Theory in an Uneven World

Theory in an Uneven World

Volumn , Issue , 2008, Pages 1-217

  Radhakrishnan, R ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

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EID: 84889296624     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1002/9780470775660     Document Type: Book

References (277)

1. For a thorough analysis of the impact of "capital" on the time-space of global culture, see Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Random House, 1973). Also see Ranajit Guha, "Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography," in Subaltern Studies, Vol. 6: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 210-309, for a sensitive analysis of selected formulations from Grundrisse.
2. Walt Whitman uses the term "Nation of nations" to signify America as a mosaic formation in search of effective cultural unification.
3. For a useful typology of a variety of nationalisms, see Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).
4. Samir Amin has theorized the notion of "unequal development" memorably, and the work of geographer Neil Smith constitutes "unevenness" as an unavoidable category in the study of global systems. See Samir Amin, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989).
5. Jean François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
6. Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity-an Incomplete Project" in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed.Hal Foster (Port Townsend,WA: Bay Press, 1983), p. 315. For different positions on the modernist-postmodernist debate see also the contributions of Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991)
7. Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), and Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the Post-socialist Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997)
8. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988)
9. Andreas Huyssen, "Mapping the Postmodern," in New German Critique 33, (1984), p. 552.
10. The difference between "dominating" and "dominated" knowledges has been developed by a number of South Asian scholars. For a spirited, antagonistic engagement with the secularist episteme, see Ashis Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony, and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (Tokyo: UN University; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990).
11. For a careful differentiation of the "post," see Anthony Appiah, "Is the 'Post' in Postcoloniality the Same as the 'Post' in Postmodernism?" in Critical Inquiry 17 (1991), pp. 336-57.
12. In general, it has become customary to separate out two kinds of postmodernism: the postmodernism of play and pleasure, and a more serious postmodernism interested in oppositionality and resistance. But here, too, the privileged site has been "epistemology."
13. For an enabling articulation of universalism that functions as a critique both of Eurocentrism and Marxism, see Samir Amin, Eurocentrism.
14. Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984).
15. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958).
16. For a particularly mechanical and uninspiring application of poststructuralist self-reflexivity to third world feminism, see Julie Stephens, "Feminist Fictions, A Critique of the Category, 'Non-Western Woman in Feminist Writings on India,'" in Subaltern Studies, Vol. 6: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 92-125. See also Susie Tharu, "Response to Julie Stephens," in the same volume, pp. 126-31.
17. See Edward W. Said's essay on Camus' Algerian politics, "Narrative, Geography, and Interpretation," in New Left Review, 180 (1990), pp. 81-107. See also his Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993) for further discussions of overlapping territories and relationships between the center and the periphery.
18. See the collection of essays, Postmodernism/Jameson/Critique, ed. Douglas Kellner (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve Press, 1989), for more on the nature of the "critique" as a form of knowledge.
19. "Where does the critique come from?" is a pertinent question that is raised and discussed by Ranajit Guha in his essay, "Dominance without Hegemony and its Historiography," in Subaltern Studies, Vol. 6: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 210-309.
20. I would refer here to the work of Raymond Williams, to whom alternatives for change were more important than mere systems-building or a deterministic celebration of technology. See his Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1989).
21. Ella Shohat, "Notes on the 'Post-Colonial,'" in Social Text 31/32 (1992), pp. 99-113.
22. This flying away from history could also be read as postmodernism's rejection of a Marxian dialectic.
23. Jean Baudrillard's treatment of America, for example, is virtual and not historical.
24. See Raymond Williams' posthumously published Politics of Modernism for a critique of such a hypostasis of theory. See also Tony Pinckney's introduction to that volume.
25. I refer here to Jean François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
26. African-American intellectuals like Cornel West and bell hooks have eloquently articulated the "postmodern difference within" the first world. See the interview with Cornel West in Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism, ed.Andrew Ross (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), pp. 268-86.
27. For a polemical discussion of "hybridity," see my "Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity," p. 164.
