A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty

doi:10.2307/j.ctvjsf541

Cited by 3,454 publications

(324 citation statements)

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“…Therefore I would argue, along with Spivak (1999), that we are not privy to a particular liberation of any native (or non-native) identities, but rather to new forms of native subjection that similarly re-define her/him in new ways. The ethnographic analysis of the past does not afford new forms of freedom to any authentic subject, but at its best it may provide or elucidate the hidden manner in which initial social categorizations might have been afforded.…”

Section: Policing the Vanishing Presentmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…I am specifically interested in understanding this archaeological recovery of the past not only as a particular method of political domination but also one of agency, in which multiple players express their own ambiguous social positioning as well as their own frustrations with a limited daily existence within the postcolonial landscape of Latin America. I explore these political dimensions of archaeology from the poststructural understanding that all readings of the past are really ''histor(ies) of the vanishing present'' (Spivak 1999), and as such are re-embodiments of specific national, racial, class and engendered nostalgia for who one imagines and wishes one to be (or not). It is also in this manner that I wish to problematize archeological (re)production by the ethnographic enterprise of focusing upon archaeology as an object of study, and therefore assessing anthropology's ultimate contribution to ''new old'' (see Hall 1997a, b) forms of postcolonial domination.…”

Section: ____________________________________________________________mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Disciplining the Past, Policing the Present: The Postcolonial Landscape of Ecuadorian Nostalgia

Benavides

2008

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________________________________________________________________The present article assesses the complex reconfiguration that studying the past signifies when one becomes visibly aware of the enormous political and cultural implications that such an endeavor entails. To this end, I will use the Ecuadorian landscape as an entry point or particular case to understand these larger theoretical problematics within a more empirically grounded ethnographic framework. I will rely heavily on my own previous assessments of particular reconfigurations of the past in the Ecuadorian imaginary through the production of the archaeological site of Cochasquí (Benavides, Making Ecuadorian Histories: Four Centuries of Defining Power, 2004a); the Indian movement's historical recovery of their pre-Hispanic past; the representation of a troubling pre-Hispanic homosexual harem of young coastal boys known as the enchaquirados; and the more recent representation of Guayaquil's national identity over the last century. All of these studies have viewed the manner in which the differing communities of the Ecuadorian nation-state utilize the past in conscious and unconscious forms to legitimize their own political ambitions. More concretely even, these studies exemplify the manner in which archaeological discourse is used to identify itself as the most rightful heir to assessing and understanding the national past, and ultimately, defining what being Ecuadorian means or should be all about. ________________________________________________________________Résumé: Le présent article évalue la reconfiguration complexe lorsqu'il s'agit d'étudier des faits avenus en considération des implications politiques et culturelles considérables d'une telle tentative. Pour en venir à mon propos, je vais recourir à la situation qui prévaut en Équateur en tant que point de départ, afin de comprendre ces problématiques théoriques dans le cadre d'une approche ethnographique plus empirique. Je me propose de recourir massivement à mes propres analyses des reconfigurations particulières ayant prévalu dans l'imaginaire équatorien en tenant compte des résultats de l'investigation du site archéologique de Cochasquí (Benavides, Making REVIEW

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Section: Policing the Vanishing Presentmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: ____________________________________________________________mentioning

confidence: 99%

Disciplining the Past, Policing the Present: The Postcolonial Landscape of Ecuadorian Nostalgia

Benavides

2008

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“…37 Situating himself as a postcolonial theorist 'within this inheritance', Chakrabarty rereads Fanon in an identical fashion to Said: 'Fanon's struggle to hold on to the Enlightenment idea of the human-even when he knew that European imperialism had reduced that idea to the figure of the settler-colonial white man-is now itself a part of the global heritage of all postcolonial thinkers'. 38 Arguing that there is no more pure 'indigenous theory' uncontaminated by 19th century colonialism, 39 Spivak attends to the representational impasses of humanism (and humanities) in her critique of essentialist politics. As Didur and Heffernan suggest, for Spivak, it is possible to construct 'an ethics of alterity that is not reducible to identity politics', 40 since the (gendered) subaltern is not detached from the forces of global capitalism.…”

Section: Postcolonial Humanism and Rightsmentioning

confidence: 99%

(An)other Way of Being Human: ‘indigenous’ alternative(s) to postcolonial humanism

Kumar

2011

Third World Quarterly

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“…Postcolonial studies, as a field of inquiry, seeks to understand the processes underlying colonization, and the representations that circulate in the dominant discursive spaces that justify colonial processes (Spivak, 1999). It is with this emphasis on deconstructing the dominant narratives that circulate in mainstream discursive spaces that postcolonial theory demonstrates its commitment to emancipatory politics by seeking to revisit and redress these processes of colonization (Dutta, 2008a).…”

Section: Postcolonial Theory and Hiv/aidsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Postcolonial Constructions of HIV/AIDS: Meaning, Culture, and Structure

Sastry¹,

Dutta²

2011

Health Communication

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As a field of inquiry, postcolonial health communication seeks to apprehend processes implicated in the construction of "primitive" versus "modern" with respect to issues of health. In the case of HIV/AIDS, the sociocultural representations of the disease have a profound impact on how the disease is configured medically and symbolically in dominant cultural imagination. Postcolonial constructions of disease are mobilized around the political and economic interests of the dominant power structures in global spaces. In this article, a thematic analysis of the constructions of HIV/AIDS in India in the mainstream U.S. news media was conducted. A corpus of news articles from the Lexis-Nexis database was created with the keywords "HIV," "AIDS," and "India." Three themes emerged from the study: (a) India as a site of biomedical control; (b) the economic logics of HIV/AIDS; and (c) AIDS, development, and the "Third World."

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A Critique of Postcolonial Reason

Cited by 3,454 publications

References 0 publications

Disciplining the Past, Policing the Present: The Postcolonial Landscape of Ecuadorian Nostalgia

Disciplining the Past, Policing the Present: The Postcolonial Landscape of Ecuadorian Nostalgia

(An)other Way of Being Human: ‘indigenous’ alternative(s) to postcolonial humanism

Postcolonial Constructions of HIV/AIDS: Meaning, Culture, and Structure

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