Thanks all of you for coming
My name is Eric Calderwood
I want to thank Susan as well
for the invitation to come and talk to you
guys
Can you guys all hear me in the back?
Yeah? Volume more or less ok?
Alright. So, I'm honored to participate in
this lecture series which so far I think has
been really exciting
both for the students and the faculty who
have been here
In fact I think one sign that our lecture
series is really hitting it is I think we
know have a baby, somewhere here in the crowd
that I saw
So we're reaching new audiences
And if that baby grows up to be a Spivak or
something
I'd like to have some attribution
So my mission today is to talk about my field,
Post-Colonial studies, and that is what I'm
going to do
I'm going to try to cover a lot of ground
I see that there is a significant...
Ok...Where's the volume situation
This will just take one moment
In the meantime, there is a handout that went
with...
Is it better now?
Ok. There was a handout that I passed out
with the presentation
I hope there were enough for many of you,
it seems I might have run out. If that's the
case I apologize
Also you can look on with someone
The handout is simply what I'm going to be
showing up here on the PowerPoint sides
This may help you follow along and jot down
questions as I go along
And on that topic, I just want to encourage
you to interrupt me at any moment if you want
me to clarify anything I say
Obviously I'll also leave time for a Q and
A at the end
But I'm more than happy for this to be a conversation
and not just a lecture
So please just throw your hand up if you want
clarification on anything, ok?
So my goals for today are fairly straightforward
I'm gonna try to answer this question: What
is Post-Colonial theory?
What are Post-Colonial studies? What is that
field?
And I'm going to be relying mostly on the
readings from Said and Spivak to answer that
question
The bulk of my lecture is really going to
be on that first question up there
And I'm gonna be drawing a lot of my ammo
from those first two texts that were assigned
I'm also going to try to, as I go along...
Try to make some cases for how Post-Colonial
theory fits into the greater scheme of this
course
I'm going to try to make connections to things
that we've seen already
Especially with Derrida and Foucault
Actually, especially with Foucault, so thank
you Behrooz for setting it up so nicely
I'm also going to try to see if I can start
to open some doors on conversations we'll
be having later in the semester
about Feminist and Queer theory
Indigineous Studies, Critical Race Theory...
In short my goal is going to be both to try
to present some of the central concerns and
questions of Post-Colonial theory
and also use Post-Colonial theory to sort
of pivot
between where we've been so far and where
we're going in the course
So as I've said, to say one two and three
is a little misleading
because that's really kinda 80% of the talk
Towards the end of the talk I'm gonna kind
of pivot and see if I can address
what I think are some of the current problems
in the field
So if I'm gonna be using Said, Spivak to sort
of set up a classical sense of what Post-Colonial
theory is
I'm going to be using the Anzaldua reading
to push against that a little bit
and suggest what some of the current debates
and questions in the field are
And then finally in the conclusion
I'm going to try to make an assertive claim
about why you should care about Post-Colonial
theory
And I should say, why you should care even
if you don't study colonialism
I'm going to try to make the case that this
should matter and could matter to you no matter
what you study
So that's the conclusion
So as a first step...I don't have a clicker
so I'll have to move over here from time to
time
As a first step to Post-Colonial theory
I thought that I would just provide some simple,
or not so simple but at least straightforward
definitions
that I pulled directly from the anthologies
from which I assigned those readings for today
The first one, most of the readings came from
the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism
which I'll normally be referring to as NATC
on the slides for short
and also the Routledge reader on Post-Colonial
studies
So the reason I want to give you this definition,
well there are a few
One, I want you to see how major scholars
in the field have defined it
its questions, its concerns
Second I kinda wanted to give you a going-away
present
Something short that you could take with you
And in the future if you have to look up one
paragraph, what is Post-Colonial theory
well this is a pretty good shot at it, I don't
know if I could've done better myself
And thirdly, I'm also gonna be both
I'm gonna be arguing from but also to some
degree against some of the things in this
definition
And so I'm kinda setting it up as a prop that's
both
a launching pad but also a catalyst for debate
about some of the issues that we're gonna
discuss as I go along
So let me...and it was mainly for some of
these definitions that I gave the handout
because I wanted people to have something
they could jot notes on if they had specific
things they want to talk about
So here's how the Norton editors describe
the field of post-colonial studies
Post-Colonial studies is an interdisciplinary
field
that examines the global impact
of European colonialism
from its beginnings in the 15th century to
the present
Broadly speaking
it aims to describe the mechanisms of colonial
power
to recover exluded or marginalized subaltern
voices
and to theorize the complexities of colonial,
neo-colonial, and post-colonial identity,
national belonging and globalization
So, hopefully by the end of this lecture you'll
understand every word
in that definition and you'll also have some
grounds for contesting them potentially
or give your own version of what post-colonial
theory is
To that end I wanted to give you a proviso
So the Routledge say something very similar
and then it adds
the following proviso
which I thought was significant for what we're
gonna say today
So this is from the Routledge
We would argue that Post-Colonial studies
are based in the historical fact
of European colonialism
And the diverse material effects
to which this phenomena gave rise
We need to keep this fact firmly in mind
because the increasingly unfocused use of
the term Post-Colonial
over the last 10 years
to describe an astonishing variety of cultural,
economic, and political practices
has meant that there's a danger of its losing
its effective meaning altogether
In particular
- this is gonna come up later -
the tendency to employ the term Post-Colonial
to refer to any kind of marginality at all
runs the risk of denying these spaces
in the historical process of colonialism
Ok
So these are the definitions that are gonna
be kind of our starting point
and also some of the things we're going to
try to come back to and revise
as the lecture goes on
And as I read them
Instantly I have several questions that kind
of rise to the surface
The first one is
What is the colonial? Or, what is colonialism?
The way I phrase it up there is
How capacious or limited is that category?
The category of the colonial
Both the Norton and the Routledge editors
seem very intent
on tying colonialism in this category of the
colonial
to what the Routledge editors call
"the historical fact of European colonialism"
The Norton definition shares this emphasis
on European colonialism
and then, kind of, takes it one step further
or projects it onto an even broader canvas
by saying it's talking about the global impact
of European colonialism
from its beginnings in the 15th century
that being the Iberian empires, Spain and
Portugal
to the present
So the Norton editors are not only, kind of
focusing here again on Europe and European
colonialsim
but also trying to draw a line between European
colonialism and the present
and in particular what they're calling globalization
which, we can already say, there's already
a tension rising here, right?
because that globalization is something which
comes long after,
or somewhat after, colonialism
It's usually tied to the neo-liberal policies
of the 1980s and 1990s
So we have this very broad question
How far in space and in time can we stretch
this category of the colonial?
One way of kind of breaking that down
into a smaller piece
Might be through geography
Where, where is the colonial?
Where is the post-colonial?
What is the map of the post-colonial?
That question might seem kind of unnecessarily
abstract and not that interesting, but
let me put it in a more concrete way
that might start to bring to the surface some
of the tensions here
What is gained and what is lost by
bringing into comparison places as disparate
as
say...Canada, Mexico, Morocco, and India?
What are the similarities and discontinuities
there?
