Jonathan Arac

After Foucault : humanistic knowledge, postmodern challenges

The essays in this collection assess the impact of Foucaults work on the conditions of disciplinary knowledge in humanistic studies and speculate on the directions we might take from his work. Topics covered include philology, history, phychoanalysis, feminism and politics.

Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U.S. Discourse of Identity: Invisible Man after Fifty Years

I start with a key moment late in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, published in 1952. The moment comes near the end of the Harlem riot, a few pages before the protagonist falls underground, just before he transfixes with a spear the Afrocentric, Black nationalist agitator Ras, who is in turn hoping to hang our hero for allying himself to the white-directed Brotherhood. In a single sentence, the narrator sets himself against all the powers the book has conjured. These forces map as ‘‘un-American,’’ subalternAmerican, and hegemonic-American. They include Jack and the Brotherhood, which is a fictional group modeled on the Communist Party; they include Bledsoe, the president of the college for Negroes the narrator had been expelled from, modeled on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee, which Ellison had attended; and they include the WASP establishment of Emerson and Norton. Here is the sentence:

Commentary: Literary History in a Global Age

No consensus dominates current thinking toward literary history in our global age, to judge from the remarkable assemblage gathered here. Some contributions are wonderfully erudite, others probe the lacunae in what we as yet know or can think, but all are open essays, trying out live directions for further development. Some exemplify by their performance models of a newly global literary his tory, and some imagine plans for organizing collaborative projects that encompass more of the world than any single scholar can command. Yet others think through the changes that may be required for the genre of literary historiography to comprehend the world that we are striving to know.

Defining an ‘Age of the Novel’ in the United States

The term literature began to consolidate its modern meaning around 1830, just as print culture was becoming immensely more powerful.1 Ever since that time, the novel has taken up more and more space within literature, but since the early twentieth century, literature has become increasingly less important within culture as a whole, as new media, including film, radio, television and the e-world have rapidly emerged and risen to dominance.2

From north Indian vernaculars to a new world philology Introduction

Jonathan Arac, ‘From north Indian vernaculars to a new world philology’ Aamir R. Mufti, ‘Orientalism and the language of Hindustan’ Rashmi Dube Bhatnagar, ‘Whats Braj got to do with the Hindi–Urdu divide?’ Mehr Afshan Farooqi, ‘Āb-e gum, or “Disappeared Water” as a metaphor for language, location, and loss This cluster of papers carries forward Critical Quarterlys emphasis on language in society and history. They offer incisive, innovative perspectives on several major debates concerning vernacular languages of northern South Asia. Hindi and Urdu have been the languages of Indian-Hindu and Pakistani-Muslim nationalism, extending over the arc from British colonialism to Independence and Partition (1947), and continuing in the seven decades since. Both languages arise from the north Indian everyday speech called, in its own terms, Kharī bōlī and known in the nineteenth century as Hindustani (unsuccessfully revived by Gandhi as a unifying term and concept). The only definitive distinction between them is the alphabet: Hindi is rendered in Devanagari; Urdu in a right-to-left script derived from Persian and Arabic.