in sum, i was arguing that many of the litcritters in the US, as well as social science types who draw on subaltern studies lit, are white and that, as spivak points out herself, they have fundamentally misread her arguments about sublterneity which ARE NOT, she says, to be applied to westerners.
as i said on the pomo./id politics threads, people really do more often then i'd like to see [and i'm sure rakesh, as thorough as he is on hs fave authors], misread these arguments and use them for purposes that i find apalling and clearly this is one of spivak's problems. for me, as a white working class person in the academy to claim some status as subaltern is outrageous! spivak says same about asian-americans doing so etc. i think we need to make distinctions between an author's body of work and the way it is taken up by followers --these is so obvious that it's laughable and yet when anyone critiques the way theories are used they seem to think that it's adequate to revert to the authorial text as a defense. not so. and if you take anything about the pomoistas! seriously it ought to be that!
spivak spends much time in her latest addressing it. it's what the book is primarily about. my assessment of rakesh's criticisms (and he'd only read one chapter in a bookstore) was that he wanted it to be a book about what he wanted it to be about, not what spivak wrote. 'o course that's the game that all book reviewers play if they like to keep their name in lights that is.
kelley
At 12:13 PM 10/14/1999 -0400, you wrote:
>[Rakesh Bhandari asked me to forward this. I'm a little disturbed by
>the characterization of the list as compulsively antifeminist;
>perhaps Rakesh can expand on this when he has a minute.]
>
>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
>
>
>