1. the quick impulse to declare anyone critical of indian thinkers or religion as possibly racist [you did this to me, to jim h and to ken. all three times you did so impulsively which just isn't especially characteristic of you. so i chalk it up to the fact that it hits home to you in the same ways that critiques of feminist thought and the "working class masses" offend me. so you're a human, yes? i don't think it so awful to point out when i worry that you've jumped too quickly to an unwarranted conclusion. i'm surprised that you accuse others of racism or not caring about indian history when you have been victim, yourself, of such charges with similar essentializing logics..
2. you're rather quick to assume here that i was ever talking about the entirety of pocolonialist thought , it is much vaster than even you characterize it. i know spivak's work though i've not sat down and read it in years. i'm not an expert and have never claimed to be. i don't think that precludes me from discussing what i know of her work and what i've seen done with it in her name. i'm speaking here not just of course work, but of papers submitted to a grad student journal when i was on the ed board for a few years.
3. you complain that i'm ignorant and that i should know and care about indian history. i find this a bit disturbing that you expect a colleague with her own interests, specializations and background to have to know postcolonialist thought backward and forward. that shouldn't be the issue because that isn't the only issue that spivak speaks to, nor even is it the only topic covered in postcolonialist thought which goes far behind india rakesh. you demand that everyone come at a topic from your position and that simply is not fair. i don't complain that you don't know what i know or that you don't have a facility with the literature in the things i care about. i mean seriously rakesh, why *should* i care about indian history as an intellectual, as part of my intellectual pursuits? i'm a sociologist of work/the economy focusing on the US. why should i take it up? i have plenty of things on my plate. i can have opinions on feminist thinkers, for that is the way i have taken in spivak's work, as part of the feminist tradition, NOT postcolonialist thought. so your criteria here just doesn't work. that said, however, i did study some variants of postcolonial thought in 1992. and no, i'm not going to hit the stacks, and nor should you. that's absurd. we both have better things to do. [note:
don't charge me with hypocrisy. my criticism of roger was that he was applying a standard to carrol that he was not applying to himself. that, however, was not actually a demand that people know feminist thought in order to discuss it. rather, it was simply pointing to the hypocrisy of the criticism leveled at carrol==that he didn't know his marx; whereas clearly roger didn't know a lick of feminist thought. i don't particularly care if he does or not, but i do think it's absurd to criticize feminist thought on the grounds that your interlocutor doesn't know his marx]
>Don't know if you will open this. You can post it anywhere you want. Your
>story continues to remain confusing to me. My Oct 15 reply to your charge
>of my manipulative use of feminism was quite polite--though probably no one
>has still read it since you buried it beneath one more of your overlengthy
>posts.
as you know, i was responding rather kindly to your offlist, but i wasn't backing down and i wasn't going to roll over after you'd declared that i was an anti-feminist because i agreed with spivak that mainstream US feminsim was complicit in the oppression of third world women in a variety of ways.
>As for the last message which you just reposted, you also suggested to me
>that you had trashed it unread along with a new 8,000 messages in your in
>box. I wanted you to read it, and wanted to discuss it publically.
good, then we have discussed it. no i did not say that i had trashed it. i said that it was buried in 8000 msgs that made even looking at my in box a chore. and so i avoided it. upon finally getting around to cleaning it out, i saw your incredibly rude post. it was clearly typed for lbo and you said you didn't want to be so critical if it would offend me. it did not because your posturing only made you look bad, not me.
as i recall rakesh we got into a polite discussion of spivak in which you fairly quickly assumed that i was critical of spivak when i was not. i was critical of the uses to which spivak's work has been put.in the context of the discussion of a review of spivak's latest, in which she speaks to that issue, it was hardly unrelated. there was no reason why we couldn't discuss that. we read spivak from different perspectives rakesh. i think you might learn to start appreciating that rather than colonizing everyone's else's positions as wrong if you don't happen to read from that position. you're interested in economic history and that's what you find interesting about that body of work. that's not my interest.
again, as i noted in my offlist which i reposted to lbo: i have and only have ever been talking about the way WHITE academics use spivak's work. as i posted at LBO, only about 2% of the population goes on to attend master's and phd programs. something like 98% of all grad students are white. hence, a lot of people reading spivak are white and they read her in courses ranging from feminist theory, to antrhopology, to indian history, to postcolonial lit crit. there are many uses to which spivak's work is put. some litcritters read her just for her commentary on brit lit, and they couldn't care one wit about her position on economic theory, yes? that doesn't mean they don't know or read spivak good enough. they simply read her differently.