28. Nadine Gordimer thinks through this issue of conscience in the context of "white relevance" in post-apartheid South Africa in her collection of essays, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1988). See also Stephen Clingman's introduction to that volume, p. 115.
29. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation ofCulture, ed.Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271-313. See also my essay, "Towards an Effective Intellectual," in Intellectuals: Aesthetics/Politics/Academics, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), and in Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis:University ofMinnesota Press, 1996.)
30. By "feminization" I mean the ethico-political authority of feminism which functions both as a "special interest" and as a general perspective with the capacity to influence the overall scheme of things. For a brilliant argument that advocates the generalization of feminist historiography, see Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid's introduction to Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989), p. 126.
31. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay, "Feminism and Critical Theory," in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987) pp. 77-92 and 277-80, for a provocative conjunctural articulation of feminist theoretical agendas.
32. See the special issues of Social Text 31/32 (1992) and Callaloo (fall 1993) on postcoloniality for discussions of the "post." See also Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory (London: Verso, 1992), and Arif Dirlik's essay, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism," in Critical Inquiry, 20 (2) (1994), pp. 328-56.
33. See the collection Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), and Nancy Fraser's Unruly Practices.
34. Edward W. Said's The World, The Text, The Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983) for a sustained advocacy on behalf of "worldliness."
35. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)
36. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, ed. Chandra Mohanty and M. Jacqui Alexander (New York: Routledge, 1997)
37. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Gloria Anzaldua and Cherry Moraga (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983).
38. Both Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Lata Mani in their work have consistently addressed the problematics as well as the potentialities of "location." See Mohanty, Russo, and Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, and Lata Mani, "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception," in Inscriptions 5 (1989), p. 123.
39. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has undertaken in quite a pervasive manner this project of the epistemological critique of identity as such, in conjunction with a strategic practice of essentialism for certain political ends. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic (New York: Routledge, 1990).
40. See the work of Peggy Kamuf, Naomi Schor, and others in this regard.
41. I refer here to Michel Foucault's essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy,History," in Language, Countermemory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Shery Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 139-64, where he reads Nietzsche radically in the name of "present history."
42. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278-93, 339.
43. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Richard Seaver Press, 1977), is written in the vein of flows and energies. See also Foucault's introduction to that volume. Also refer to Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault's The Foucault Phenomenon: The Problematics of Style, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and Paul Bove's foreword to that volume, pp. vii-xl.
44. Slavoj Žižek's Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992). See also the interview with Žižek in Found Object, 2 (1993), pp. 93-110.
45. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic. See also Satya P.Mohanty's essay on Toni Morrison's Beloved and the issue of identity politics, "The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition," in Cultural Critique 24 (spring 1993), pp. 41-80.
46. Michel Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum," in Language, Countermemory, Practice.
47. Chinua Achebe, in his celebrated essay on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, makes the point that even when Marlow grants humanity to the African, the African is always perceived as a junior. See Achebe, Things Fall Apart.
48. In modernist work after modernist work, Africa becomes the backdrop for the working out of the European psyche, and in a real way the "forwardness" as well as the complexity of the psychological enterprise is posited on the simple backwardness of Africa. For a critical reading of modernity in terms of gender, see Alice Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986).
49. Gauri Viswanathan's The Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), as well as her essay "Raymond Williams and British Colonialism: The Limits of Metropolitan Cultural Theory," demonstrates this thesis with clarity. See Views from the Border Country: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics, ed. Dennis L. Dworkin and Leslie H. Roman (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 217-30.
50. The point to be made here is that the axiomatic force of binarity has been coextensive with the authority of anthropological thought.
51. See The Invention of Tradition, ed. Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
52. Dipesh Chakrabarty's essays in Representations and Public Culture take up the question of "who is speaking for the Indian past," as well as the native's obsession with colonialist historiography. See "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for 'Indian' Pasts?" in Representations, 37 (winter 1992), p. 125
53. "The Death of History? Historical Consciousness and the Culture of Late Capitalism," in Public Culture 4 (2) (1992), pp. 47-65.
