whatever.....
the below sent to me offlist. why offlist rakesh. send it to the list for god'sake
Kelley, I want to send this to the list. But given the very criticial nature of my comments, I want to send it to you first. Why didn't you ever send my reply to you to the list? Yours, Rakesh ________________
Well compare Eagleton's review of Spivak to Sumit Sarkar's review of subaltern studies or Aijaz Ahmad's or Thomas Trautmann's treatments of Said or Alex Callinicos' criticism of Homi Bhaba. I also believe that Kelley had not read Guha, Pandey, Amin, Chatterjee, Prakash, etc carefully, if at all, before she offered without provocation her criticism of students' interpretation of this material. Nothing Kelley ever wrote convinced me otherwise; the reasonable review by Rogall was of course no evidence that she had herself read anything by the subaltern studies school though she had decided to mock students who took it seriously, making it seem as if they were almost pathological to have taken an interest in the history of India, an interest Kelley obviously does not share. After I challenged her knowledge of the subaltern studies school, she scurried to the internet to find a review that she could download; and then she summarized a few paragraphs from the introduction to the Spivak Studies Reader. It seemed to me that she had way too strong opinions about a school that she knew little about. Indeed I think she was mocking and caricaturing students' interpretation of the subaltern studies school as a way of justifying not ever having read the assigned material or ever having learned much about the historical problems to which subaltern studies is one approach. Given this aggressive defense of ignorance, it is not surprising that she would then label me an anti feminist after a few more challenges and not post to the list the response that I sent her when I was away. Of course Kelley was willing to overlook her own feminism in her promulgation of Eagleton's review that does such a good job of defending her right to ignorance.
Well back to the world of published reviews. Except in Eagleton's case, it is clear that the reviewer has read the material carefully and made some independent effort to know something of the history that is being discussed, i.e., not blamed his own ignorance (and one can be considered educated in the West without knowing much of the rest) on the author he is reviewing. Even if one thinks, as I do, that Said's work stands up to some of the criticism rather well--despite its anti marxism--one can be stimulated by the mentioned criticisms (and Ahmad and Trautmann are doubtless correct in much of their criticism). This is not the case in Eagleton's review. There is every reason to believe that he wrote the bulk of the review before he even got the galleys for Spivak's book. Why this does not outrage people truly surprises me.
I can only conclude that what he finds difficult is the set of questions Spivak is raising, not Spivak's own idiosyncratic prose. At any rate, I think one of Spivak's basic ideas is correct--call it collusive Orientalism as does John Dower, America's preeminent historian of Japan. To put the problem now in my own words (it's been years since I read "Can the Subaltern Speak?") the problem of Orientalism is not only the power/knowlege nexus in terms of the West's own representations (and Trautmann seems wrong not to have connected the transition from Sanskritism to race science to 'power', viz. the 1857 Mutiny) but also Western acceptance of those representations of the 'Orient' by its own ruling classes and native informants. In the context of such collusive Orientalism, the subaltern indeed does not speak. For example, has Louis Dumont accepted the Brahminical view of caste in his polarized representation of the West and India (Homo Hierarchus--see discussion by Ursula Sharma and Mary Searle-Chatterjee)?
Sometimes I feel like we are still at the level of defending our right to exist.
Yours, Rakesh