Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - human rights issues

Ken, you do not need to defend Spivak against criticism. Rather you should add your own criticism about her work and the works of those you admire to help chart a new course for younger scholars. Do you think that her initials stand for Great Comrade Stalin who is above criticism? You may want to read Aijaz Ahmad and Terry Eagleton to borrow some critical perspectives before you crown her the founding mother of postcolonial theory. Her translation of Derrida made her name and her concept of strategic essentialism and epistemic violence are influential but her passing references to Africa apeear consistently disdainful.

Similarly, attributing the birth of cultural studies to Derrida without any evidence is a claim that Stuart Hall would find strange given his own account that the Marxist influences were those of English theorists like Williams who privileged the study of working class culture as part of the intervention to wean them from conservative authoritarian populism the way that CLR James and Gramsci studied popular culture for the same reason. The second paradigm of cultural studies that Hall identified was that of Althusser with emphasis on the role of ideology as a powerful epiphenomenon that can sometimes shape the economic infrastructure, contrary to crude economism. Hall modestly did not identify the Africana paradigm in cultural studies that he, Gilroy, James and Du Bois exemplified. But he distanced the field from the postmodernists who rejected the need for a revolution and claimed to do so in the name of the masses.

Derrida centered much of his critique against white supremacy on the important contributions of Africans to civilization and Spivak was disdainful towards Derrida for such a territorial attachment to his birth place, Africa. Derrida would never claim that he invented the methodology of cultural studies with deconstruction which predated him in the works of Marx and others as he admitted in Specters of Marx where he also embraced the African philosophy of the forgiveness of the unforgivable by calling for the cancellation of the debts of the Third World and a return to the reading of the works of Marx which you claim are no longer relevant while you recommend Kant.

Biko

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

On Sat, Apr 28, 2018 at 1:19 PM, Kenneth Harrow

<harrow@msu.edu> wrote:

A word or two in defense of Spivak, and against the attacks posed here or by biko.

We need to draw a line between abhominin attacks—which are definitely fun for me, I am a sucker for that—and serious intellectual engagement. Most well known intellectuals make a fortune when they give talks. I wish they wouldn't charge anything; or like me, charge low fees. I don't like the signs of elitism in our profession. That said, it has absolutely nothing to do with what they write.

My view.

Spivak can rightly claim that she and 2-3 others were foundational for postcolonial studies. She walks along with derrida, said, and Bhabha. Derrida provided the deconstructionist tools with which to attack the metaphysics of presence, as butler proclaims, that underlies western metaphysics. He provided ways of attacking phallogocentrism, tracking it from plato through rousseau to the present. I believe he was the most profound philosopher of our times, and wrote from a position that enabled us to claim values that would underlie the positions embraced by stuart hall, positions I identify with cultural studies. And he provided the methodology for cultural studies. Spivak was grounded in derrida, translated grammatology, and utilized deconstruction so as to establish political positions that made resistance to colonialism and now to globalization from the north possible. At her height, she and Bhabha, following after said and fanon, provided the real bases for all scholarship on postcolonialism.

 

Her approach and time have passed. Her critique should not. We should honor properly figures of her stature in our field, "our" meaning those concerned with African studies and global south studies.

 

If you want to cast aspersions against her because she has certain character traits you don't like, or because her work is so dense and difficult to understand, or because she is a figure at Columbia, following in fact said's high position there, etc etc, that is irrelevant. You can't seriously teach postcolonialism without her work being central.

Do we still really teach postcolonialism? I doubt it; the term, shaky from the start, was merely a convenience to replace third world, or non-western, studies; and those, which accompanied work on neocolonialism, were followed by postcolonialism. The debate about it really being post were and are tedious, boring, useless, and I won't cry to see global south replace it.

But the theorizing, the application of Marxist theory and deconstruction to the current capitalist phase, is of the highest order, and that's all that really matters. To rephrase this, high theory has had its day, and is gone. But we have inherited cultural studies, and a slew of major thinkers and scholars like mbembe, ferguson, Mudimbe, Robert young, who made our field real. I am glad to add  weheliye to the list of influential contemporary theorists.

I'd love to hear more about those I should be reading.

ken

 

Kenneth Harrow

Dept of English and Film Studies

Michigan State University

619 Red Cedar Rd

East Lansing, MI 48824

517-803-8839

harrow@msu.edu

http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/

From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 27 April 2018 at 19:56
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - human rights issues

 

".......  Spivak's eclectic and often contradictory critical scope resembles her shifting position as an academic "subject." Simultaneously privileged as an elite, even esoteric intellectual currently teaching at Columbia University, and marginalized as a "Third-World woman," "hyphenated-American," and Bengali exile, Spivak uses deconstruction to address the ways in which she is in fact complicit in the production of social formations that she ostensibly opposes."

Brown

 

 

After listening to five of Spivak's lectures, thanks to you tube,  I have to say that

the above description of Spivak seems quite appropriate. "Eclectic and contradictory" sums it all up- subject to new information.  

 

 

 

 

Professor Gloria Emeagwali

 Gloria Emeagwali's Documentaries on

Africa and the African Diaspora

8608322815  Phone

8608322804 Fax

 

 

 

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