54. The vicious development of Hindutva in India today is a conscious political practice to "other" the Muslim and secure for Hindutva the legitimacy of nationalism. Madhu Kishwar and others have been compelled to question such an ideological fixing of the meaning of Hinduism and in the process call the bluff of the Hindu zealots.
55. Here again, Jameson's work has been crucial for, more than most other Marxists, he has accepted the cultural logic of postmodernism without at the same time relinquishing the ethico-political mandate of Marxian thought. See Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
56. Much of this problem with narrative can be subsumed under the general rubric "legitimation crisis." Lyotard's Postmodern Condition discusses at some length the relationship between narrative and the epistemic authority of knowledge.
57. For a postmodern interrogation of the aprioristic status of "value," see Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1975).
58. Philosophical discussions of En-Soi and Pour-Soi have been fundamental to Western thought. See in particular Jean-Paul Sartre's elaboration of these concepts in his Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).
59. One of the most poignant delineations of this invisibility of the subaltern self has been Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952). Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, trans. Mirra Ginsberg (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), is a powerful forerunner.
60. Gayatri Spivak's distinction between the two meanings of "representation" in her essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (pp. 271-313) has been most illuminating.
61. Michael Ryan's Marxism and Deconstruction: A Critical Articulation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982) faces the same problem of assigning priorities. Are Marxism and deconstruction coordinated in an equal relationship, or is deconstruction to be instrumentalized in the service of Marxism?
62. I refer here to Anthony Appiah's essay, "Is the 'Post' in Postcoloniality the Same as the 'Post' in Postmodernism?" Critical Inquiry 17 (winter 1991), pp. 336-57.
63. Homi K. Bhabha, "Dissemination, Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 291-322.
64. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991).
65. See my "Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity."
66. The Lacanian algebra completely preempts the specificity of a historically located semantics.
67. Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986) for a lucid discussion of the East-West divide via nationalism. See also his later work, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
68. One of the characters in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses (New York: Viking, 1988) expresses this idea succinctly: "What do the English know of their history? It happened overseas."
69. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
70. Audre Lorde develops and points out the limitations of this strategy of using the master's weapons to destroy the master's house.
71. The term "politics of location" goes back to Adrienne Rich's essay, "Notes Toward a Politics of Location," in Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (New York: Norton, 1986).
72. Lata Mani, "Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception," in Inscriptions, special edition on "Traveling etc.," ed. Vivek Dhareshwar and James Clifford, 5 (1989), p. 123.
73. I am using the term "totality" to reinvigorate it as a Marxian concept to question the immanence of the "fragment" and its autonomy. See Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977), with an afterword by Frederic Jameson.
74. The notion of "ethnoscape" is developed persuasively by Arjun Appadurai in "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy," in Public Culture 2 (2) (spring 1990), p. 124.
75. See my "Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity."
76. Homi K. Bhabha, "Interrogating Identity: The Postcolonial Prerogative," in The Anatomy of Racism, ed. D. T. Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 183-209.
77. For a compelling elaboration of "double-coding," see Kumkum Sangari, "The Politics of the Possible," in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. David Lloyd and Abdul Jan Mohamed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
78. See Spivak's In Other Worlds, and her Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993).
79. I would like to make an analogous connection between the question of language and the question of knowledge. We must not forget that Volosinov/Bakhtin emphasized the reality that language itself is the contested terrain and not a mere non-ideological vehicle of meaning.
80. See Edward Said, "Third World Intellectuals and Metropolitan Culture."
81. The "beyond" is to be conceived as a proactive seeking out of alternative knowledges, value systems, and worldviews.
82. See also the work of theorists such as Vandana Shiva, Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1988)
83. Ashis Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony, and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity (Tokyo: UN University; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990)
84. Alok Yadav, "Nationalism and Contemporaneity: Political Economy of a Discourse," in Cultural Critique, 26 (1993-94), pp. 191-229.
85. For a hopeful and populist take on nationalism, see David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
86. Madhu Kishwar, "Why I Do Not Call Myself A Feminist," Manushi 62 (1990), p. 28.
87. See the Inscriptions 6 (1992) special issue on "Orientalism and Cultural Differences," ed. Mahmut Mutman and Meyda Yegenoglu. In particular, see the essay by Françoise Lionnet.
