From: "bhandaric" <bhandaric at prodigy.net> Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 02:21:33 -0700
Dear Doug and LBO list,
I am with a family member recovering from surgery. I shall resub in a few weeks. It is true that Kelley and I had an argument over her assessment of the subaltern studies project.
As for Eagleton on Spivak, I am quite surprised that Kelley has let pass a very careless statement by Eagleton. Do note that he agrees with Spivak that Western feminists are often SHORING UP imperialist structures that deny women's rights elsewhere. Really? Examples? Shouldn't we be a little more careful here?! Is Spivak correct in such an assessment (if indeed Eagleton's characterization of Spivak's, as opposed to his own, position is indeed accurate)? I am quite skeptical. At the very least, we can now add Kelley's own silence on this carelessly made point by Eagleton to the list of compulsive anti feminism on LBO-talk. I think I would rather have Spivak's tortured, meandering and unintelligible prose than such off-handed, simple minded, and pernicious comments by Eagleton.
Eagleton makes a few good points in the course of the review but seems to lack the energy to actually develop the point. Take his passing comment that post colonialism has been an exported version of the US (or the West's) own grievous ethnic problems. He doesn't tell us what he has in mind here or what Spivak has said on this problem. So he seems to me as committed to the meaningless, tantalizing phrase as Spivak.
But there is an important point to be understood here. Trautmann does show how Western scholars have attempted to understand Hindu caste society in terms of its own racial theory. But it should also be underlined that the West's own distorted, oft racialized understanding of Hindu caste society has been then used to understand its own 'race' relations--even by Fischer, et al in Inequality by Design. One could also argue for example that even Oliver Cox's critique of this caste theory of US race relations for its evasion of the uniquely violent and coercive aspects of the latter itself accepted a false, Brahminical understanding of caste as a consensually hierarchical system (challenged by Berreman among others). The othering of India or the Orient in general in Western thought is no small problem.
Yours, Rakesh