Restless indeed

• I have an idea I keep thinking about, something that others who have been doing this for longer may already have more and better words for. I keep thinking about something I want to call “metonymic realism.” It’s a logic of representation. If a metonym is a reference a whole, full idea by naming one of its attributes, then the logic I want to call metonymic realism is when that attribute, that part, becomes mimetic of the whole. It’s the logic that leads people to accept notions that all Black men with hoodies are gangsters, or that all Afghans are members of the Taliban, or that salsa speaks to all of Latin@ culture. I think it is this “metonymic realism” that makes, as Dabashi writes, the “ethnographic logic” governing the Museum of Natural History (which is actually the American Museum of Natural History and not New York – so go figure with another example!), essentially the logic that postcolonial theory is critiquing, possible. In his reflection on “traveling theory,” Said reminds us that no reading is neutral or innocent of an orientation (if not overtly an ideology or theoretical execution), and that theory which begins as a liberating idea can become a trap of its own (Said 170), often against itself. This is all to say that I have a very “but” to Dabashi’s well-articulated and spot-on critique of “South Asian thinkers” vs “thinkers” in the European mode: “Why is it that if Mozart sneezes it is "music" (and I am quite sure the great genius even sneezed melodiously) but the most sophisticated Indian music ragas are the subject of "ethnomusicology”” (Dabashi)? Gramsci critiqued the implicit bracketing going on in such sweeping constructions (akin to Kant’s “all men”). Even to refer to, for example, “African music” in this continental-adjective way erases the possibility of difference within the idea of Africa). My question is this: is postcolonial criticism a response to this problem or does it engender it? Does postcolonial literary scholarship also, in a “metonynmic realistic” move, read a text from “elsewhere” as a pure, full, representation of the whole from that “elsewhere” which it comes as a means of making its intervention in the European monolith?

• Hogan’s article seems to indicate that theories travel based upon the prejudices and power structures imbricated with their origin (colonialist and imperialist/core periphery logics)? When theory is “theory” or it becomes itself an object of ethnographic study – “African theory” – rather than an exegetical tool, as Said suggests? Said should know this better than anyone - given, you know, Orientalism - yet this “travel tilt” doesn’t come up in his essay.

• Said calls for us to develop a “critical consciousness” of theory (Said 173) - a special sense, a measuring faculty for locating or situating theory. So, if we have an (ethical?) obligation to remain conscious of the theory through which we are consciously (or unconsciously) reading a text, how can we make our awareness of this critical consciousness communicable whenever we do so? Or would that be an impossible overload of awareness?