Pub Date : 2002-07-01DOI: 10.4324/9780429027239-11
Santiago Castro-Gómez, Desirée A. Martín
During the last two decades of the twentieth century, postmodern philosophy and cultural studies developed into important theoretical currents that impelled a strong critique, inside and outside the academy, of the pathologies ofWesternization. Their many differences notwithstanding, both currents attribute these pathologies to the exclusive, dualist character thatmodern power relations assume.Modernity is an alterity-generating machine that, in the name of reason and humanism, excludes from its imaginary the hybridity, multiplicity, ambiguity, and contingency of different forms of life. The current crisis ofmodernity is seen by postmodern philosophy and cultural studies as a historic opportunity for these long-repressed differences to emerge. I hope to showhere that the proclaimed “end” ofmodernity clearly implies the crisis of a power mechanism that constructs the “other” by means of a binary logic that represses difference. I also argue that this crisis does not imply the weakening of the global structure within which this mechanism operates. What I will refer to here as the “end of modernity” is merely the crisis of a historical configuration of power in the framework of the capitalist world-system, which nevertheless has taken on other forms in times of globalization, without this implying the disappearance of that world-system. I argue that the present global reorganization of the capitalist economy depends on the production of differences. As a result, the celebratory affirmation of these differences, far from subverting the system, could be contributing to its consolidation. I defend the claim that the challenge now facing a critical theory of society is precisely to reveal what the crisis
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Pub Date : 2001-03-01DOI: 10.1215/9780822383901-003
J. Dayan
During my last visit to Haiti, I heard a story about a white dog. Starving, its eyes gone wild, it appears late at night with its tongue hanging out. Reclaimed by an oungan or priest who “deals with both hands,” practicing “bad” magic, the dog comes back to life in skin bloated with spirit. A friend called it “the dog without skin,” but this creature was not a dog. Instead, when a person died, the spirit, once stolen by the oungan, awakened from what had seemed sure death into this new existence in canine disguise. We all agreed that no manhandled spirit would want to end up reborn in the skin of the dog. Being turned into a dog was bad enough, but to end up losing color, to turn white, seemed worse. In this metamorphosis, the skin of the dead person is left behind, like the skin discarded by a snake. But the person’s spirit remains immured in the coarse envelope, locked in another form, trapped in something not his or her own.
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Pub Date : 2000-03-01DOI: 10.4135/9781848608238.n14
D. Chakrabarty
Subaltern Studies: Writings on Indian History and Society began in 1982 as a series of interventions in some debates specific to the writing of modern Indian history.1 Ranajit Guha (b. 1923), a historian of India then teaching at the University of Sussex, was the inspiration behind it. Guha and eight younger scholars based in India, the United Kingdom, and Australia constituted the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies until 1988, when Guha retired from the team.2 The series now has a global presence that goes well beyond India or South Asia as an area of academic specialization. The intellectual reach of Subaltern Studies now also exceeds that of the discipline of history. Postcolonial theorists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds have taken interest in the series. Much discussed, for instance, are theways inwhich contributors toSubaltern Studies have participated in contemporary critiques of history and nationalism, and of orientalism and Eurocentrism in the construction of social science knowledge. At the same time, there have also been discussions of Subaltern Studies in many history and social science journals.3 Selections from the series have been published in English, Spanish, Bengali, andHindi and are in the process of being brought out in Tamil and Japanese.4 A Latin American Subaltern Studies Association was established in North America in 1992.5 It would not be unfair to say that the expression “subaltern studies,” once the name of a series of publications in Indian history, now stands as a general designation for a field of studies often seen as a close relative of postcolonialism.