88. One of the most influential books in this area is Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso, 1989). Equally illuminating is David Harvey's Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
89. It is to Michel Foucault that we owe this notion of "heterotopia." See Michel Foucault, "Heterotopias," in Diacritics (spring 1986), p. 22-7.
90. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (London: Bloomsbury, 1988).
91. A. K. Ramanujan has identified and analyzed the mirror-window dyadic function in Tamil poetry. See the introduction to Folktales from India, ed. Ramanujan (India: Viking, Penguin, 1993), pp. xiii-xxxii.
92. In this context I would like to make a qualitative distinction between the need-a postcolonial one-for transcendence as delineated by Ghosh through the character of Tridib in The Shadow Lines, and the colonialist cartography of Conrad.
93. I owe the insight that the "postmodern" should be "post-Western" to an essay on Du Bois that I refereed anonymously.
94. Amin, Eurocentrism, p. 152.
95. The controversy over Miss Saigon is a case in point. See Yoko Yoshikawa, "The Heat is On Miss Saigon Coalition: Organizing Across Race and Sexuality," in The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s, ed. Karin Aguilar San Juan (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994), pp. 275-94.
96. Among the many collections that have been published on the topic of multiculturalism, Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, edited by David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), is remarkable for its range of positions. For a more recent intervention on the drama of multiculturalism as it unfolds in England
97. Brian Barry, "The Muddles of Multiculturalism," New Left Review, 8 March/April (2001), pp. 49-71.
98. Jacques Derrida makes this crucial distinction between "centered play" and "the center in play" in his celebrated essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
99. Johannes Fabian develops the notion of "coevalness" in his work, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See also Satya Mohanty's ongoing work, which seeks to find post-positivist ways of talking about one history in terms of another.
100. There has been no greater or more complex advocate of "the big O" than Jacques Lacan, whose work has constantly underscored the transcendent importance of "the Other who knows no other."
101. Though Žižek's work in general focuses on the importance of the category of "universality," I refer here in particular to his book The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999). Equally relevant here is William Connolly's work on secularism and the ethos of pluralism.
102. For more on the relationship between ontological stability or the depth of being and loss of sovereignty through the process of mirroring, see Michel Foucault's The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1973), in particular, the section on "the analytic of finitude."
103. The works of Emmanuel Levinas and Edward Said, each in their own way, highlight the tensions between ethical and political notions of accountability. See also Adrienne Rich, Simon Critchley, and Alenka Zupancic.
104. This inviolable space of the Lacanian Real has been ably theorized by Z? iz?ek. See also the contributions of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, who attempt to coordinate a critical space between Marxism and psychoanalysis.
105. William Julius Wilson's work focuses on justice and Lani Guinier's sophisticated critique of a winner-take-all democracy cost her her nomination by President Clinton.
106. Jacques Derrida deals with the notion of "the parergon" in The Truth of Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and thematizes the relationship between the frame and what is in the frame.
107. Judith Butler's work on hate speech is particularly remarkable for the manner in which it instrumentalizes poststructuralist theory for a political cause. See also David Scott's discussion of Orlando Patterson's theorization of the relationship of freedom to slavery in chapter 3 of his book Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
108. William Connolly's Why I am not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999) explores the politics of becoming by way of Nietzsche and argues how a normative secularism preempts and colonizes possibilities of becoming.
109. See the dialogue between Michel Foucault and Noam Chomsky in Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, ed. Fons Elders (London: Souvenir, 1974), where the two philosophers, while they concur on what is to be done, differ radically when it comes to accounting for the nature of concepts such as justice, freedom, human nature, etc.
110. This is a notion rigorously developed by Foucault in The Order of Things.
111. Chantal Mouffe's The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso, 2000) differentiates agonism from antagonism.
112. Terry Eagleton's essay in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward W. Said (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), makes the powerful argument that the objective of revolutionary movements should be to diagnose and understand oppression in all its specificity, such as women's oppression and class oppression, but goes on to argue that the purpose of such an understanding is not to perpetuate the hegemony of these categories. These categories are meant to be transcended in the name of a full and indivisible humanity.
