yes. every single author i've ever read has been subjected to this critique during classroom discussions, particularly if they were white males. aristotle? what could we possibly learn from reading The Politics, he owned slaves and thought women were deformities. durkheim? peeeuuuu. marx, he sponged off engels who was the son of a factory owner! i'm not kidding or exaggerating rakesh. maybe princeton folks are much more mature. i don't know. but this is what i heard constantly. and i know that i'm not alone in this experience, nor was it confined to my uni.
what perplexes me and the point of my questions in that classroom was this:
when it came to reading feminists or folks denouncing the white male western canon very little thought was given to these same issues w/ regard to the authors we were readings. they wrote about the right things and little thought was given to the matter. having an interest in the sociology of knowledge/science made this question an intellectual matter and not simply some personal consternation.
i'm not advocating this at all, mind you. i think it rather a pointless exercise if one's object is to assess the body of a scholar's work simply on the basis of this. i was, however, suggesting that i think, with regard to eagleton, his criticisms of spivak aren't nearly as bad as they have been read here. and, furthermore, that he's criticizing the *uses* of spivak's and others's work which she is quite aware of, it seems to me and reflects on throughout the text in various places.
now, where does all this out of hand dismissal of the dead white guys come from? where does the valorization of live brown females come from? a variety intellectual traditions, among which i'd include multicultural theory, cultural studies, third wave feminism [ feminist standpoint theory and the critique of it], and subaltern studies among others. my point is that, surely, if white guys are accountable then authors in these traditions ought to be as well. spivak was one of the first in subaltern studies trad to engage in this sort of reflexive critique, no?
perhaps to buttress my concerns regarding the uses of the critique of the phil of the subject my first encounter with all of this might be instructive. it was a conference, my first as an undergrad, on pomo/poststruc theory. lots of big names in the field: maria lugones, elizabeth spellman, kwame anthony appiah, etc. i was excited and even got to be near a feminist theorist i much admired! thrilling. so i listened to various speakers. one woman, a philosopher, discussed her ethnographic research about lesbians among two east african tribes. her argument was that adrienne rich's lesbian continuum was the product of the tendency in the west to conceive of het/homsex as a binary. big news back in 1991. guess what happened? in front of 100 ppl she was called on the carpet and asked whether she was a lesbian or not. on the view of lesbian philsophers and grad students in attendance she was not supposed to speak for or about lesbians because she wasn't a lesbian! i have seen this happen many many times.
linda alcoff spoke shortly after and started here paper with the following:
1. geo bush says that he must speak for the panamanians because their tyrannical govt' leader by the 'evil' noriega has silenced them. 2. a successful canadian author writes about indigenous women in cananda. she is asked to "move over" by these women who now want to speak for themselves. 3. a famous pomo theorists is set to speak about gender/race/class and contemporary social problems in US. he opens his talk by maintaining that he's thought a great deal about this and has decided that he can't speak for historically oppressed groups because he is a white upper middle class white man.
i don't think that linda alcoff would have presented this paper or gone on to publish it in a variety of places and become quite well known for it were she not speaking to a very real problem with the ways in which the "critique of essentialism" has been taken up in subaltern studies, cultural studies, such that #3 has been perversely justified as #2 has been conceded because #1 is so clearly and always wrong but too often confused with #2 as if there were no significant differences between the two situations.
>I don't think it's that important on the face of it. [etc...snipped but
only in the interest of bandwidth]
i think you are misunderstanding what i'm saying. i hope the above has cleared things up. as for subaltern theorists, my concerns are not about them. rather, i was speaking about what eagleton was concentrating on: how this discourse gets taken up--particularly by white upper middle class grad students. they tend to ignore the operations of race/class oppression in their own backyards sometimes in favor of valorizing the struggles of third world peoples. or, at least, they did when i was in grad school. now, there may well be a sound epistemological basis for this and there are still standpoint theories which support this political practice. folks have put forth such arguments and i do enjoy reading them and thinking carefully about them.
>Kelley, it's a bit absurd to argue that the subalternists themselves are
>not interested at all in class analysis; for goodness' sake, what of the
>subaltern studies trad, as you put it, did you read in this class? It
>couldn't have been the volume ed. Guha and Spivak, yet that must have been
>the assigned class reading.
the moral entrepreneurship is that which takes place among students of, not scholars in the tradition necessarily. not all students, mind you. and i think there are more than "mere" psychological reasons for this. which is to say, i think one could easily do a marxist sociology of knowledge here and that is what i'm suggesting; dismissing this as mere psychologizing is dismissing an entire intellectual tradition that seeks to understand how knowledge, ideology operates. asking how and why some strands of thought get taken up, where and when is important because i don't think it's accidental. [you know why did darwin get taken up the way he did?]
>Well this supposition surely works against those who are not from such a
>background--a kind of pretending we are all equal while some won't have
>parents to bail them out over the summer and thus become quite preoccupied
>with non academic concerns. I take it that this is your point.
well i am one who is not from such a background, wsj characterizations of who constitutes the uppermiddle class aside. and this is precisely why i have some interest in this particular subject as well as in the more general issue of identity, class, knowledge, and the academy. i did not know i was working class until i hit grad school. and so, not unlike people of color, i was a stranger in a strange land. but i had no easy discourse within which to understand what was going on. i did find that discourse in the works of people exploring these issues, though i didn't find spivak particularly helpful if only because of her opaque style and the fact that she was working in a discipline quite different from mine. in any event, perhaps these comments will illuminate for you what i meant by "passing" and why i was so utterly confounded by any attempt to raise marxist class analyses in classrooms only to be interpreted as saying "i'm envious of your beemer" or "i think you should live your politics and give up your trust fund to the poor" AS IF.
>Yes, middle class kids of whatever color go slummin in their youth. At any
>rate, now you are not defending Eagleton's failure to engage a single
>argument or interpretation in Spivak's book--including of the novels he
>knows quite a bit about. From Eagleton's "review" we have some idea that
>Spivak discusses the complicity of multiculturalism in the
>transnationalisation of capital, though we don't know if anything more than
>a benneton ad is being invoked here or if it goes beyond the kinds of
>things A Sivanandan used to write. And from what I can gather this is only
>a part of the book.
the problem here i think is that eagleton is engaging her text, but of course he cannot engage all of it. otherwise it would be a book report and not a book review. reviewers take up certain themes and zero in on them. the better ones do so by picking up on one or two main claims, rather than minor ones.