>Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder (1990). "The Subject of Sati: Pain
>and Death in Contemporary Discourse on Sati" Yale Journal of
>Criticism 3 (2): 1-23. The article focuses on the common
>ground of pain as a means of divergent views talking about
>the issue. I'm just wonder why these things can't be tackled
>head on.
Ken, is this the analysis where the author is 'unwilling to be critical of [sati] because it makes a religious claim.... so it is covered under "spellbinding power" and "I have no right to interfere with the religious beliefs of other people even if I disagree"'?
I just can't get over how
>auto-immunized religion becomes both in religious discourse
>and in [so-called] philosophical, social, historical, political
>discourse....
Are you sure the use of scriptural authority is not subject to critique in this essay despite what you take to be its silly focus on the pain and torture of the suttee? I haven't read it, but if it is anything like Lata Mani's, this certainly is not the case.
>I'm not citing anyone that directly argues for tolerance in
>regards to the religious justification of sati,
Yet that's what you initially branded those much reviled postco subalternists (note that Mani is not in the subaltern studies school while her prose style is light to Spivak's dark) with believing, as if they were every bit the ethnocentricists, provicincialists, and reactionaries they accuse Westerners of being (projection?) I know I am just dying to delegitimize these new poseurs (mostly Indian women in literature depts, it seems) so we can run them out of the academy or at least not have to incorporate any knowledge of those colonial and postcolonial realities into my thinking. You have no idea how overloaded I already am with Hegel, early Marx, Adorno, Butler, Habermas and Nietzsche. I am pretty happy that Horkheimer dismissed Grossmann as an orthodox Marxist; I didn't want to have read all that stuff about value, money, accumulation, crisis cycles, etc. So I'm just going to sit pretty with that above reading list in German Ideology, ok?
peace, rakesh