***
"Women themselves are often key players in the fundamentalist game: in India, for example, women like Sadhvi Rithambara and Uma Bharati have stridently mobilised for Hindu nationalism by invoking fears of Muslim violence. In other words, women are objects as well as subjects of fundamentalist discourses, targets as well as speakers of its most virulent rhetoric...
Third world women and women of colour remain the most exploited of the world's workers today. Moreover, such women are the guinea-pigs for fertility and other medical experiments, and the recipients of drugs and contraceptives banned in the West. [Ed: Men are also participants in medical trials. In any case, we can stop them being participants in studies, then none of them will get any drugs at all and all of them will die. Hurrah!]
... To what extent did colonial power succeed in silencing the colonised? When we emphasise the destructive power of colonialism, do we necessarily position colonised people as victims, incapable of answering back? On the other hand, if we suggest that the colonial subjects can 'speak' and question colonial authority, are we romanticising such resistant subjects and underplaying colonial violence? In what voices do the colonised speak - their own, or in accents borrowed from their masters?... Can the voice of the subaltern be represented by the intellectual? Such questions... are also crucial for any scholarship concerned with recovering the histories and perspectives of marginalised people - be they women, non-whites, non-Europeans, the lower classes and oppressed castes - and for any consideration of how ideologies work and are transformed. To what extent are we the products of dominant ideologies, and to what extent can we act against them? From where does rebellion arise?...
Jean Baudrillard remarks that 'the masses' are 'the leitmotif of every discourse, they are the obsession of every social project' which claims to make the oppressed speak (1983: 48-49). Baudrillard himself believes that such projects are doomed, for the masses 'cannot be represented'...
Is objectivity possible, or are we merely ventriloquising our own concerns when we make the subaltern speak? Of course, to some extent, our investments in the past are inescapably coloured by our present-day commitments. We are interested in recovering subaltern voices because we are invested in changing contemporary power relations... it should not be the case that we begin to measure our own radicalism mechanically in terms of our ability to find 'resistance' in any given text or historical situation. If I cannot locate the voices of nineteenth-century widows it surely does not mean that I am party to the process of silencing them. Conversely, critics often lay claim to a radical politics by suggesting a radical consciousness on the part of those they study. This often leads to a reductive understanding of 'resistance', which seems to mushroom too easily everywhere. Thus, our desire to make the subaltern speak may or may not be gratified by our historical researches...
The concept of resistance is vaguely and endlessly expanded until, as Frederick Cooper puts it, 'it denies any other kind of life to the people doing the resisting. Significant as resistance might be, Resistance is a concept that may narrow our understanding of African history rather than expand it (Cooper 1994: 1532)...
Kwame Anthony Appiah pronounced that:
Postcoloniality is the condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery. In the West they are known through the Africa they offer; their compatriots know them both through the West they present to Africa and
through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and for Af-
rica... Despite the overwhelming reality of economic decline; despite unimaginable poverty; despite wars, malnutrition, disease, and political instability... popular literatures, oral narrative and poetry, dance, drama, music, and visual art all thrive. The contemporary cultural production of many African societies—and the many traditions whose evidences so vigorously remain—is an antidote to the dark vision of the postcolonial novelist. (1996: 62-63, 69)
... Both post-modernists and postcolonialists celebrate and mystify the workings of global capitalism. Even the 'language of postcolonialism... is the language of First World post-structuralism'. Therefore, postcolonialism, which appears to critique the universalist pretensions of Western knowledge systems... [ends] with a return to another First World language with universalist epistemological pretensions; (1994: 342)...
Is the notion of the decentred subject the latest strategy of Western colonialism? As Denis Epko puts it:
nothing stops the African from viewing the celebrated postmodern condition... as nothing but the hypocritical self-flattering cry of overfed and spoilt children of hypercapitalism. So what has hungry Africa got to do with the post-material disgust... of the bored and the overfed? (1995: 122)
... We need to distinguish between thinkers who adopt postmodernism as a philosophical creed, and others who signal the need for new tools to understand the contemporary world...
Contemporary views of cultural difference mirror past and present geo-political tensions and rivalries. Thus it is no accident that it is Muslims who are regarded as barbaric and given to acts of violence and Asians who are seen as diligent but attached to their own rules of business and family... These views not only reverberate with older colonial views about Muslims as despotic and intractable, and Asians as inscrutable and hard working, but speak to contemporary global economic and political rivalries. [Ed: Presumably it has nothing to do with how Asians top their classes. Or maybe that's a self-fulfilling prophecy brought upon by
... The destructive histories of modern empires are being widely whitewashed... George W. Bush now claims that the United States freed Filipinos instead of colonising them. [Ed: I suppose the appointment of the First Philippine Commission in January 1899, less than a year after the US won the islands from Spain, was just a colonial facade.] Such white-washing not only obscures, distorts and ignores anti-colonial and post-colonial scholarship but also directly attacks it. Dinesh D'Souza's 'Two Cheers for Colonialism' claims that 'apologists for terrorism' such as Osama Bin Laden and other 'justifications of violence' rely on a large body of scholarship 'which goes by the names of 'anti-colonial studies,' 'postcolonial studies,' or 'subaltern studies' (2002: n.p.). Niall Ferguson claims to be disturbed by the fact that
The British Empire has had a pretty lousy press from a generation of ''postcolonial'' historians anachronistically affronted by its racism. But the reality is that the British were significantly more successful at establishing market economies, the rule of law and the transition to representative government than the majority of postcolonial governments have been. The policy ''mix'' favored by Victorian imperialists reads like something just published by the International Monetary Fund, if not the World Bank: free trade, balanced budgets, sound money, the common law, incorrupt administration and investment in infrastructure financed by international loans. These are precisely the things Iraq needs right now. (2003: 54)
[Ed: Some people need to brush up on their history instead of their literary theory.]
... The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) suggests that universities [cannot defend Civilization] because, unlike the rest of the country, large numbers of American academics and students are critical of US policies. On US campuses, 'it has become commonplace to suggest that Western civilization is the primary source of the world's ills- even though it gave us the ideals of democracy, human rights, individual liberty, and mutual tolerance'... ACTA had complained not only that Shakespeare was being dropped from required courses but that Shakespeare and Renaissance classes were being polluted by a focus on social issues such as poverty and sexuality (ACTA 1996) [Ed: GEE. I wonder why ACTA would think that?!?!?!]
... 'Said equated professors who support American foreign policy with the 19th-century European intellectuals who propped up racist colonial empires. The core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power.' (Kurtz 2003)"
--- Colonialism/postcolonialism / Ania Loomba (2005)