If we acknowledge that all those places are
in some way post-colonial
in the sense that they were once
controlled or part of European empires
Then how are their post-colonial experiences
similar
and how are they different?
Are they all equally post-colonial?
Or is one more post-colonial than the other?
Certainly at least academic practice would
suggest that some places start to seem to
be more post-colonial than others
So we're gonna have to probe that and see
why that might be
So the location is difficult to pin down
Something that seems very easy
Ok, the historical process of European colonialism
Starts to introduce very significant fissures
once you start to pull away at that
So if it's really difficult to, kind of...
Pin down the location of the colonial and
the post-colonial
It's also really difficult to pin down the
temporality
When? When is, or when was, the post-colonial?
Did it already happen? Are we still in it?
You know, the Norton editors they state very
confidently
That they're going to look at European colonialism
starting in the 15th century
And it's very easy to breeze by that and say
"Ok, of course, the 15th century"
But all of a sudden it begs the question of
clarifying questions, right
So how is the 15th century experience of territorial
expansion
Of the Iberian empires
How is that categorically different from what
came before?
Why then and not the Roman empire?
Why not the Moroccan Almoravids taking over
part of Europe?
Why is that not colonialism?
We have to kind of probe that question
So that's from the beginning
And then we also might want to ask
Is the 15th century colonialism the same as
the 19th century colonialism?
Can we draw a very clean and kind of easy
line between say
Cortes in Mexico and Napoleon in Egypt?
And if not why not?
These are some of the questions we're going
to kind of try to debate and tease out in
the lecture
The main point I'm trying to draw out is that
these concepts, the colonial and post-colonial,
are always going to be subject to
some kind of push and pull
There's gonna be people who are going to want
to make them as capacious as possible
And there are going to be people who are going
to want to draw out their limits
by suggesting the very real differences in
colonialism
across space and time
And part of what I want you to be thinking
about
And part of what I'm going to try to talk
about
is what is gained and, again, what is lost?
What are the advantages of making colonialism
really, really big?
And what are the advantages of saying
Well, there is no one singular post-colonial
because everything is so different and we
might as well talk about very specific contexts
So this is in some sense
the debate between kind of specificity and
generality
But with a very, kind of, unique manifestation
of that
within the context of colonialism
So I want to talk about this "post"
The "post" in post-colonialism
Both because I think it's important for understanding
what people mean
And because I think we're gonna be hearing
a lot of "posts" as we go along
Post-structuralism, post-modernism
post-capitalism, post-industrial
We're gonna hear a lot of "posts"
And it's important to know, what does it mean
when we talk about the "post"
So I'm gonna be talking mostly about how I
understand the "post" in post-colonial
but I do think it carries over, conceptually,
to the other "posts"
you're going to be hearing about in the semester
and in your work going forward
So the easy thing to say, ok, the "post" means
after, right
But I'm gonna say that actually the "post"
This prefix, this troublesome prefix
is a helpful site for thinking about
this tricky temporality of what the post-colonial
is
Some people have thought of it as chronological
Signaling after colonialism
which would be kind of the most literal meaning
of it
But other people have thought of it as more
of a kind of epistemic marker
That is, shifting beyond the systems of knowledge
and power
that make colonialism work
And before I build on that
what would it mean for the "post" to be epistemic,
it's really important that we define this
term and make sure that we're all on the same
page
Behrooz defined it really brilliantly last
week in his lecture on Foucault
So this is gonna be
review for many of you
but I also know there are new people and new
faces each week
So I just want to make sure we're all on the
same page
So I'm going to be talking about the epistemic
Which is a really important turn and idea
that post-colonial theorist have taken from
Foucault
And episteme literally just means knowledge,
basically, in brief
But Foucault, as put up there, he uses it
in a kind of specialized way
Foucault, and this is kind of the Norton spin
or their gloss on what Foucault means
He means the underlying structure of knowledge
and beliefs
during the historical period
I put my own definition up there
not because I think I can necessarily do better
than the Norton
but because I think its helpful to try to
translate things into your own words
and that's an instinct that I've been trying
to encourage the students in my own seminar
to do
So I thought of the episteme as
a kind of horizon
A horizon of what is knowable and thinkable
in a given historical period
So when Said and Spivak talk about the epistemic
effects of colonialism
and we're gonna see them use this word moving
forward
What they're talking about is, how did colonialism
shift
sometimes violently
the structure of knowledge
within colonized societies
Ok? So that's kind of my first parenthetical
on the episteme
So let's come back to the quotes
because I was saying we could mark either
a chronological shift,
so after colonialism,
or it could mark a sort of epistemic shift
beyond colonialism
And that leads to a kind of ambiguity, right?
Which "post" are we talking about when we
say "post"?
For some people that ambiguity kind of detracts,
potentially
from the utility of the term post-colonial
But many scholars have seen that ambiguity
to be productive
rather than debilitating
Opening possibilities to think about, as I
say,
these practices of representation of power
that circulate across the barrier
in between colonial rule and decolonization
So I'm gonna to be using the post to mean
something
that is temporally after but not over
Something that is after and yet still structured
by
what comes before
And I think that thinking about that practice
of the post might help you to think about
some of the other ones
that I'm sure are coming up in your seminars
such as post-modern, and we can just go down
the list from there
So these are, kind of, my introductory remarks
Here's my closing nugget from my introduction
which is, I'm just going to conclude with
one word
Which is, "resistance"
I found it really provocative...
is Bob Parker here?
Bob Parker was awesome
If Bob Parker ever gives his lecture on Structuralism
again, you should go
It was incredible
Or not lecture, his emphatically not lecture
His conversation about structuralism
But basically he came in and said
I'm going to define Structuralism in one word
And it was "comparison"
I mean, we only understand one thing in relation
to another thing
And it was kind of cheeky, right?
I mean, obviously you're setting yourself
up for a sort of critique when you do that
But at the risk of collapsing very important
differences
I'm going to take that same leap, that Bob
Parker leap
And I'm going to say
If I were to describe post-colonial theory
in one word
that word would be "resistance"
Post-colonial theory, broadly construed
seeks to identify and examine the mechanisms
of colonial power
and to propose strategies for resisting them
Resistance
So if I were to turn that into question form,
I would say
Post-colonial theory asks
How do we trace the consequences of colonialism
and the legacies of colonial power
and what are meaningful modes for combating
or resisting them?
So I'm trying to give you a few different
ways that you could get at this idea of post-colonial
One of them, which you could later decide
whether it works for you or not
is to think of resistance
Resistance is going to be a kind of recurring
theme in my lecture
So now I'm going to move on to
What is a little like the pre-history of
Said and Spivak
Alright so most of my time I'm going to use
Said and Spivak
but I want to say something about post-colonial
theory
before Said and Spivak
Excuse me
And I'm going to do that by saying a few things
about the 4 page reading on national culture
from Frantz Fanon
Just a quick show of hands, no shaming at
all
Did anyone have a chance to read Fanon?