{"title":"Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography","authors":"D. Chakrabarty","doi":"10.4135/9781848608238.n14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4135/9781848608238.n14","url":null,"abstract":"Subaltern Studies: Writings on Indian History and Society began in 1982 as a series of interventions in some debates specific to the writing of modern Indian history.1 Ranajit Guha (b. 1923), a historian of India then teaching at the University of Sussex, was the inspiration behind it. Guha and eight younger scholars based in India, the United Kingdom, and Australia constituted the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies until 1988, when Guha retired from the team.2 The series now has a global presence that goes well beyond India or South Asia as an area of academic specialization. The intellectual reach of Subaltern Studies now also exceeds that of the discipline of history. Postcolonial theorists of diverse disciplinary backgrounds have taken interest in the series. Much discussed, for instance, are theways inwhich contributors toSubaltern Studies have participated in contemporary critiques of history and nationalism, and of orientalism and Eurocentrism in the construction of social science knowledge. At the same time, there have also been discussions of Subaltern Studies in many history and social science journals.3 Selections from the series have been published in English, Spanish, Bengali, andHindi and are in the process of being brought out in Tamil and Japanese.4 A Latin American Subaltern Studies Association was established in North America in 1992.5 It would not be unfair to say that the expression “subaltern studies,” once the name of a series of publications in Indian history, now stands as a general designation for a field of studies often seen as a close relative of postcolonialism.","PeriodicalId":343953,"journal":{"name":"Nepantla: Views from South","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114371226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2000-03-01DOI: 10.1515/9780822385462-040
John Kraniauskas
In“MarxismAfterMarx:History,Subalternity, and Difference” (1996), the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty provides a subalternist reading of the historicity of capital. Just as his Subaltern Studies colleague Ranajit Guha (1983) recovers the trace of subaltern agency in the historical narratives of the colonial and postcolonial Indian states, Chakrabarty here reflects also on the coexistence of different temporalities within the time of capital: the temporality of commodified abstract labor that, in his view, underpins imperial history writing, and the heterogeneous temporalities of subaltern “real” labor that capital subsumes and overcodes, but which it cannot quite contain. “If ‘real’ labor . . . belongs to a world of heterogeneity whose various temporalities cannot be enclosed in the sign History,” he suggests, “then it can find a place in a historical narrative of capitalist transition (or commodity production) only as a Derridean trace of something that cannot be enclosed, an element that constantly challenges from within capital’s and commodity’s—and by implication History’s—claim to unity and universality” (Chakrabarty 1996, 60). Such heterogeneous social forms (“worlds”) are thus only ever, for example, precapitalist from the point of view of capital’s self-narration in a Eurocentered historicism—in Chakrabarty’s words, “secular History”—and its
{"title":"Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: Latin-Americanist and Postcolonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies","authors":"John Kraniauskas","doi":"10.1515/9780822385462-040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822385462-040","url":null,"abstract":"In“MarxismAfterMarx:History,Subalternity, and Difference” (1996), the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty provides a subalternist reading of the historicity of capital. Just as his Subaltern Studies colleague Ranajit Guha (1983) recovers the trace of subaltern agency in the historical narratives of the colonial and postcolonial Indian states, Chakrabarty here reflects also on the coexistence of different temporalities within the time of capital: the temporality of commodified abstract labor that, in his view, underpins imperial history writing, and the heterogeneous temporalities of subaltern “real” labor that capital subsumes and overcodes, but which it cannot quite contain. “If ‘real’ labor . . . belongs to a world of heterogeneity whose various temporalities cannot be enclosed in the sign History,” he suggests, “then it can find a place in a historical narrative of capitalist transition (or commodity production) only as a Derridean trace of something that cannot be enclosed, an element that constantly challenges from within capital’s and commodity’s—and by implication History’s—claim to unity and universality” (Chakrabarty 1996, 60). Such heterogeneous social forms (“worlds”) are thus only ever, for example, precapitalist from the point of view of capital’s self-narration in a Eurocentered historicism—in Chakrabarty’s words, “secular History”—and its","PeriodicalId":343953,"journal":{"name":"Nepantla: Views from South","volume":"192 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2000-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124270671","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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