113. See Judith Butler's discussion of the slave-master relationship in Hegel in The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
114. Pheng Cheah's recent work on the spectrality of nationalism, by way of Derrida, focuses on the nature and the production of the collective subject.
115. Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), especially the chapters "Secular Criticism" and "Criticism between Culture and System."
116. See Derrida's discussion of the double session in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
117. Charles Taylor,"The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 75-106.
118. See the collection of essays Cosmopolitics, ed. Bruce Robbins and Pheng Cheah (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).
119. Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," p. 75.
120. I refer here to Partha Chatterjee's brilliant articulation of nationalism in the third world in his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial Word: A Derivative Discourse? (London: Zed Books, 1986).
121. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein's Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), a book that is a philosophical and theoretical demystification of the claims of nationalism.
122. The movie Being John Malkovich (1999) is a hilarious and though-provoking look into the ontological as well as the performative nature of what it means "to be" anybody.
123. Charles Taylor,"The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 83.
124. Paul Bove makes a similar point in his critique of Charles Taylor's egregious misrecognition of Foucault's politics-a misrecognition that has everything to do with Taylor's philosophical humanism that disavows its political and ideological "unconscious." See Bove's foreword to Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault's The Foucault Phenomenon: The Problematics of Style, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. vii-xl.
125. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interreptus: Critical Reflections on the "Post-socialist" Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997).
126. Kumkum Sangari's essay "Politics of the Possible," in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. David Lloyd and Abdul Jan Mohamed (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), parses the double-coding that characterizes a number of postcolonial novels that straddle East and West.
127. Anthony Appiah, "Is the 'Post' in Postcoloniality the same as the 'Post' in Postmodernism?" Critical Inquiry 17 (1991), pp. 336-57.
128. Charles Taylor in the Multiculturalism Reader, p. 98.
129. T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1991)
130. See my essay "Aesthetic Truth: Production or 'Letting Be,'" in Maps and Mirrors: Topologies of Art and Politics, ed. Steve Martinot (Chicago, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), pp. 304-18. See also Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, especially the introduction, pp. 4-23.
131. Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).
132. Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
133. Fredric Jameson,"Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue," in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 54.
134. For a rigorous analysis of the relationship between nationalism and super nationalism, see Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991).
135. Noam Chomsky, "Free Trade and Free Market: Pretense and Practice," in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 361.
136. Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), for more on the genealogy of "underdevelopment" as it is used to essentialize "indigenous"modes of production.
137. See Praul Bidwai and Achin Vinaik, New Nukes: India, Pakistan, and Global Disarmament (Northampton, MA: Interlink Books, 2000).
138. See, in particular, New Left Review 238 (1999) and The Nation, January 31, 2000; April 24, 2000; May 8, 2000.
139. It is of course impossible to use the phrase "derivative discourse" without immediately acknowledging Partha Chatterjee's ground-breaking work, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Tokyo: UN University, 1986).
140. For a postcolonial critique of postmodernity, see chapter 1 of this volume, also published in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, ed. Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 37-70.
141. See "Talking 'Anarchy' with Chomsky," in The Nation, April 24, 2000, pp. 28-30.
142. See Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 7.
143. See Nestor Garcia Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chiappati and Silvia L. Lopez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
144. See Edward W. Said, "Traveling Theory," in The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
145. For an articulation of "contrapuntal" reading strategies, see Said's Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993).
146. For a brilliant co-articulation of the metropolitan with the postcolonial, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Reading The Satanic Verses," in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 217-41.
147. Ashis Nandy, "Towards a Third World Utopia," in Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias: Essays in the Politics of Awareness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 21.
148. For a similar appeal to the ethico-political from the standpoint of economics, see Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999).
149. For a passionate and eloquent appeal against the winner-take-all model, see Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority (New York: Free Press, 1994).
150. For more on the relationship of self-centered to other-oriented imaginings, see T. N.Madan, Pathways: Approaches to the Study of Society in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
151. For more on exotopy, see Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
152. Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler, along Hegelian-Lacanian lines, have discussed the master-slave relationship throughout their writings.
