Now to this thread:
>It's the dictionary definition of PC, Daniel old sport.
>
>Carl
I don't really see why you are getting so snooty, Carl. The terrifying report on the Taliban had nothing to do with US assault on Iraq which after all is not a *fundamentalist* country. If you were trying to liken Bush's fundamentalism to the Taliban's, then develop the comparison, which seems to me quite a weak one. Which leaves open the question of what you were trying to suggest by putting this report under the same header. It seems to me that *in America* it can only be read as evidence that Muslims are such fanatics that they can only be subdued by greater force--or in this case, genocidal sanctions (of which Bradley, Gore and Bush are all supporters). Of course all this is not to say that Ba'ath regime is not a monstrously oppressive one.
Daniel raises the question of Said. Ernest Gellner and Russel Jacoby have criticized him for being out of his depth in his discussions of, say, anthropology and history (Gellner by the way never had a single piece published in a peer reviewed major anthro journal and Jacoby is in no position to make such arguments). At any rate, surely all this cannot be said of many of those who were inspired by Said, e.g., Ronald Inden Imagining India. But as I suggested with Camille Paglia, there is little effort to really delve into such scholarship. In her Said criticism Paglia speaks of the prodigious scholarship of the Orientalists without commenting on the sorts of critical analyses that have been done (to take Indian examples) on Wm Jones or Max Mueller (including their relation to ethnology or the new evolutionary race science that later developed--Marx's struggle with this scholarship is of course of great importance).
In one of her first posts on the subaltern stud trad (as she called it), Kelley noted that they were all elites who fellow students were nonetheless reading as the authentic subalterns thus diverting attention from class politics at home. Of course it took Kelley's heroic intervention to fix the situation. This was a rather silly comment, I thought, since Kelley did not know then and does not know now what the class background of every member in the school (nor does she know that even Ranajit Guha has not worked for most of his life in what could be called a priviliged academic setting by American standards). Nor did she evince any knowledge of the kind of class analysis performed by Guha, Shahid Amin, Gyan Pandey and others. There are those who have criticized the subaltern studies school for recent anti Marxist turns. After I challenged Kelley's understanding of the issues, only then did she rush to to the Internet to find a review by Rogall (which does not seem to me to be a fair assessment of Subaltern Studies X, the latest volume, though Rogall makes important points indeed) and quickly read the first few pages of the intro to the Spivak reader. All this was done *after* she accused the subaltern stud trad of being a bunch of masquerading elites who had bamboozled her fellow students.
Kelley, when was this seminar? Were you teaching it or taking it? What did you in fact read?
At any rate, I found it baffling then and now how Kelley could have found a seminar on the sublatern studies school (I am presuming the class read the Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak) a diversion from the study of class unless she thinks any discussion of any country other than the US is a diversion from class politics. Kelley then suggested that students read this school as focused on white imperialist racism to the exclusion of class politics. Which makes no sense since none of the pieces in that volume really have that focus (and I couldn't tell whether Kelley was mocking any attempt to analyze racism or imperialism). At any rate, the contributors are more concerned with the elitist and bourgeois nature of the Indian Congress Party than imperialism.
Perhaps if we are going to discuss other countries, the Taliban is the most (or only) interesting topic at least for those not burdened by the strictures of political correctness.
Yours, Rakesh