Alright, we have a few
It was recommended
So I'm not going to draw on him for long
It was just important for me to know
I am going to kind of say a few things about
him
because I'm hoping he could set up
what are some of the distinctive contributions
of Said and Spivak
So this extract, this text that we read
is a part of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth
which was published in 1961 in French
Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of
Martinique
in 1925
At the time Martinique was under French colonial
rule
and later in life Fanon became a really active
member of
the Algerian struggle for independence
the Algerian struggle against French colonial
rule
This is a sort of trans-colonial intellectual
Whose life took him from the Carribean, to
France, to North Africa
where he ended up dying
A standard account of post-colonial theory
might start with Fanon
or at least with Fanon or other intellectuals
who, like Fanon, participated in the struggle,
the decolonization struggles
that spread throughout the colonized world
in the 1940s, 50s, 60s, and 70s
So when I say that Fanon and his contemporaries
participated in the decolonization struggles
what do I mean? What is the arena, what is
the point?
Where does the rubber hit the road?
What is the arena for their struggle?
What does anti-colonial resistance mean for
Fanon?
Well, in a phrase it means, national liberation
This may seem really obvious, right?
We're starting with colonialism, what does
that mean?
We want to decolonize
It's gonna seem obvious, but later its not
gonna seem that obvious
So let me walk us through it a little bit
Fanon says
and this is from The Wretched of the Earth
"to fight for national culture
means in the first place
to fight for the liberation of the nation,
that material keystone
which makes the building of a culture possible."
So this quote really exemplifies Fanon's clear
emphasis
on this idea of anti-colonial fight
And indeed, the armed struggle for liberation
from European colonialism
is a centerpiece of Fanon's thinking
And he thinks that colonialism will only come
to an end through
violent anti-colonial struggle
I also want to highlight his use of the word
"material" here
which hopefully should be kind of ringing
off bells in your heads
from previous weeks that we've been doing
Cause I think that this really signals his
commitment to
the Marxist idea of historical materialism
The idea that material forces shape consciousness
Not the other way around
Social economic forces shape consciousness
and not the other way around
This might seem a leap to you but
I can bear it out by having read more of The
Wretched of the Earth
but this is part of a larger in program in
which
he has a sort of material, I would say
a material understanding of what colonialism
is
and how you fight it
Now to be sure Fanon understood that colonialism
had both
material and epistemic consequences
Later in the same text he says
"Colonialism is not simply content
to impose its rule upon the present and the
future
of a dominated country.
By a kind of perverted logic,
it turns the past of the oppressed people
and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it."
So this quote anticipates the problem that
Spivak
is later gonna call epistemic violence
Which is a phrase that I'm going to return
to later in the lecture
According to Fanon, this is kind of his early
take
on what epistemic violence is
Colonialism not only distorts the present
through political and economic domination
it also distorts the past
because the European colonizer disfigures
the colonized nation's pre-colonial history
So Fanon is really foreshadowing,
he died actually before Algerien independence,
but he's foreshadowing a problem
that's gonna become very real
after the decolonization struggles
Mainly that decolonization will not be sufficient
in some ways
to liberate colonized nations
from the logic of colonial rule
Post-colonial subjects will have to decolonize
or liberate
history itself,
or subjectivity itself
So there is an epistemic dimension to what
Fanon is saying
He does understand that colonialism is working
on multiple levels
But I do want to emphasize that for him
kind of what I say, where the rubber meets
the road what he gives pride of place
is the idea of struggle
specifically the armed struggle against colonial
rule
and the material necessity of national liberation
The reason I'm emphasizing this is that
a later generation of post-colonial theorists
the one that we're gonna be focusing on
mostly today, Said and Spivak amongst them
focus, I would say, less on the material consequences
of colonialism
and more on its epistemic consequences
And that shift in focus
from the material to the epistemic
is what I'm gonna call the discursive turn
in post-colonial studies
By this I mean a turn
toward an understanding
of colonial power
that focuses on the production of knowledge
and also on the institutions in which knowledge
circulates
So for example
and Said and Spivak, as I've said, are representatives
of this trend
I'm trying to set up a contrast here
moving from the material to the epistemic
in what post-colonial resistance is about
So a discursive approach to the analysis of
colonial relations
might say, for example,
Colonial violence has not just made its mark
on territories, or on institutions
Rather, it also resounds
on the level of discourse
So this discursive turn
is this turn from the material to the epistemic
responds in part to the problem I said Fanon
was already foreshadowing
That decolonization did not resolve, or fix,
colonialism
It does not fix the structural problems
that the legacy of colonialism had left behind
Indeed, post-colonial thinkers recognize
that liberating the nation from post-colonial
rule
was not enough
They also had to decolonize the subject
They had to decolonize the archive
They had to free them, or liberate them,
from the distortions, and disfigurations,
the disfigurements
that Fanon had complained about
and already foresaw as being a problem
So I'm going to use Edward Said as kind
of a pioneering approach
of the move from the material to the epistemic
and of the discursive turn
Said is really someone who was a pioneer
 in this approach
to the study of post-colonialism
His book Orientalism is really all about this
It's about the discursive grounds
upon which the West exercised
and asserted its colonial power
over the rest of the world
And in particular he examines how the West
constructed an image of the Orient
which means here roughly the Middle East
but we can talk about that, he means roughly
the Middle East
as we would call it now
How the West constructed an image of the Orient
as its shadowy other
Said argues that through the binary opposition
of Orient and Occident
The West justified its political and epistemic
mastery
over the world
So that's one kind of discursive take
Then the next author we're going to be talking
about is Spivak
and in her essay I think that she's kind of
extending
Said's expiration of the discursive grounds
upon which colonialism works
She's asking us to listen to the voices,
the subaltern voices,
we'll return to that word, subaltern,
the voices that have been effaced from the
record
the historical record of Europe's colonial
encounter with India
And at the heart of that essay for me is a
challenge
And it's a challenge that is at once hermeneutic
methodological, and also ethical
How do we listen to the silences of history?
Indeed, can we listen to the silences of history?
Therefore, if I'm going to venture an initial
comparison
And I'm going to try to bear this out in more
detailed readings
between the two
I think what Said is doing is
he's illuminating one of the discourses that
made colonialism possible
Whereas Spivak is meditating upon
the discourses whose very possibility was
occluded or negated by the fact of colonialism
Now before I go deeper I'm gonna see if this
kind of comparison
I'm gonna see if I can tease that out with
some nice quotes from those texts to make
sense of that
But before I go any deeper into this analysis
I should just say
from the beginning, I encourage you all to
have a little bit of
healthy suspicion, or you know,
we shouldn't all take for granted the fact
that
post-colonial resistance is grounded in discourse
rather than in material experience or in revolutionary
activity
I wouldn't want to elide what is actually
a very signifcant shift in thinking about it
To see if I could kind of draw that into more
real life comparisons
I would ask you to think, what are differences
between, say,
the Algerian War of Independence, in which
Fanon was deeply involved,
and this lecture, that I'm giving to you,
in the comforts of a beautiful lecture hall
here in Lincoln
If you see those to be different exercises
then you might want to think about it, and
yet,
I'm arguing that they're both in some sense
engaged in this project of resistance
I encourage you to think about that
You know, I'm talkng about a discursive turn,
that's where I'm gonna spend most of my time,
because I think that's where post-colonial
studies has moved increasingly,
but we shouldn't take for granted that that
is the best,
or certainly not the only form of responding
to colonialism
I'm now going to focus for a bit on Said's
Orientalism
Does anyone have any questions about what
I've said so far?