Why else
>would have I asked you on the list itself whether you had received my two
>private emails? I was waiting for your reply before posting it to the list.
>You never gave it to me. Indeed you told me that you had never read it.
i hadn't until the day i posted it to lbo
>I however did not want to defend my argument presently after having spent a
>week on the one sex model and other questions you had raised on the list. I
>was focusing on only diss related work after this last exchange.
well rakesh, i guess you need to realize that you don't have to do anything, do you? you are the only one who feels compelled to speak to the issue. it's a simple matter of stating this or just ignoring the post. or whatever. who cares?
You could
>have had the simple courtesy of asking me whether this was a good time to
>have this debate having just exhausted ourselves on other questions--the
>questions you raised and to which I tried to speak to the best of my
>ability. Kelley, give me credit. I am sure I am one of the few people who
>read almost all of your 200K.
heh. i think you only do so so you can read someone more K-bound than yourself. now come on rakesh. let's be fair. there's no reason to continue the flamage is there? i think you can criticize me with out resorting to ad hominem. at least have a sense of humor about it all!
> It was not a good time for me to begin a new debate in which I would have
>do almost all the work while you sit on your ass and carp about the use of
>the word subaltern based on a bad classroom experience you had (by the way,
>anyone who has seriously read Spivak knows how contradictory and, yes,
>confused her own use of the category has been).
yes. as i recall, i did mention this way back in may i think. i think i was pointing out this very problem, that students who read her work and wrote about it for the grad student journal i edited seemed not to quite grasp this important point you make. and i did write an post to doug explaining why spivak's theories are useful and can be to people like me, even though i don't use them specifically to analyze the plight of third world women. that was around 10/15 or so. indeed, this is why spivak is taken up in feminist theory courses. she's not just a model of third world feminist or postcolonial theory. rather, she's taken up as a model of more general feminist theory in attempts to extend her insights beyond their location. whether that is a good thing or not is another question. [certainly spivak wouldn't be happy about such a move!]
> All you will continue to say (because it is all you know) is that Spivak
>has fought against the misuse of the term subaltern both by Guha, et al and
>uppity grad students. You really don't know anything about Spivak's work,
>and you continue to assert that she has had a single purpose in the last
>book (the purpose surprisingly stated on the dustjacket of the book)--to
>prevent the misuse of her work by uppity grad students. This is utter
>bullshit--you simply don't what you are talking about (Spivak's criticism
>of the subaltern studies school is also not what you say it is; admit it
>you never even read the intro the volume in that class you were either
>taking or teaching--you have said both, by the way).
i'm not sure what you're referring to so i'll wait for elaboration.
>Just from my reading Spivak's piece on French feminism (in which she made
>an argument on behalf of Cixous over Kristeva), I am pretty sure that she
>could not have made the simple anti Western feminism argument in her latest
>book that Eagleton ascribes to her.
well i've not read eagleton's review in a while [btw, someone else posted it, not me] so i couldn't tell you. and i'm not so invested in proving i'm abslutlely right so i'm not even going to bother. i'd rather, though, think angela was right in her position on eagleton's review: he was appropriating. as far as i'm concerned, that's typical book reviewer BS and it's exactly what gets him invited to do book reviews for the LRB
It's inconsistent with everything she
>has hitherto written about the complexities of intl feminism (do you even
>know Spivak's literary work on Bronte and Jean Rhys--i thought it was
>insightful when I was a reader for Elisabeth Abel and Abdul JanMohammed at
>UC Berkeley and from what I remember so did they)
well not every last word rakesh, but i did take a few course and i've kept up with her work since. you can read my posts to doug daddy of oct 15 to find out why. i don't really care about lit crit [nor do you according to some of your crits of poco of last spring.] that's why i was interested in spivak because she's a marxist and does so much more. for that i admire her, her range and breadth is astonishing.
