>>Hmm, a different context. Getting along in academia means sucking
>>up to The Man, when instead all The Excluded should be sticking
>>together (not that they necessarily have much in common other than
>>being excluded). So does this mean that black lesbian academics
>>should't strive for tenure? I'm confused.
>>
>>Doug
>
>Audre Lorde wasn't giving a workshop on academic career advancement
>when she delivered her talk "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women
>Redefining Difference,"
But that wasn't the version I was responding to that Jenny Brown quoted. It read:
>"Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's
>definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in
>the crucibles of difference-those of us who are poor, who are
>lesbians, who are Black, who are older-know that survival is not an
>academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and
>sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others
>identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a
>world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our
>differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will
>never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to
>beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring
>about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those
>women who still define the master's house as their only source of
>support." (Lorde, 1979.)
The "academic skill" reference made me suspect it was aimed at a more academic audience. I don't have the full text at hand, but I'll pick a version up soon.
In the meanwhile, I came across this interesting quote, in a bit of Google serendipity:
<http://africaresource.com/vbpro/war21/entries.html>
>Full Name: Adeleke Adeeko
>Home Page: http://spot.colorado.edu/~adeleke
>Date and Time: 12/26/2000, 7:07 PM
>Comments: Biko Agozino's critique of the absence of African in what
>we call postcolonial theory today Gayatri Spivak's book, A Critique
>of Postcolonial Reason, highlights a true fault of that field of
>study. But even so, shouldn't we follow the wisdom of Chinua Achebe
>that a reviewer must not ask an author to produce a book she did not
>want to write in the first instance?
>
>For the benefit of those who might want to reject Spivak's book
>because of the very poor kind of "bolekaja" reading offered by
>Agozino (and Terry Eagleton before him in Times Literary Supplement)
>I would suggest that a more careful attention be paid to that book
>which calls Kant, Hegel, and Marx--just to name three dead white
>philosophers--as postcolonial thinkers. Spivak challenges us to
>consider the fact that othering mechanisms have been the major means
>of apprehending the world and charting it for domination and
>liberation since the 18th century. Postcolonial "reason" (i)
>miseducates itself by downplaying the ignorance that makes its
>claims possible (ii) spends little to no effort in trying to
>understand what it does not know (iii) when challenged, reinscribes
>otherwise ignored knowledge as belonging to others. Spivak calls
>these processes "sanctioned ignorance", "foreclosure of the Native
>Informant", and "benevolent appropriation and reinscription of the
>third world as an Other." In postcolonial reason one line of reason
>is called superior and all the others are tagged unreasonable.
>Spivak also argues that anticolonial work often uses the protocols
>of postcolonial reason! The question Spivak tries to answer is Can
>the wholly other be embraced ethically? She thinks it is possible
>because being called by the other is the basic condition of being
>human. However, embracing the other requires that the hug begins
>with the knowledge of bounds and limits between the subject and the
>other. Turning to others should not degenerate into a redemption
>project that views their condition as a sort of sinfulness from
>which assimilation into a privileged ideology will necessarily
>rescue them.
>
>Would readings of more African "informant" texts have helped Spivak?
>I don't know. But that is not the most important question for me.
>Biko Agozino ought to demonstrate that they would have. He did not.
>
>