Another thing on this discursive turn
I think, something to think about is
I think one of the reasons that it works so
well is
that it really puts scholars back on the front
lines
of post-colonial struggle
I mean, discourse is our bread and butter
and, you know, if we can't fight in the war,
we can fight in the word discourse
that kind of turns us into heroes, and so
I both mean that to be an invitation
for you to join the struggle
and also for you to be skeptical from the
outset about
what are meaningful modes of resistance
So I'm gonna talk about Orientalism, Said's
Orientalism
Which is a book that's been very influential
for me
Probably of all the books that we're reading
this semester
the one that's been most influential to me
personally
And that's because I work on European colonialism
in the Arab-Islamic world
And so I'm sort of humbled to present this
work to you
In the tradition of Foucault
Said's book is really interested in the intersections
of power and knowledge
And specifically
academic knowledge, a specific kind of academic
knowledge
which is orientalism
How did it contribute to the consolidation
of colonial power?
And also Said is asking
How did Western representations of the Orient
contribute to the project of European colonialism?
My discussion of Said is going to attempt
to respond to those questions
and also to see if I can tease out the connections
between Said and Foucault
So before, I wouldn't say before...
to, in order to respond to those questions
I think we need to unpack the term that is
at the center of the book
The term that gives the book its title
Orientalism
What is Orientalism?
How many of you had heard the term Orientalism
before reading Said?
Ok...some have, I mean
Something to consider is that Said has sort
of overdetermined
what orientalism is
This is not a word he invented
But he fundamentally altered its semantic
field
So I'm gonna give you a sense of what orientalism
meant before Said
and what in some sense it can no longer mean
because of Said
And this is really what...
he gives us a few different definitions and
he's trying to build up and say these definitions
are interdependent
The first one that he gives...
and this is what Orientalism might've first
signified to someone before Said...
is: orientalism was and is
I'll show you evidence of that, was and is
an academic discipline
that emerged in the 19th century
Said says
"the most readily accepted designation for
Orientalism
is an academic one.
And indeed the label still serves
in a number of academic institutions.
Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches
the orient
is an Orientalist.
And what he or she does is Orientalism."
So, I'm an Orientalist.
Not really, but...
but in some ways, according to that definition
So if Orientalism is an academic discipline
then where, you might ask,
is the department of Orientalism
at the University of Illinois?
Is there a department of Orientalism at the
University of Illinois?
No. Why? Why do you think that is?
Anyone?
Why is there not a department of Orientalism
at the University of Illinois?
It's at the office of the chancellor, it's
been moved to administration (laughter)
Fair enough, I stand corrected
The reasons that there really isn't
a department of Orientalism at the University
of Illinois
it's twofold, you know
the term has really fallen out of fashion
as a descriptor for an academic field
And one of them is the practical reason
that it was deemed just far too broad
It at one time encompassed everything from
India all the way to Morocco
and everything from ancient Mesopotamia up
until the present
And it just became too unwieldy
to be actually a field of academic inquiry
But really, it wasn't the weight of that that
broke the back of Orientalism
it was really Said's book itself, Orientalism
which really demonstrates the extent to which
that field was implicated
that academic field was implicated
in Europe's colonial expansion and domination
of the Arab-Islamic world
But before we pat ourselves on the back
and congratulate ourselves for having moved
on from Orientalism
I do want to suggest that the term still lingers
amongst us
in some academic venues
Actually, just this week as I was preparing
this lecture
I got an invitation to review a manuscript
from a major journal in my field
which is
Journal of the Economic and Social History
of the Orient
And likewise, probably Europe's most important
institution
for studying the languages, cultures, and
history
of the Middle East amongst other places is
SOAS: The School of Oriental and African Studies
And so, Said's first definition, which is
an academic discipline that emerged in the
19th century
that's what he means
and it's mostly gone but it still lingers
with us
So I want you to think about the kind of long
shadow
that this disciplinary name has cast
From there Said moves to a second definition
so he says, the first and most obvious one
is that its this field you might've heard
of, Orientalists
and then he kind of moves up in order of complexity
and he says
Orientalism is, and I quote
"A style of thought
based upon an ontological
and episemological distinction
made between the Orient and, most of the time
the Occident."
So, this is a lot harder than the first definition
I think we can all agree
First of all, to see if we can understand
it
I think, we're gonna have to see
if we can define ontology and epistemology
I did that up there, so
ontology, kind of roughly, the study of being
and epistemology
the theory or study of knowledge
And if you were reading, I think most of you
were reading from the Norton text
the Norton actually glosses this phrase
this is how they gloss it, they say
"Orientalism is a style of thought
based upon the difference in the essential
being
of the Orient and the Occident
that's the ontology
and in how they are known"
That's the epistemology
I might've glossed this phrase slightly differently
I might've said
Orientalism is a style of Western thought
based on the total alterity
of the Orient, that's the ontology
and based on the total superiority
of the Western colonizer
because in Orientalism
it is precisely knowledge that is the source
of power
So, for me, he's saying
Orientalism is a style of thought based on
total alterity
of the colonized subject
total superiority of the colonizer
And it's from this definition,
and what he calls its traffic with the first
one
the traffic between Orientalism as an academic
discipline
and Orientalism as a style of thought
that emerges the third definition
which in some senses is the main definition
the one that's going to structure the rest
of Said's book
And here it is
Taking the late 18th century as a very roughly
defined starting point
so he's saying, starting with the Napoleonic
invasion of Egypt
in 1798
And I say that because we should be very careful
in considering what turn...