153. See Veena Das, "Subaltern as Perspective," in Subaltern Studies, Vol. 6: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 310-24.
154. For passionate and theoretically astute elaborations of borderly existential phenomenologies, see Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute, 1987)
155. Trinh T. Minhh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
156. Ashis Nandy, Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 22.
157. Theorists such as William Connolly and Giorgio Agamben, each in his own way, have been attempting in their work to articulate a transformative praxis between pure form and/or procedurality and the determinacy of specific ideological contents.
158. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), p. 29.
159. I refer here of course to "filiation" and "affiliation" as developed by Edward Said in his essay "Secular Criticism" in The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
160. Rustom Bharucha's In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) takes up the concept of sarva dharma sama bhava and provides a useful analysis of the relationship of humanity to itself through denominational variants.
161. For more on the colonialist gaze in the context of colonial female sexuality, see Meyda Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
162. For more on the nature of the ethical in the context of Lacan and Kant, see Alenka Zupancic, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000).
163. See also Simon Critchley, Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity (London: Verso, 1999).
164. I refer here to bell hooks' essay, "Eating the Other," in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), pp. 21-39.
165. This entire register of the big O is of course the profound effect of Lacan's thought on the contemporary project of ethicizing the political.
166. For more on the joys and perils of recognition, see chapter 2 of this volume, where I discuss in great length the contributions of Charles Taylor and Nancy Fraser, among others, to the politics of multiculturalism.
167. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (Delhi: Ravi Dayal Publishers, 1988).
168. I am reminded here of the movie Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), scripted by Marguerite Duras, where the theme is also that of love between two people: one French, and the other Japanese.
169. The reference here is to Antonio Gramsci, who insists that an inventory needs to be made of the many traces of the past so that the present may be understood.
170. The idea of "traveling theory" was initiated by Edward Said in his essay of the same title, initially published in Raritan 1 (3) (winter 1982), pp. 41-67, and republished as a chapter in his book, The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
171. Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) is a persuasive historical-theoretical rendition of the double-conscious African- American condition vis-à-vis modernity.
172. Edward W. Said, "Intellectuals in a Post-colonial World," Salmagundi 70-1 (spring/summer 1986), pp. 44-81.
173. See Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), pp. 11-40.
174. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993).
175. I am reminded here of Amitav Ghosh's crisp and persuasive rejection of the very category of "Commonwealth Literature" for the simple reason that the kind of world where this category made sense does not exist any more.
176. The "voyage within" is a concept that Edward Said develops in Culture and Imperialism.
177. Ernst Renan's essay "What is a Nation?" in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990) makes conceptual connections between the making of a nation and willed patterns of remembering and forgetting.
178. For more on this, see chapter 2, this volume.
179. See Partha Chatterjee, "Nationalism as a Problem in the History of Ideas," in his Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
180. See R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
181. David Harvey, among others such as Neil Smith, Edward Soja, and Henri LeFebvre, has been particularly insightful in the way he has combined questions of phenomenology, history, and lived experience with postmodern notions of epistemic spatiality.
182. Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, p. 21.
183. For more on "imagining with precision," see chapter 3, this volume.
184. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), part two, "I Am Where I Think," p. 89.
185. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Viking/Penguin, 1988).
186. Judith Butler, among others such as Zizek, has intervened powerfully in unpacking the master-slave dialectic. See, in particular, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
187. See Ashis Nandy, "Notes Towards a Third World Utopia," in Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992).
188. The concept of the addas as social space is developed brilliantly by Dipesh Chakrabarty in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
189. See Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe.
190. Jacques Derrida's Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), deals with the theme of the materiality of writing and the valorization of writing by the king who himself cannot write.
191. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
192. See Ngugi wa Thiong'O, Decolonizing the Mind (London: James Curry, 1986).
193. Ngugi's novel A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, 1986) is a memorable depiction of the poisoned moment of independence: both liberation and mourning.
