well from what i read she writes about the movie "passage to india," about hegel, charlotte bronte, mary shelly, jane eyre, and the Asiatic mode of Production. i don't see why eagleton can't speak to her work. she's doing lit. crit, he's a lit critic too. they both work out of marxist traditions. [and this criticism seems unwarranted given that this is a long standing tradition in academia: when you defend your diss you'll have readers from different disciplines, no? why is that?]
>And if I remember he makes the terribly obnoxious comment--really a cheap
>shot by a white man paranoid of a resurgent third worldism despite two
>decades of neo liberalism and structural adjustment programs --that
>interest in third world or post colonial studies by we brown and black
>Westerners can only be motivated by a disinterest in changing one's own
>society, a substitute politics
actually, spivak suggests this herself. she is engaging and has been in an internal critique of post-c studies. eagleton writes:
"This book takes a few well-deserved smacks at the wilder breed of post-colonialist critics, whose fascination for the Other is in part a demoralised yearning to be absolutely anyone but themselves." [by which he means this: p-c critics are the elite in their native countries or their are immigrants to adopted counties, as spivak--who is well known for making this critique of p-c criticism already]
and toward the end he writes:
"Nobody would imagine that Stanley Fish was not up to his ears in capitalism, not least Stanley Fish; but there are a number of gullible souls in US graduate programmes who might just make the mistake of seeing Gayatri Spivak as some avatar of pure alterity. She herself is rightly out to scotch this sentimentalism, reminding these fans of the Black Female that she is also a highly-paid bourgeoise and the scion of a colonial élite. She would thus rather opt for the bad faith of refusing the system while proposing no general alternative to it, than the bad faith of denying her collusion with it."
eagleton's complaint is that she's a bit too meek about it. she staked her claim in p-c lit crit by objecting to the romanticization of the subaltern on the part of educated elites. again, eagleton writes of spivak:
"She is the best-placed because as an immigrant in the West she can spot those conceptual limits which are less obvious to insiders. There is a great deal of timely good sense, if Spivak would forgive the phrase, in pointing out to the more idealist employees of the Western post-colonial industry that nativism is not to be romanticised; that ethnic minorities within metropolitan countries are not the same as colonised peoples; that there is nothing 'essentialist' about civic rights; and that for subaltern groups to become institutionalised citizens is an undesirable goal only for card-carrying primitivists."
[...]
Yet this withering criticism of the post-colonial Western liberals never quite comes to a head. If Spivak has an uncannily keen nose for Western cant, patronage and hypocrisy, she is notably reluctant to break ranks. In one sense, this is an admirable refusal to indulge in the gamesmanship of those in the know confronted with those who want to be. There is enough futile self-laceration in American academia without Spivak mauling the victim a little further. It is also a brave acknowledgment of her own compromised condition, as an academic superstar who speaks of caste and clitoridectomy. But there is more to her reticence than that. This book takes a few well-deserved smacks at the wilder breed of post-colonialist critics, whose fascination for the Other is in part a demoralised yearning to be absolutely anyone but themselves"
he goes on to fault her for not going as far as edward said does when he criticizes elite intellectuals in both their native and adopted countries for the same thing. afterall, eagleton says, the book is entitled "A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present" he says it doesn't go far enough:
"If she can be splendidly scathing about 'white boys talking post-coloniality', or the alliance between cultural studies, liberal multiculturalism and transnational capitalism, these wholesome morsels surface only to vanish again into the thick stew of her text."
moreover, he refers to "american students" as students/fans of p-c lit crit and does not specify anything in particular about their ethnicity/race: "American students who, through no fault of their own, would not recognise class-struggle if it perched on the tip of their skateboards, or who might not be so keen on the Third World if some of its inhabitants were killing their fathers and brothers in large numbers, can vicariously fulfill their generously radical impulses by displacing oppression elsewhere. This move leaves them plunged into fashionably Post-Modern gloom about the 'monolithic' benightedness of their own social orders."
indeed, i'd say he is referring to white americans here.
finally, i'll re-quote what i read as his biggest complaint, that spivak provides no alternative to capitalism. despite her scathing critique of the 'culturalism of post-c lit crit and her resolute commitment to socialism, spivak doesn't speak enough to alternatives, to political practice because, eagleton thinks, she worries that this is hypocrisy: "She would thus rather opt for the bad faith of refusing the system while proposing no general alternative to it, than the bad faith of denying her collusion with it."
kelley