how Said places Orientalism in space and time
he's saying, starting with Napoleon in Egypt
in 1798
Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed
as the corporate institution
for dealing with the Orient
dealing with it by making statements about
it,
authorizing views of it, describing it by
teaching it
settling it, ruling over it,
in short, Orientalism as a Western style
for dominating, restructuring
and having authority over the Orient
So this third definition, this is the motor
behind Said's book
this is what he means when he says Orientalism
But he does go through the work to say
This isn't a term I invented
It has this prehistory
This is how I'm gonna use it
I hope that when you read this passage
Or if you haven't read it yet when you saw
this quote
you had your Foucault bells ringing off in
your head
Because Foucault's footprints are really all
over this definition I think
One of the things that's at work in this passage
Is what Foucault calls knowledge-power
Which is the term that Foucault
kind of creates to describe how the production
of knowledge
is always wedded to power
Another thing that Said is building on is
Foucault's idea of productive power
You might remember that one of Foucault's
main arguments
is that power is not just negative and repressive
rather it's also productive
in the sense that it produces the very categories
that it then strives to regulate
So this is what Said is kind of playing with
here
This idea of Orientalism being a kind of productive
power
And let me see if I can kind of translate
that into Foucauldian terms
to make more sense of it
Western knowledge produces a category
the Orient
which it then seeks to dominate and regulate
through the knowledge-power of Orientalism
So this is a category that is at once
produced by the very discourse that is used
to control it
So that's a very kind of Foucauldian methodology
that Said is using
Here's another passage where
Said is using kind of very explicitly
the language of productive power
to talk about Orientalism
And I'm doing this a little bit
to kind of show you the geneology of Said
and how post-colonial theory
it has a kind of relationship with Europe
because it's drawing very significantly
from some European conceptual tools
to criticize Eurocentricism
We're going to talk about that a little bit
late
So this is what Said says, he says
"Orientalism responded more to the culture
that produced it
than to its putative object
which was also produced by the West"
That is, the Western imaginary
produced the Orient
and then produced a series of authorized statements
and ideas
to talk about the Orient
And Said locates Western colonial power
in the formation and deployment
of this kind of discourse, discourses like
Orientalism
And its precisely for that reason that Orientalism
and this is really important to understand
Said says Orientalism doesn't really tell
us anything about the Orient
It tells us about the culture that produced
the Orient
This is what he says in this quote
"I, myself, believe that Orientalism
is more particularly valuable
as a sign of European Atlantic power over
the Orient
than it is as a verdic discourse about the
Orient
which is what in its academic or scholarly
form it claims to be"
So its important to keep in mind here that
for Said
both the Orient and the Occident
are not, as he says, inert facts of nature
He contends that neither the East, nor the
West
is an essence
They have no ontological stability
using a term we just saw
They have no presence, Derrida might say
In colloquial speech we might say, there's
no "there" there
Ok, he's saying that both the West
and the Orient are discursive constructs
and that the West needs the Orient
indeed, that the West produces the Orient
in order to have a sign
against which to define itself, ok?
I should mention, while I'm kind of in the
mode of defining what Orientalism is
that Orientalism was also a school of European
art
And I notice that later Oscar Vazquez
Oscar can you please...
Who's going to be giving a lecture on Visual
Studies
actually assigned an article that talks a
bit about the politics
of Orientalist art
So I encourage you to start to make some connections
as we go along
In what ways might the gaze itself
be a tool of colonial domination
In what ways can looking, just the act of
looking
be part of the colonial system?
So hopefully we're gonna kind of see a connection
there when Oscar gives his lecture
Alright, so Orientalism has been incredibly
productive
for the field of post-colonial studies
One of the most influential books
Mostly because it charted this path, right
for analzying the intersections between
academic knowledge, colonial discourses, and
power
But the book has also spawned a sort of cottage
industry of critiques
Alright, which always happens
When you make people really angry usually
that's a sign that you're onto something
So I just wanted you to know, in what...this
is
This is 30 years of responses to Said in one
slide
But I think we can boil down the critiques
of Said
into kind of two major schools
The first critique has to do with how Said
theorizes the West
And the second has to do with his theorization
of the East, or the Orient
So in this first line of critique
several scholars have complained that Said
does seem to tacitly assume
that there is such a thing as a unified West
that is somehow the origin of discourse
the discourse then structures the rest of
the world
They're accusing Said of a sort of monolithic
idea of the West
Even though he's saying its just this discursive
con job
And indeed if you read the book
even though he talks very broadly of Orient
and Occident
he really only draws his examples from four
places
Britain, France, Egypt, and the Levant
So he sort of universalizes France and Britain
as kind of universal standards for what the
West is
Just in the way that he kind of universalizes
Egypt and the Levant as stand-ins for what
the East is
So people have asked
Aren't there in fact multiple Orients and
multiple Occidents
which vary across space and time?
That's been kind of like one...
That's the first major question that people
pose to Said
And the second one is
What about the Orient itself?
What about - and I'm using that term, once
again, kinda cheekily
no one uses that word -
What about non-Western representations of
the West?
In some ways there might be a kind of unfair
critique
Said says, very openly
This is a book about Western representations
of other parts of the world
But people say, well
Is there such a thing as Occidentalism?
Like what about the other side of the representational
coin, as it where?
And if you say that Orientalism is a project
that's wedded to colonial power
What would be the ideological contours of,
say, Occidentalism?
What kind of project would that be tied to?
Is there such a thing as Occidentalism?
In the way there is Orientalism?
So I'm happy to go into greater detail into
each of those lines of critique in the Q&A
But I want to make the jump now from Said
to Spivak
And I'm gonna do so with just this one claim
Which is that
Orientalism is an example of what Spivak calls
"epistemic violence"
Ok, so this is the bridge I'm trying to build
between "Orientalism" and "Can the Subaltern
Speak"
The Norton editors, they define epistemic
violence as
"the forceable replacement of one structure
of beliefs with another"
Personally I think we can define the term
in even simpler ways
I think, for me, epistemic violence is
the way the West uses knowledge to exert colonial
power over the rest of the world
And Orientalism would be
one mode, or one example, of epistemic violence
And in fact, for Spivak, epistemic violence
is the definition, in some ways, of colonialism
itself
She says, I think in the opening paragraph
of the text we read
"The clearest available example of such epistemic
violence
was the remotely orchestrated
far-flung, and heterogenous project
to constitute the colonial subject as Other."
This quote suggests several connections
between Spivak, Said, and Foucault
First of all
Spivak is building on Foucault's idea, once
again, of productive power
She's saying colonialism constitutes, or produces,
the colonial subject that it then strives
to regulate
But for Spivak colonial power doesn't only
produce the colonized subject
it also produces it specifically as an Other
an other that fixes the centrality
of the colonizing power
So, as I was saying, I think Orientalism might
be
one example of what Spivak calls
this hetergenous project to constitute the
colonial subject of other
And I gave myself this sort of mad-lib challenge
of translating Said into Spivak
So this is how I do it
The West produces, or constitutes, the Oriental
subject
and then it produces discourses to delimit
and define the Oriental
as the West's other
So that would be kind of one way that we can
mad-lib Said's thinking into Spivak's formulation
I want to give another example of epistemic
violence
because I really think that is one of the
ideas that is at the core of her essay
And this is one that is actually taken from
her essay itself
It's an 1835 document on Indian education in
British colonial India
And it says
I quote
"We must at present do our best
to form a class who may be interpreters between
us and the millions who we govern
A class of persons Indian in blood and color
But English in taste and opinions and morals
and intellect
To that class we may leave it to refine the
vernacular dialects of the country
To enrich those dialects with terms of science
borrowed from the Western nomenclature
And to render them - notice that word -
render them by degrees
fit vehicles for conveying knowledge
to the great mass of the population."
