Postcolonialism Flashcards
1
Q
Nicholas Dirks
A
- “Castes of Mind” (2001)
- argued Indian caste system, as the British presented it, was largely a construct of their own
- it distorted and simplified a complex and shifting set of social relationships in order to divide and subjugate Indians
2
Q
influence of gender historians
A
- confronted by limitations of public archives and methodological limitations of conventional modes of historical analysis
- Joan Scott’s “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis” (1986) and Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” (1990) exposed some of the problems with existing scholarly practices and pointed the way to new approaches
- gender difference intersected with racial difference in striking and revealing ways in the colonial realm, became particularly productive area of inquiry
3
Q
unevenness of postcolonial influence on historians specialising in different regions of world
A
- transformative effect on colonial Indian historiography
2. muted response from African scholars
4
Q
“subaltern” and Antonio Gramsci
A
- borrowed from Gramsci’s writings in prison (1929-35)
- referred to Italian proletariat, emphasised how bourgeoise not only imposed domination through the coercive apparatus of the state, but also through transforming the cultural and ideological institutions of civil society to construct hegemony over society as a whole
- AND referred to more general relationship of domination and subordination in class-divided societies; critical of the negative and dismissive attitudes of European Marxism towards the culture, beliefs, practices, and political potential of the peasantry; highlights the limits of peasant consciousness as passive and dependent, firmly enveloped by the dominant ideologies of the ruling classes
5
Q
subaltern historiography reaction to what?
A
colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism of modern South Asian history during the 1970s
- Cambridge Historians: argued Indian nationalism was a bid for power by handful of Indian elites who used traditional bonds of caste and communal ties to mobilise the masses against British rule
- Delhi historians: argued material conditions of colonial exploitation created the ground for an alliance of the different classes in Indian society and that nationalist leadership inspired and organised the masses to join the struggle for national freedom
6
Q
Renajit Guha & Gayatri Spivak, “Selected Subaltern Studies” (1988)
A
- Cambridge historians colonial elitism and Delhi historians bourgeois-nationalist elitism
- accounts assumed nationalism was wholly the product of elite action, failed to emphasise independent political actions of subaltern classes
7
Q
major issues for subaltern studies
A
- difference between the political objectives and methods of colonial and nationalist elites, and the political objectives and methods of the subaltern classes
- autonomy of the subaltern classes
8
Q
Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988)
A
- critiqued Western representations of sati (funeral custom where widow immolates herself on husband’s pyre)
- communities participating in sati (subalterns) unable to represent themselves through their own voice
- concludes that the subaltern cannot speak when Western academia failed to relate to “the other” with anything other than its own paradigm
9
Q
problem with the archives
A
- archival material that was prepared and preserved by and for the dominant groups was useless
- Nicholas Dirks, Caste of Mind (2001): archive as creation of the instrument of the state, and reflected its interests and concerns
- subaltern historians used documents of revolt and counterinsurgency, developed new strategies of reading conventional documents on peasant revolts
10
Q
Antoinette Burton, Dwelling in the Archive (2003)
A
although the panoptic ambitions of the state manifested in archives it failed to take into account women’s historical perspectives that were usually private and passed on through memory
11
Q
European modernity as a universal phenomenon
A
- understanding heavily influenced how historians wrote about and presented colonised and formerly colonised regions
- discipline of history, as it developed at the time of the Enlightenment, was rooted in the idea of human progress: showed how societies had either developed to failed to develop in a “modern” direction
- when the product of Western modernity are transported to and domesticated in other places, they take on new and different shapes, these deviations from the “ideal” present valid examples of a different modernity
12
Q
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe (2000)
A
- the “Europe” that Chakrabarty seeks to provincialise is an imaginary figure that refers to the propositions about human life in generalised accounts of European history
- abstract universalism of European thought created an exclusionary and historicist vision of modernity, Europe was viewed as the pinnacle of a process of historical development, and other societies defined by an inevitable lack
- AIM: provincialise Europe and assert the identity of other cultures even as they participate in the presumed universality of modernity
13
Q
Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Question (2005)
A
- questioned whether the term “modernity” retains any serviceable meaning given the range of alternative modernities historians working from a postcolonial perspective have identified as emerging across the colonial and postcolonial world
- highlights danger that efforts at destabilising a Eurocentric narrative of progress can result in preserving the category of modernity as a defining characteristic of European history to which all efforts to write the histories of non-European areas must respond
- Charkrabarty: failed to illuminate conflicting ways in which inhabitants of Europe actually thought, allowed the most simplistic version of Enlightenment stand in for the European’s province much more convoluted history
14
Q
Dane Kennedy (2013)
A
- the inspiration that early proponents of a postcolonial history of imperialism and colonialism drew from theories and critics in other disciplines may have run its course
- however, the proliferation of new imperial historians, subaltern studies scholars, and other postcolonial-inflected histories of imperialism and colonialism illustrates the ways in which postcolonial theory opened the way for new and important methodological approaches and epistemic understandings
15
Q
Edward Said, “Orientalism” (1978)
A
- argued that Orientalism was something very different to what its adherents claimed it to be
- Orientalism functioned to create inequalities of which they might not have been aware
- image of the Orient as feminine, childish, superstitious, backward, despotic, unchanging, and sensual
- important epistemic break in Western social science and humanities
- presented critical viewpoint and interpretive methodology that initiated postcolonial studies