194. Homi Bhabha has been quite brilliant in the way he has developed notions of pedagogical authority and the performative in the shaping of national consciousness. See his essay,"Dissemination: Time,Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,"in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990).
195. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Deconstructing Historiography," in her book, In Other Worlds (London: Methuen, 1987).
196. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
197. See R. Radhakrishnan, "Towards an Effective Intellectual: Foucault or Gramsci?" in Diasporic Mediations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
198. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk makes the famous declaration that Europe, too, is part of his intellectual-aesthetic formation.
199. Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, p. 29.
200. Adrienne Rich, "Notes Towards a Politics of Location," in Rich, Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (New York: Norton, 1986).
201. See Feminism and Postmodernism, ed. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990).
202. See also Feminism as Critique, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
203. I refer here of course to Audre Lorde's famous formulation of the strategy of "using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house."
204. It is impossible to mention "embodiment" without reference to the works of Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway.
205. The strategy of "rubbing history against the grain" as the hallmark of historical materialism was developed by Walter Benjamin.
206. This critical distinction is made by Edward Said in his critical essay on Michel Foucault in The Foucault Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
207. Hélène Cixous for one has called a certain "male-dominant" tendency to idealize critical negativity as nothing more than "building a monument to the lack," in a psychoanalytic sense. Lacanian feminists, however, would refute such a characterization.
208. The term "coevalness" comes from Johannes Fabian's work, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) and the "chronotope" goes back to Mikhail Bakhtin.
209. The intersection of history and psychoanalysis marks the relationship of the empirical here and now to the elsewhereness of psychoanalytic thought and diagnostic insight.
210. See Nadine Gordimer, The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1988).
211. Dominick LaCapra's work on "empathy" goes much farther than liberal- humanist notions that keep empathy captive to the histrionics of the dominant historiography.
212. The predicate of the animal or the inhuman has been a consistent theme of Coetzee's work, in particular Disgrace (New York: Viking, 1999).
213. Nadine Gordimer, Burger's Daughter, p. 208.
214. See Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).
215. For a phenomenological understanding of the nature of perception and visuality, see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed Claude LeFort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968).
216. Lacanian theorists, in particular Slavoj Zizek, have been attempting to reformulate the category of "the universal" by way of reviving the authority of the big O in the context of the historical relationships among historical selves and others.
217. For more on this Mobius strip-like figurality in the context of diasporic subjectivity, see R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), in particular the introduction.
218. The worlding of the world is developed phenomenologically by Martin Heidegger in the context of the "earth-world" relationship in his essay, "The Origin of a Work of Art." Spivak develops the same problematic in the context of the third world. The significant question is this: is the third "world" different in any way?
219. Aijaz Ahmad, in an egregiously erroneous and unself-reflexive reading, takes Said to task for his critical ambivalence and eclectic critical practices. See Ahmad, In Theory.
220. The famous/notorious statement by Derrida in Of Grammatology that there is "nothing outside the text" continues to cause fraught debates about the "being of textuality" and the "textuality of being," rather reminiscent of a similar debate about the "language of being" and the "being of language" in the context of Martin Heidegger.
221. Immanuel Kant theorizes the category of "purposeless purposiveness" as an aesthetic category. We could perhaps also think of the old man in Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea as embodying and exemplifying the same principle, as he does his task ethically and aesthetically, even though deprived of public kudos.
222. For more on this, see Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora, ed. Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), in particular the essays by Dipesh Chakrabarty and R. Radhakrishnan.
223. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Pengiun Books, 1996)
224. Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992) for the advantages and disadvantages of double consciousness.
225. Samir Amin and Neil Smith, among others, have focused on "unevenness" as a geopolitical structure.
226. Judith Butler's Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) remains a classic in this field.
227. See Edward W. Said, "Secular Criticism," in The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983)
228. Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975). Also see the work of critics like Mahmud Mutman and Aamir Mufti, who have further unpacked Said's notion of the secular.
229. For a fascinating discussion of Said as a "border intellectual," see Abdul JanMohamed's essay in Edward Said: A Critical Reader, ed. Michael Sprinker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
230. See Edward Said's autobiography, Out of Place: A Memoir (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1999).