So this passage from Macauley's "Minute on
Indian Education"
exemplifies how Western institutions of education
were implicated, not only in the production
of colonial subjects
but also in the consolidation of colonial
power
Note that Macauley, he doesn't talk about
needing to find a class
He says, we need to "form" a class
of Indian subjects
Whom the English will render, quote, "fit
vehicles
for conveying knowledge to the great mass
of the Indian population"
So in other words, Macauley's statement shows
how, and to draw on Foucault again,
how these colonial institutions of education
really were conceive of as tools training,
or discipline,
that were meant to render the colonized subjects
as docile purveyors of a certain kind of knowledge
So this is another attempt to see if I can
draw connections
between Spivak and Foucault
So that's kind of my bridge between Said and
Spivak
which is epistemic violence
I want to see if I can take a step back
and just talk about Spivak's essay, "Can the
Subaltern Speak" on its own terms
So sort of outside of what Said is doing
And to do that I think we should just start
with the title itself
It's a real...it's kind of a quagmire
I think the four word title contains two meanings
It's sort of a deceptively simple title, right
And in some sense, the one that seems really
difficult, which is,
Who or what is the subaltern?
I think ends up being less challenging than
the second one, which is
What is speech?
You'll notice that the most dangerous things
in these theoretical texts is when
people use words that you think you know in
ways that are, kinda, what does that mean?
In order to address the second one we're going
to have to say
What or who is the subaltern
And then, what is speech?
And then there's this corollary question which
I've thrown up here, which is
How can we learn to listen to the silences
of history?
How can we learn to listen to what history
does not, or potentially cannot, say?
These voices that have been effaced from the
historical record
So let's see if we can attack this first question
which is, who is the subaltern? Or, what is
the subaltern?
I'm saying who or what because I think I'm
gonna be leaning, leaning...
eventually to the point that the subaltern
is more of a what than it is a who
Hopefully that point will become clear in
a minute or two
Spivak says that she is building on the work
of a group of radical Indian historians
known as the Subaltern Studies group
And she actually addresses this group very
explicitly in the essay that we read
And she describes their work in the following
terms
"Their project is to rethink Indian colonial
historiography
from the perspective of the discontinuous
chain of peasant insurgencies
during the colonial occupation."
So, for Spivak, in Guha, and in other historians
Guha is kind of the founding figure of this
group,
other historians associated with the subaltern
studies group
The subaltern is the peasant insurgent
whose voices and struggles have been left
out of Indian historiography
So far so good, I think
But what's really key here to drive home
is that this omission of historiography and
this problem of representation
was not fixed by decolonization
They're not saying only the colonial -
the colonial writers did not pay attention
to these peasant insurgencies
They're saying, no, no, in fact
this is an omission that is true both before
and after independence
So in some ways both Guha and Spivak are speaking
to the problem
of what we now call post-colonial leaks
who are, people who inherit and perpetuate
the structures of colonial rule
and in particular, in this case
the epistemic structure of colonialism
an epistemic structure who excluded certain
events and certain people
So Guha and Spivak are accusing certain nationalist
Indian historians
of, in some sense, replicating exclusionary
practices
that were part of the colonial episteme
So Guha - she's building on this
this is kind of where she's taking this turn
But she's moving in a new direction
Like Guha, she's interested in recovering
voices
that have been effaced from the historical
record
But she focuses in particular on the figure
of the subaltern woman
Who, she says, is doubly effaced
That's her word
So she's theorizing subalternity
She's taking this debate that's already happening
in Indian studies
And she's theorizing it as a specifically
gendered form of muting
She's interested in exploring how certain
historical and ideological conditions
have conspired to mute or silence some subjects
And in particular, women in colonized societies
So, I'm kind of walking us down this road
but now I need to kind of throw up a proviso
that's important here because
it would be very easy to think, ok
So the subaltern is a woman, or is a colonized
woman
or is an illiterate woman in rural India
And, no that's not actually what it is
because for Spivak, although she's very interested
in the intersections
between gender and power, the subaltern is
not so much an identity
as it is a predicament
It is a certain relationship to power
A certain situational relationship to power
and discourse
It is the predicament of subjects whose voices
cannot be heard
Of subjects who are radically obstructed from
discourse
And this is how Spivak puts that point
"Simply by being post-colonial, or an ethnic
minority
we are not subaltern
That word is reserved for the sheer heterogeneity
of decolonized space"
Ok, so clear now.... No, not really at all,
I'm just kidding
Sheer hetergeneity, right, is one of the defining
hallmarks of the subaltern
But what does that mean, right? What does
that mean?
So in my seminar we've, kind of, with an eye
towards starting to think about final papers
and this is a methodological aside
We've been starting to think about, how do
you argue with theory?
How do talk about theory in an argumentative
mode?
What are the grounds upon which you can engage
these texts critically
and insert your own voice?
And for me, and this is mostly directed to
people who are taking the seminars
One of the best ways, or one of the first
ways into theory
is through key terms and concepts
that are characteristic of certain theorists
or certain schools of theory
And they're usually not neologisms, they're
not necessarily new words
but rather words that are used in new or unfamiliar
ways
So for Foucault that might be power
for Derrida that might be play or presence
for here, one way to start to engage
if you're starting to think, how would I write
a paper about Spivak?
One way might be to just look at this one
phrase, "sheer heterogeneity"
and say, what does she mean by that?
What is the relation between heterogeneity
and subalternity?
So I'm going to give you my take, but it's
not meant to foreclose debate
because most of the debating about Spivak
has to do with that specific formulation
My take is that she's saying that she reserves
the term subaltern
for the subject whose radically difference
will not merely serve as the shadow
that defines the dominant center
That is to say, the subject who will not be
subsumed
in the self-other binary
I say that subalternity is not an identity
but rather it's a predicament
it's also, I think, a situational relationship
to power
And by that I mean, the subaltern is that
which lies
beyond the horizon of the colonial episteme
So that's how I understand - I think Spivak
and I -
I've never spoken with her
would agree the subaltern is a predicament
and not an identity
I'm not sure she would agree with that specific
formulation
but I encourage you to think about it on your
own
I'm thinking about the subaltern as that which
lies beyond the colonial episteme
So here's my cheeky rejoinder to Spivak's
essay
Can the subaltern travel?
We've got can the subaltern speak, and now
I'm saying can the subaltern travel?
And what do I mean by that? I mean,
To what extent is the category of the subaltern
helpful
for analyzing and thinking about post-colonial
cultures and experiences
outside of India, outside of the context of
India?
For example, I can just start with like a
very easily, empirically verifiable fact
That subaltern studies has played a huge role
in recent Latin American studies
but it's actually played relatively little
role, relatively less role I should say,
in African studies, both North African and
Sub-Saharan Africa
That would be easily verifiable by any library
search
The question is, why?
Why is it that this is an idea that catches on
in some contexts
and not in others?
Have you heard of the subaltern in the context
you study?
If the answer is yes, you might ask why
If the answer is no, you should also ask why
I have some ideas about this and we can maybe,
I'm running a little bit over
I'll share them in the Q&A
But in any case I think that the take home
is not merely
to replicate Spivak's theorization of the
subaltern
but rather to take up the spirit of the essay
Which is to ask
What are the voices and experiences that have
been effaced from the record
of the cultural context you study
Who or what is the subaltern in the context
you study?
