Questions/points of discussion

• ·      I’d like to discuss the qualities of the “evidence” Hall discusses – a kind of text that seems to lie at the heart of the power of the discourse he’s laying out, and lies at the intersection of conceptions of “fact” and “fiction.” Are there aesthetic and affective characteristics of such evidence (particularly given Kojin’s examination of the aesthetic qualities, or bracketing processes, of a category)? Two moments in the text:

o   (208) “The point of recounting this astonishing mixture of fact and fantasy which constituted late medieval ‘knowledge’ of other worlds is not to poke fun at the ignorance of the Middle Ages. The point is: (a) to bring home how these very different discourses, with variable statuses as ‘evidence,’ provided the cultural framework through which the peoples, places, and things of the New World were seen, described, and represented; and (b) to underline the conflation of fact and fantasy that constituted ‘knowledge.’”

o   (215) Stereotyped Characteristics become the sign, the ‘evidence’ by which the subject is known.

• ·      Hall’s expansion enables us to recognize the discursive structure/power/logic of Orientalism in colonialism and other global dynamics more broadly (i.e., why Orientalism is such an important book for Latin Americanists). But what are the benefits and pitfalls of developing such a sweeping hermeneutic for understanding Western civilization and nearly all modes of philosophical and scholarly thinking? Is Spivak’s metareflective writing is a critical mode of breaking into this pattern, rather than the development of another monolithic rule of law that explains the world Perhaps his final turning of the question back on modern sociology itself points to why he’s making a sweeping claim as an intervention.

• ·      What might be the relationship between Spivak’s project and the demonstration of Said’s “critical consciousness”? Though challenging to More than delineating a practice, she seems to be modeling one that draws together and into tension multiple legacies of critical approaches and problematics in her reading of the British response to Sati, and “peripheral” lives with dominant global forces…ultimately a demonstrative project of the ethics of writing the history of “the other.”