231. For a provocatively ground-breaking reading of the genealogy of reason in the historical context of colonial modernity, see "Nationalism as a Problem," in Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
232. Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacou-Labarthe, and Iris Marion Young have made memorable contributions to the "reasonable possibility" of community. There, behind it all, of course, is Foucault's understanding of the constructedness of madness: a construction undertaken by Reason as it delivers its monologue on "madness."
233. Rustom Bharucha, In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 16.
234. Foucault's essay on "Governmentality" makes the point that the state both collectivizes and individuates at the same time, thus rendering "subjection" unrescuable from the iron grid of official binarity.
235. See Gauri Viswanathan's The Masks of Conquest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)
236. Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
237. Rudolf Carnap, among the positivists, was the fiercest of them all in his polemical "witch hunt" of all forms of fuzzy and existential thinking.
238. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
239. Suya Dharisanam, in Jayakanthan Sirukathaigal, The Short Stories of Jayakanthan (India: National Book Trust, 1973), pp. 101-19.
240. Madhu Kishwar, in essays such as "Why I Do Not Call Myself A Feminist,"Manushi 62 (1990), pp. 2-8, has been consistently posing the question of "which Tradition," "which Hinduism."
241. For a deconstructive elaboration of the pharmakon, see Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
242. S. Shankar, in an essay on the cultural politics of translation,"Midnight's Orphans, or A Postcolonialism Worth Its Name" forthcoming in Cultural Critique, offers a stimulating non-Western version of postcoloniality.
243. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?' in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271-313
244. "Deconstructing Historiography," in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987).
245. For more on this issue of representation, see R. Radhakrishnan, "Towards an Effective Intellectual: Foucault or Gramsci?" in Diasporic Mediations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
246. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971).
247. For an affective and critical account of the psychic and psychological effects of colonialism, see Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983)
248. Ngugi wa Thiong'O, Decolonizing the Mind (London: James Curry, 1986).
249. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic (New York: Routledge, 1990).
250. See Veena Das, "The Subaltern as Perspective," in Subaltern Studies, Vol. 11, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).
251. See Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority (New York: Free Press, 1994).
252. For a poignant fictional account of how the "morning after" decolonization could degenerate into the "mourning after," see Ngugi wa Thiong'O, A Grain of Wheat (London: Heinemann, 1986).
253. William Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
254. See Ashis Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
255. Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist, p. 3.
256. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, 1973).
257. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe.
258. Walter Benjamin, "The Task of the Translator," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 69-82.
259. All the socially revolutionary movements in Tamil Nadu, like the Dravida Kazhakam (DK) and its offshoot, Dravida Munnetrakkazhakam (DMK), were all atheistic in nature.
260. See Frantz Fanon on nationalist consciousness in The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
261. Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist, p. 4.
262. I cannot think of a more profound or more incisive theoretical-ideological critique of nationalism than Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein's Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991).
263. See William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
264. See the essay by Fraser and Nicholson in Feminism and Postmodernism, ed. Fraser and Nicholson.
265. R. Radhakrishnan, "Ethnic Identity and Poststructuralist Difference," in Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
266. Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist, pp. 70-1.
267. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
268. Michel Foucault, "Theatrum Philosophicum," p. 175.
269. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, trans. Adrian Collins (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1949).
270. See Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold.
271. Connolly, Why I am not a Secularist, p. 70.
272. On the question of history and its relationship to subaltern theory, see R. Radhakrishnan, "Why History, and Why Now?" in Interventions, Fall 2003.
273. Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
274. For more on this theme of "history as a problem," see R. Radhakrishnan, "Why History,Why Now?" forthcoming in Interventions, Fall 2003.
275. Among the many memorable texts that deal with revisionism and the reclaiming of history, I would like to single out Toni Morrison's Beloved and Adrienne Rich's poem "Diving into the Wreck" for the exquisite manner in which they combine memory and counter-memory, the pain of the political and the pleasure of the aesthetic.
276. Edward W. Said, "Criticism between Culture and System," in The World, the Text, the Critic.
277. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), p. 21.