Postcolonial Theory Passages Flashcards
The African is, of course, sensitive the external world, to the material aspect of beings and things. It is precisely because he is more so than the white European, because he is sensitive to the tangible qualities of things—shape, color, smell, weight, etc.—that the African considers these things merely as signs that have to be interpreted and transcended in order to read the reality of human beings.
Senghor: The African (30)
Indeed, my real argument is that Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than is does with “our” world.
Said: representing orient 12
In any instance of at least written language, there is no such thing as a delivered presence, but a re-presence, or a representation. The value, efficacy, strength, apparent veracity of a written statement about the Orient therefore relies very little, and cannot instrumentally depend, on the Orient as such. On the contrary, the written statement is a presence to the reader by virtue of its having excluded, displaced, made supererogatory any such real thing as “the Orient”.
Said: representing orient 21
Must the novel be a house? What kind of narrative can house unfree people? Is the novel also a house where the unhomely can live?
Bhabha the house (142)
For the critic must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility for, the un-spoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present.
Bhabha the critic (147)
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 culture possible. There is no other fight for culture which can develop apart from the popular struggle.
Fanon
native poet & culture (43-44)
Thus we have followed the break-up of the old strata of culture, a shattering which becomes increasingly fundamental; and we have noticed, on the even of the decisive conflict for national freedom, the renewing of forms of expression and the rebirth of imagination.
Fanon
national culture & revolution (50)
Derrida here makes Nietzschean, philosophical, and psychoanalytic, rather than specifically political, choices to suggest a critique of European ethnocentrism in the constitution of the Other. As a postcolonial intellectual, I am not troubled that he does not lead me (as Europeans inevitably seem to do) to the specific path that such a critique makes necessary. It is more important to me that, as a European philosopher, he articulates the European Subject’s tendency to constitute the Other as marginal to ethnocentrism and locates that as the problem with all logocentric and therefore also all grammatological endeavors (since the main thesis of the chapter is the complicity between the two). Not a general problem, but a European problem
Spivak European theorist (293)
This slippage can be seen in the fracture inscribed in the very word sati, the feminine form of sat. Sat transcends any gender-specific notion of masculinity and moves up not only into human but spiritual universality. It is the present participle of the verb “to be” and as such means not only being but the True, the Good, the Right. In the sacred texts it is essence, universal spirit. Even as a prefix it indicates appropriate, felicitous, fit. It is noble enough to have entered the most privileged discourse of modern Western philosophy: Heidegger’s meditation on Being. Sati, the feminine of this word, simply means “good wife.”
Spivak
sati and subject-constitution (305)
I have attempted to use and go beyond Derridean deconstruction, which I do not celebrate as feminism as such. However, in the context of the problematic I have addressed, I find his morphology much more pain- staking and useful than Foucault’s and Deleuze’s immediate, substantive involvement with more “political” issues-the latter’s invitation to “become woman”-which can make their influence more dangerous for the U.S. academic as enthusiastic radical. Derrida marks radical critique with the danger of appropriating the other by assimilation. He reads catachresis at the origin. He calls for a rewriting of the utopian structural impulse as “rendering delirious that interior voice that is the voice of the other in us.”
Spivak
Derrida (308)
Seldom in our literary history has blackness so occupied the imaginations of white artists as during the rise of modernism. Indeed, that jazz age that found a sort of spokesman in F. Scott Fitzgerald derives its name from America’s primary indigenous art form, one created by Afro-Americans.
Nielsen: White modernists (49)