I do find your and
>Eagleton's attempt to understand Spivak's feminism less than academic.
>Indeed you have not demonstrated that you have the slightest clue as to
>what Spivak's arguments regarding Western feminism and feminism in general
>really are. There are those who thinks she is defending widow burning in
>her famous piece which is now reworked in the latest book. Yet you speak
>about them as if you have thought through them.
and...? not sure what this has to do with anything ...?
> And if we are going to discuss post colonialism and orientalism, what do
>you know?
i'm getting the sneaking suspicion that were i not white working class then it'd be okay to type about it.
now why don't we take a chill pill or crack a can of soothing something or other and relax. you're the only one who imposes this work on yourself in your quest for martyrdom.
kill the dissertation i say!
kelley
>Kelley, this is so offensive it just boggles my mind. I have expressed
>critical admiration for Trautmann''s critique of Said (but the case of
>Max Mueller does lend support to Said, not Trautmann), of Berreman's of
>Srnivasan, of Callinicos' of Bhabha. To say I have a problem with
>Western knowledge or critique requires a willful misreading of everything
>I have written. I attribute the sort of criticism you have engaged in not
>to racism but ignorance, aggressively defended.
rakesh, i was speaking to specific incidents on lbo which others notices as
well. ferpetesakes get over yourself already. this is not about your
critiques of whoshisname or anything else. it's about three specific
incidents which, as i said, i simply attributed to the fact that you're a
human being who cares about these things just as i care about
misrepresentations of the dumb slovenly masses. i didn't say you were a
bad person. i just don't understand why you recently implied i was an
ignoramus because i don't know or don't care about indian history. it's an
absurd charge. an absurd complaint.
>
>The
>only thing I did suggest was that Eagleton was surely less than a feminist
>to have characterized Spivak's take on Western feminism the way he did.
>I did not call Ken a racist, simply noted that there were complex readings
>of sati available, such as Lata Mani's, which presumably was being
>discussed in that class. And Mani does not defend sati out of cultural
>relativism.
but all of that could have been avoided had you simply noticed that ken was talking about teaching religion and wondering why religious practices were seen from such relativistic perspectivies. he was talking about something else entirely, for the same things are said with regard to US-based religions: to each his own. it was a cultural logic in north america ken was blabbering about. and yet you twisted it into a moment to suggest that ken was misrepresenting spivak or somesuch b.s. nonsense that i was quite literally taken aback. be/c you imposed on ken's comments something that simply was not there.
>Why don't you just say: I know Spivak's work though I have
>never read it (except for a review by a rogall of the subaltern studies
>school of which she is not a member and the first few pages of the spivak
>reader).
because rakesh, i did fucking say that. here it is typos and all....and i'd find the rest but there are no june archives. but the fucking fact is rakesh that i have said this in almost every single post i've written on and off list.
" for the remick's fo the list who think this stuff has nothing to do with real world politics...... tho i think rakesh had problems with this acct. i'm not a scholar/expert in this field, just stumbled over it once in my dilettante way....so perhaps others can comment "
>> seen done with it in her name. i'm speaking here not just of course work,
>> but of papers submitted to a grad student journal when i was on the ed
>> board for a few years.
>
>Name of journal please. This is a new tidbit. Before the base of knowledge
>you were working from was grad student interpretations in a seminar that
>you have simultaneously said that you were teaching and taking.
what on earth are you talking about. i've never said i taught a course on spivak. see this is ridiculous. you don't bother to read anything.
as for the rest: deleted. you should take a nap or something.
you're not going to bother to give me one bit of respect rakesh and this conversation therefore cannot be had. you want to blah blah about spivak's book that's just great find someone else because you don't read what the other person is typing about and don't particularly care. you grind axes on other people's heads and now you're making a fool of yourself. i think i've typed enough in support of spivak's work demonstrating that i have a facility on the topic and that i appreciate her work. i think i can speak to how whites use her work to apply it to race relations in the US and criticize it.
i've left lbo rakesh. i'm resubbing to post these and bye bye. take a peddle on the stairmaster or something.
kelley