3/3 class, postmortem

Since I didn’t manage to post about the readings beforehand (and managed to get out most of comments during class), I’ll write a few thoughts on our discussion today.

Both Izzy and Max brought up really important doubts and questions about the project of postcolonial criticism as we’ve seen it in the context of these course readings. Izzy, in particular, questioned the presence of actual, clear solutions and approaches to addressing the disparities the critics are highlighting.

For me, what’s refreshing about a non-prescriptive argument how we address these problems of imbalanced representation of both literary and critical archive from the non-Western world is that it both points to and tackles the problem that the issues are in the very rhetoric and logic that we use as critics to make literary texts communicable. It’s an extremely tricky, and fraught, mode of critical intervention. Can you perform what you are pointing to at the same time? It’s kind of a mindfuck.

But I'll admit that I find this very compelling about deconstruction. As a critical strategy, it seems to get us to push at what we think are the limits of our expression of knowledge. I think there is a venue for more outlined, prescriptive, exegetical scholarship or argumentation. But it seems to me that a tool through which we can interrogate and expand the structures through which we create knowledge (which is what we purport to do) is essential.

The outcome of the utilization of such a tool may simply mean you approach your work with a new transparency about what you’re doing. This can be the take-away for a person in any field. I really appreciated Dr. Abel’s comment on Spivak’s postcolonial deconstruction project as a sort of 10% shift in the way we think about texts we both encounter for the first time and hold near-and-dear. It’s similar to the comment we made about Spivak’s project in her “History” chapter, in which we lay bare the structures of rhetoric and knowledge we are deploying, though not destroying them.  It means that when we teach our own version of CMLIT 010, Introduction to World Literature, we make a proactive, transparent decision about our chosen topography of World Literature.