That's something for you to think about
I'm going to jump over to my next, brief section,
which was,
Making some connections between Spivak, Derrida,
and then also from Foucault
mostly in the spirit of time, because I want
to make sure we have time for questions and
answers
but one thing I will say from this, a kind
of quick summary of this section is
I think Spivak shares Foucault's interest
in
the forces that help to produce the subject
and help to produce knowledge
but she takes issue with -
she thinks that Foucault fails to acknowledge
that the Western subject is not a universal
subject
and she also takes issue with
Foucault's failure to address the constitutive
role of gender
in the formation of subjectivity
So in some ways we can say that she is kind
of worlding and also gendering
these post-structuralist debates in subjectivity
and this is part of this larger post-colonial
program
which is the critique of Eurocentrism
that is to say, showing the ways in which
certain European thinkers
take principles, take their principles to
be universal principles
rather than products of a specific cultural
and historical milieu
But I think that there's kind of a vexed issue
here, right?
because I think that post-colonial theory
is sort of inside, outside, and against
European intellectual history
because it is both arguing against Eurocentrism
but often doing so using some very critical
tools that were developed
within the European context, and so
that relationship, I don't think it can be
resolved
at the very least it should kind of be put
out there and probed
So we're gonna move now to what I consider
to be current debates in post-colonial studies
I've kind of tried to go, show the trajectory
that goes
from the material to the discursive turns
And now I want to say something about
where I think the field is now
If I were to summarize current debates and
problems in the field of post-colonial studies
I would boil them down to one phrase
which is, the location of theory
Where is it produced, who produces it, how
is it used?
Many scholars in the field today are currently
wondering
worrying, is post-colonial theory neo-colonial
That is to mean, does post-colonial theory
reconstitute the map and structures
of colonial domination
What do I mean by that?
We can say, for example, that the readings
we did for today
took us from India, to the Middle East, to
the U.S.-Mexico border
from the 19th century to the 1980s
or we could just say we read 3 texts that
were written in the U.S.
And, in the context of Said and Spivak
two texts that were written in prestigous
Ivy-League universities
And so, this is the problem that I'm calling
the location of the theory
That post-colonial studies has tended to
rely on theoretical discourses
generated in privileged Western universities
and then exported, or deployed, in some sense
to analyze, and sometimes even kind of add
value to,
non-Western cultural texts
So there's this sort of very uncomfortable
dynamic of
Western privileged discourse sort of adding
value to
the raw materials of culture happening in
other places in the world
So there've been a number of problems
I mean, a lot of people see this dynamic and
there are a number of ways at getting at
How do we solve this problem, right?
So one of them is
What if we reversed the directionality of
post-colonial theory?
What if we used thinkers of the global South
to theorize the cultural production
of the global North?
Is there a way to do this without making
sort of, cultural agents of the global South
speak through, somehow,
the legitimizing framework of the
Western university
That's kind of one way that people are trying
to think about
Can we kind of relocate where we're looking
for theory?
Another one is then a renewed emphasis on
the transcolonial
So another response to this issue of
How is post-colonial theory generated and
deployed
has been renewed emphasis on what I'm calling
the transcolonial
And by that I mean
an emphasis on these lateral movements
of culture and subjects, that are connecting
post-colonial subjects
and somehow skirting, or circumventing the
metropole
To take an example from my own work
A sort of classic, post-colonial study of
Morocco, which is what I work on,
would be Morocco in relation to its colonizers,
France and Spain
A transcolonial approach might be
A focus on cultural change between Morocco
and Palestine in the 1930s
And so this is another way that people-
This is another way that people are, kind
of, remapping
the directionality or the map of theory
And the idea behind this, I mean, and I think
I put this up there,
this has kind of emerged from this critique
that potentially post-colonial studies has
put
too much emphasis on the vertical power relationship
between the colonized and the colonizer
And the transcolonial, in some ways, is meant
to be a framework in which
minority subjects can identify themselves
vis-a-vis each other
rather than solely in opposition to a dominant
discourse
So that's one response
Another response is what I'm gonna call Other
Colonialisms
And this is another field of innovation right
now
Which is, What about projects of
What about projects of territorial expansion
or political domination
that originate outside of Europe?
Is there such a thing as a non-European colonialism?
Are there pre-modern colonialisms?
The two books that I put up here
are both from a University of California Press
series called Other Colonialisms
that is engaged in this problem
And most of the books in that series are engaged
with Japanese colonialism in East Asia
So that's another, another question is
To what extent is it helpful
How far geographically and temporally
can we extend this idea of colonialism?
So these are a few ways of kind of skinning
that cat
this problem that I've said, the location
of theory
For me, the most interesting, and perhaps
most ambitious, is
Rethinking what theory is itself
Rethinking where theory is made, what constitutes
theory
So increasingly scholars in the post-colonial
field
are looking for theory in new places
And I don't just mean by that new geographic
locales
like, Oh let's see if Japan also had a colonial
experience
But actually looking at different kinds of
practices, different kinds of texts
Might we look at creative work, creative texts,
as a site of potential theorization
And really that's the reason why I wanted
to assign
Anzaldua's kind of genre-bending Borderlands/La
Frontera
because, you know, I wanted you to ask
Is Anzaldua theoretical in the same way that
Derrida is theoretical?
And if so, what would it look like to use
Anzaldua
to read, say, a canonical Western text, like
Don Quixote or Ulysses
So I'm gonna transition now to Anzaldua
These are kind of the questions I'm gonna
be probing in this last section
And you know, one of the things that is both most
challenging and most satisfying about Anzaldua
is that, her use of code switching, right?
Her effort to sort of provincialize, or queer,
English by
joining English together with long, untranslated
passages of Spanish
And in some sense, to translate Anzaldua into
a monolingual text
is to miss the point of her entire writing
project
But at the same time I want us to be all,
like, more or less on the same page
as we discuss her bilingual aesthetics and
politics
Pedagogically it's difficult to know what
to do with that aspect of Anzaldua
So I just wanted to open up the floor now
Does anyone want to ask any comprehension
questions about the Anzaldua text?
Before I make, kind of, more argumentative
points about it?
Yeah?
What was that?
The quote, this quote right here?
