in response to the West. Though responsive, the nationalist history pictured India still in unified oneness, of containing a single national, meaning geographic and unified through certain characteristics (possibly history). Third, Prakash spends time looking at India as refigured through Marxist notions of history. These lines of thought sought to further destabilize any monolithic notion of India, in history or in nationalism; rather it sought to assert a history as determined and guided through class and power systems. Prakash notes, however, that though these Marxist interpretations may be attempting to operate on a "subjectless" plane and with especial attention given to capitalism, this is accomplished in contrast, or in light of, or in opposition to capitalist notions of development, which are birthed within a Western context, society and use through colonialism.

In the end, Prakash, asserts a notion of history along with the Subaltern Studies:
This perspective, therefore, breaks the undivided entity of India into a multiplicity of changing positions that are then treated as the effects of power relations. THe displacement of foundation subjects and essences allowed by this also enables Guha to treat histories written from those perspectives as documents of counterinsurgency--those seeking to impose colonial, nationalist, or transitional (modernizing) agendas. Writing subaltern history, from this point of view, becomes an activity that is contestory because of its insurgent readings.

Further, Prakash falls in line with Spivak in a sort of strategic essentialism.

This feature, however, is not as straightforwards as it sounds: if the assertion of the subaltern's unified consciousness, on the one hand, unravels elite projects, the claim for the subaltern's autonomous agency is rendered impossible, on the other hand, by the very definition of subalternity as a position in relations to that of the elite.

Additionally, Prakash helps clarify her stance further.

Critical practice in the Third World, must posit the subaltern as a subject in order to dethrone Europe's Implantation as the universal subject of history by territorial imperialism, even as this strategy--falling prey to its own procedures--turns the autonomous agent (the subaltern) into a positionality consisting of effects.



My personal reflections upon the text are mixed. Her essay is good, and her points are well-stated, though at points a bit convoluted. Yet she does a complete job in going over the approaches toward a sort of historicizing India. Indeed, I enjoyed her account of how a "third worlds" write their own histories. At certain points, I noticed similarities between her questioning of the act of postfoundational histories and Hutcheon's Decentering the Excentric. It was nice to focus upon India specifically, and draw similarities between the Shadow Lines, as well as MC and Pterodactyl. More specifically, my reaction to the Subaltern's studies approach to history as regarded in relationships was positive. This seems to be the most logical approach in that it acknowledges both ideology and power systems. It seems analogous to a sort of strategic essentialism, toward destablizing both latent and active colonialism. At one point, Prakash seemed to accurately describe neo-colonialism's presence in India:

but outside the First World, in India itself, the power of Western discourses is concealed and operates through its authorization and deployment by the nation-state; deeply sedimented in the national body politic, the knowledge generated and bequeathed by colonialism nether manifests itself nor functions exclusively as the form of imperial power.

All in all, Prakash's account raises questions, for me, concerning the political action of a sort of subaltern history. I do not want to question validity nor usefulness, but rather to what ends, and the proponents of this approach to history. As Prakash noted, many of the Subaltern study members live and/or have received first world education. Spivak, is a good example. I wonder, through education, how much a sort of Subaltern Studies approach has been influenced ideologically, politically by first world historical approaches toward India.