Deepika Bahri

MARGINALLY OFF-CENTER: POSTCOLONIALISM IN THE TEACHING MACHINE

n an otherwise complimentary review of Rohinton Mistrys Such a Long Journey (1991), Glenn Carey is chagrined to note a serious flaw, to wit, the lack of an appendix of Hindi expressions used in the story, with English translations (127). David Rays review of the novel also draws attention to Mistrys use of various languages: The novel frequently poses a problem for all but the polyglot reader. Words from several Indian languages are dropped in liberally. Some passages are veritable pastiches of two or more languages. A glossary would have been welcome (13). Quite apart from the fact that the appendix proposed by the first reviewer would not be too helpful to the general reader in understanding the many Parsi-Gujrati expressions also used by Mistry-a fact Ray at least is aware of-both the reviewers observations not only recall earlier debates on intelligibility in non-Western literature, but they also occasion the reexamination of a range of vexing questions for teachers and critics of postcolonial literature. More than a decade ago, in his review of Ngugi wa Thiongos Petals of Blood, John Updike had bemoaned the profusion of untranslated Swahili and Kikuyu words in the novel. As Reed Way Dasenbrock notes, Updike was hardly alone then in making an implicit appeal for universality, a tendency Chinua Achebe had earlier denounced as synonymous with the narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe (11). At a time when postcolonialism appears to be in the process of becoming institutionalized within the academy, Careys and Rays comments on the polyglossia of Mistrys novel once again raise the issue of linguistic bondage to the colonial center; but more importantly, they unwittingly exhort an examination of the larger question of the orientation and purpose of postcolonial literature, criticism, and pedagogy, and consequently of their place within the metropolitan academic marketplace that has proved so hospitable to all three.

Feminism in/and postcolonialism

[T]here are no women in the third world. Suleri, 1989: 20 Introduction In her influential and controversial essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak recounts the tale of a mysterious suicide: “A young woman of sixteen or seventeen, Bhubaneswari Bhaduri, hanged herself in her fathers modest apartment in North Calcutta in 1926. The suicide was a puzzle since, as Bhubaneswari was menstruating at the time, it was clearly not a case of illicit pregnancy” (1988b: 307). Because Bhubaneswari “had known that her death would be diagnosed as the outcome of illegitimate passion,” we are told, “[s]he had . . . waited for the onset of menstruation” (307). Some years later, when Bhubaneswaris nieces are asked about the suicide, they say that “it was a case of illicit love ” (308). Spivak confesses in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason that contemplation of “this failure of communication” had “so unnerved” her that, in her initial discussions of Bhaduris suicide she had been led to write, “in the accents of passionate lament: the subaltern cannot speak!” (1999: 308; see also 1988b, 1985b). The lament arose from her realization that the subaltern in general, and the “historically muted subject of the subaltern woman” in particular, was inevitably consigned to being either misunderstood or misrepresented through the self-interest of those with the power to represent (1988b: 295).

Predicting the Past

A s a point of departure, I take as axiomatic Barbara Fuchs and David J. Baker’s injunction “to place postcolonial studies in relation to” its others. These others may be spatially or temporally so, although the prefix post vectors such a reassessment toward the temporal, while spatial others have often been plotted on a temporal graph. It is time, in other words, to look at postcolonial times and the “hybrid temporalities” of colonialism. But even if we accept the proposition that “if there is neocolonialism, there is also paleocolonialism,” as John Dagenais submits, the problem is that we do not know where to begin with our reckoning of the past. Begin one must, but where? Not, as it turns out, at the beginning, but right where one is at the moment. Thus we generate our own “histories of the present.” We all have stories about the past, stories that let us live not so much with the past as with ourselves in the present. So which stories did postcolonial studies choose, and why? Or indeed, which stories chose postcolonialism? As various critics have noticed, the quintessentially hybrid, the exiled, the dislocated and multilocated—that is, the “postcolonials” of metropolitan definition—have stepped nimbly into the breaches and flows of the new economic and cultural order, occasioning and creating a theory often perceived as the discursive expression of what Guillermo GómezPeña, in a semiludic gesture, has dubbed the “new world border.”1

Telling tales: Women and the trauma of partition in Sidhwa's Cracking India

Bapsi Sidhwas novel, Cracking India, presents the experiences of women during the violence of the subcontinental partition of 1947. In broaching the topics of rape and trauma, topics considered culturally taboo or unspeakable for subcontinental women, the novel obliges us to confront both the possibilities and the limits of literary representation.

Feminismo e/no pós-colonialismo

In this article, the author examines the relationship between feminism and postcolonialism by emphasizing key concepts in postcolonial studies and by exploring the premises, methods and tensions of the intersection between these two areas. The author also explores the challenges between Western and postcolonial feminisms in the context of globalization.

Aliens, Aliases, Surrogates and Familiars: The Family in Jhumpa Lahiri's Short Stories

In this essay, I argue that alienation and familiarity serve as mobile matrices for understanding the affectively experienced impact of transnational migration in certain of Jhumpa Lahiris short stories. While we may think of alienation as a precondition of migrant identity, it is a condition that is familiar to most of us in different contexts. How does alienation, thus plurally conceived, figure in the experience of migrants, producing the relay between heimlich/unheimlich experiences? Moreover, in the socio-cultural context of globalisation, how does transnational migration challenge conventional notions of family, a word associated with notions of familiarity and filiation that are seemingly antonymous to the idea of alienation? These are the questions I set out to answer, concluding that the ‘family’ is always a unit composed by its very hauntings, surrogates, and absences.

What Difference Does Difference Make?: Hybridity Reconsidered

Although the term hybridity emerged in biology and botany, the postcolonial and culturalist tum in its usage is most closely associated with the work of Homi Bhabha. 1 His elaboration of the concept has been remarkably useful in challenging the binaries between colonizer/ colonized, selfiother, subject/object, oppressor/oppressed, and in recuperating the space in-between the designations of identity where the passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural identity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy (4). Bhabhas formulations, derived from Bakhtinian propositions about hybridity, Lacanian theories of the ego and subjectivity, and Derridas theories of differance, ally neatly with two crucial developments in critical theory which also inform the dominant bent in postcolonial theory: the postmodem moment in mainstream western literary criticism/ as well as the linguistic tum which began with structuralist theories in the work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf (in anthropology), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred Whitehead, and John Dewey (in philosophy), Ferdinand Saussure and J. L. Austen (in linguistics), and George Herbert Mead (in sociology), and gained traction with the poststructuralist articulations of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Suspicion of grand narratives, the provisionality of knowledge, and the role of language in constructing the