Well I'm not, I'm not going to translate it
Well I could, I could, I mean like
Native land, this is home, the small towns
in the valley
the little towns with chicken pens and goats
picketed to mesquite shrubs
I've missed the hot nights of air, nights
of fireflies and owls
making holes in the night
But there are a few things here, because
She also has a very non-normative use of Spanish
One of the things about Anzaldua is that
And I've discovered this reading her,
That I have a more normative sense of Spanish,
a language I learned as a second language
than I do of English, that I read her and
I say
Oh, that's not really how you would say this
in Spanish, so
It's a sort of in-between speech, that eludes
translation
eludes various normative practices of translation
and I think that's kind of what makes it interesting
and Anzaldua precisely wants someone who doesn't
understand the text
to feel that discomfort of not being at the
center of the text
of not being at the center of her practice
So, in some sense, doing what I just did
Flattens that effect, but at the same time
and this is the give and take of teaching
Anzaldua
it puts everyone at a structural disadvantage
if you don't do it
So, if there are more questions you can bring
them up as we go along
I'm going to be kind of using Anzaldua as
As a point of inflection to start my conclusion
of this talk
And I think that she's
a fitting place to move toward a conclusion
because
Her text picks up - for me places post-colonial
theory and post-colonial studies
in conversation with a number of fields that
we will discuss in the coming weeks
Indigineous studies, and feminist and queer
theory
Now, I'm not going to have time to draw each
of those connections
right now in the lecture
But I do hope you'll keep Anzaldua in mind
next week in particular with Indigineous Studies
because I think you're gonna start to hear
her voice resurge and resonate
in interesting ways with some of the theoretical
openings she has in those fields
So, by way of introduction, the book - we
read a chapter from a book called
Borderlands/La Frontera
Which is a foundational text for a field that
is called Border Studies
And the book is an attempt to recover, and
in some sense, valorize,
the voices and languages and culture and ethics
of people who live on the U.S.-Mexico border
But also of people who live on any border
People who live on the borders of language
People who live in multiple languages
in multiple nation states, in multiple cultures
It's a sort of defense of border thinking
and border ethics
So right off the bat, the theoretical question
I have about this text is the following
To what extent are the terms colonial and
post-colonial helpful
to describe the relationship between the mestiza
subject and white America
That is, to what extent does the U.S. have
a colonial relationship with Mexico
And if it does, then how does that relationship
resound
in the experiences of chicano, latino, and
other immigrant experiences here in the United
States
I don't really want to foreclose that question
I'd rather just leave it open
I think the fact that I put Anzaldua on the
syllabus shows a little bit
shows my cards, that I do think she has much
to offer
to the questions laid out by Said, Spivak,
and other post-colonial theorists
But I want you think about that
To what degree is coloniality a helpful framework
for thinking about U.S.-Mexico relations?
In the chapter we read
Anzaldua is trying to both identify and, in
some sense, champion
a way of being and thinking that she calls 
"Mestiza Consciousness"
So mestiza just means mixed or hybrid, though
specifically it means racially mixed
She's talking about a kind of mixture that
is grounded in the mixture of races
And this has to do with Mexican racial theory
that we can get into in the Q&A if you're
interested
but we can kind of translate that for now
as mixed consciousness
And this topic of mixed consciousness I think
leads us to one of the conceptual tensions
of the text
She places mestiza consciousness in opposition
to Anglo culture
But at the same time she argues that mestiza
consciousness is about
moving beyond binary oppositions
In some sense she kind of wants to have it
a little bit of both ways
And so we might want to consider this the
move of
"undererasure", you see a lot of people write
using binaries that are inadequate and yet
necessary
This is a move we've seen in other thinkers
That she's both trying to put it in opposition
to some dominant culture
And also suggest that its a way of moving
on, moving beyond, binaries
And in fact the text is full of binaries or
borders
that Anzaldua is trying to transcend
For example, U.S.-Mexico, Spanish-English,
Poetry-Prose, you might've noticed that
Gay-Straight
Anzaldua is making the point, or she's arguing
that mestiza consciousness enables, and I
quote,
"A tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance
for ambiguity"
And she places this tolerance of ambiguity
in strong opposition
to what she calls Western bait
And this is what she means in this quote
La mestiza, so the mixed woman, this person
whose consciousness she's trying to talk about
constantly has to shift out of habitual formations
from convergent thinking, analytical reasoning
that tends to use rationality
to move toward a single goal, that's what
she calls the Western mode
to divergent thinking, characterized by movement
away from set patterns and goals
and toward a more whole perspective
one that includes, rather than excludes
So when I was rereading Anzaldua for this
lecture
I couldn't help but hear echoes of Derrida
here
and in particular, Derrida's defense of play
and its potentially something that is an alternative
to the totalization that he associates with
the Western metaphysics of presence
And as I was trying to think through what
for me was a very surprising connection
between Derrida and Anzaldua
I was reminded of something that Marcus said
in his lecture on deconstruction
He came and he provided this quote in which
Derrida talks about the role
of having grown up in French colonial Algeria
and the role that had on him being a sort
of marginal
having a marginal oppositional relationship
with Western metaphysics or with the Western
philosophical tradition
And Anzaldua, she also claims that this mestiza
consciousness
this tolerance for ambiguity
is something that emerges at the borders,
or we might say, the margins
of national, linguistic, and ethnic identities
So it made me wonder, like, is Derrida a border
thinker?
Or, to flip that around, is Anzaldua a deconstructionist?
These aren't thinkers that are normally brought
together
But the reason I'm kinda posing this question,
because I want to see if I can break down
the pernicious assumption that theory is only
something that happens
in these sort of rarefied, prestigious, Western
academic contexts
And so, thinking about, can we border Derrida
or can we deconstructionize Anzaldua
is one way to kind of start to work at some
of these surprising connections
And one of the challenges that I thought you
might think for yourself is
What would like like if we used Anzaldua
as an analytical framework to analyze, say,
Saussure, Saussure's take on language
or Hegel, and Hegel's take on the dialectic
That would be, that in my sense, would be
one example of
new practices in post-colonial theory that
are trying to break out
of some of the binds that I called previously
the location of theory
Ok, so now I'm just going to conclude, and
it's a brief conclusion
At the beginning of this lecture
I promised you that post-colonial theory would
have something for you
I did, I promised you, and I might've failed
yet thus far, but there's still time
So, I know some of you have to leave, but
hopefully I'll get in my promise before we
go
And precisely, I want to say, have something
for you even if you don't study
the history of colonialism
So when I was thinking about this lecture,
I had sort of two questions that came to mind
One of them is
What is it that I take to be the most inspiring
and relevant parts of post-colonial theory
for people who are working outside of the
context of colonialism?
And the other one was
What does Anzaldua have in common with Said
and Spivak?
The reason I say that is because I kind of
put the cart before the horse
I was like, I'd like to link these three together
and then I had to figure out why
why I wanted to do that
And so the answer I came up with was this,
and this is kind of my case to you
The ethics of situational thinking
Personally, what I find most inspiring about
Said's work, is
his overtly political and worldly approach
to scholarship
And in fact, all three of the texts that we
read for today
formulate in different ways defenses of what
I'm gonna call situational thinking
Said, for example, calls upon scholars to-
he calls upon us
to compile an inventory of ourselves
That is, to know ourselves by scrutinizing,
and foregrounding,
the personal and political investments we
have
in the things that we study
Likewise, Spivak urges Western theorists to
mark their positionality as investigating
subjects
And then Anzaldua, with a different style,
but I think a very similar message
states that the first step on the path to
mestiza consciousness is, and I quote,
To take inventory - like Said - [Spanish]
Just what did she inherit from her ancestors
this weight on her back
which is the baggage from the Indian mother,
which the baggage from the Spanish father,
which the baggage from the Anglo
So whether or not you work on the history
of colonialism
or the cultural responses to it
I encourage all of you, and particularly those
of you who are embarking on graduate study
to compile an inventory
To mark the positions from which you approach
your object of study
This instinct, this instinct to foreground
the position
from which we perform scholarship
is what I'm calling the ethics of situational
thinking
And it's something I think post-colonial theory
does particularly well
and I think it's the aspect of the field,
that travels most readily
to other fields of inquiry
I hope you'll keep it in mind, wherever your
scholarship takes you
Thanks very much
