Marginally Off-Center: Postcolonialism in the Teaching Machine

Re-reading postcolonial poetry: Arun Kolatkar’s Jejuri

“…It seems to me that the various commentaries on the sequence -from the most hostile to more nuanced ones such as Patke's -share an implicit assumption that the meaning of the poems can be located in the events of the sequence. Critics including Deepika Bahri (1997Bahri ( , 2003 have argued that postcolonial literary analyses are particularly prone to undertake potentially reductive thematic analyses of texts, adopting what she calls a "macrocosmic" (2003: 64) conception of the work to uncover its wider concerns, while neglecting its formal specificity. For Bahri, for example, the postcolonial text is "under pressure to perform in politically instrumental ways" (2003: 77), expected to engage primarily, if not exclusively, with the colonial encounter and its historical repercussions.…”

Revisiting the Three R'S—Reading, Writing and Revolution: The Role of Humanist Scholars and the Future of Humanity and Society

“…As Deepika Bahri has argued, the marginalized academic is "given the voice and the authority to create a manageable and systematized and consumable discourse of difference that, precisely through its production rather than despite it, leaves the normative intact." Bahri concludes, "the result is that instead of confronting the mechanisms of exploitation that produce a growing number of disenfranchised here and abroad, we find an acceptable substitute and are content with the appearance of making a difference" (Bahri, 1997). The halls of corporate academe can be brutal, exploitative and downright oppressive, but for some of us most of the time and most of us some of the time, it beats the hell out of workin' for a living.…”

Challenges of Teaching Clinically Applied Anthropology and Cultural Psychiatry in India: An Evolving Partnership between a UK University and an Indian NGO

“…There are also historical resonances that are especially pertinent for former colonies such as India that have to be recognised and responded to, when developing new teaching projects (Ofori-Adjei and Gyapong 2006;Subedi and Daza 2008). Critiques of teaching in post-colonial settings focus not only on the issue of language, but also the challenges of inhabiting multiple worlds and identities that require teachers, as well as learners to address what knowledge they acquire and how (Bahri 1997;Gorski 2008;Jadhav and Jain 2008;Nandy 1983;Sen 2006;Spivak 1993Spivak , 1994. In our collaboration this was a constant and ongoing process whereby structure and content were debated alongside use of terminology, its meaning and the exploration of our individual values and philosophies that arose from our varied cultural backgrounds and identities (explored below).…”