Recent assertions of urban theory have dismissed the value of postcolonial critique in urban studies. This essay draws on postcolonial theory to demonstrate key flaws in such theoretical formulations. In doing so, it returns to the puzzle of how and why studying urbanism in the global South might matter for the reconceptualization of critical urban theory. Instead of a universal grammar of cityness, modified by (exotic) empirical variation, the essay foregrounds forms of theorization that are attentive to historical difference as a fundamental constituent of global urbanization. What is at stake, the essay concludes, is a culture of theory, one that in its Eurocentrism tends to foreclose multiple concepts of the urban and alternative understandings of political economy. A concern with the relationship between place, knowledge and power-a key insight of postcolonial critique-might make possible new practices of theory in urban studies.

Who's Afraid of Postcolonial Theory?

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic of Education in the Era of Globalization (Harvard University Press, 2012)For over a quarter of a century, Gayatri Spivak's scholarship has remained at the forefront of postcolonial studies, pushing the discipline forward, asking the uncomfortable questions, and engaging in spirited debates. Spivak's 1988 essay, 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' launched her into academic prominence, and while the essay still is regarded as enormously influential, unfortunately, it often overshadows many of her other important works, which is why her recent book, An Aesthetic of Education in the Era of Globalization, published by Harvard University Press, is such a welcome reminder of her varied and important contributions. The 25 essays, spanning nearly an equal number of years, not only reveal Spivak's unwavering commitment to an ethical, aesthetic engagement with literature (and the world) as a way of fulfilling the humanities' promise to contest the logic of capital, but also they reveal her enormous capacity as a teacher.In the preface and introduction, Spivak informs readers that she writes now with a 'desperate honesty' and that doubt will be her guiding refrain (x). From the outset, it is clear that she is concerned deeply by 'this era of the mantra of hope' and deploys doubt, which she sees as a great inheritance of the Enlightenment, as a way to recuperate the aesthetic (1). This meditation on the aesthetic gives the collection a thematic thread for readers to grasp as they move through the essays. Additionally, running throughout the collection is the frame of the double bind. Spivak instructs readers to keep this structure in mind while engaging with the essays as it reveals the tensions that undergird many of her arguments. Ultimately Spivak's work attempts to displace globalisation's hold on information, data, and capital through a 'productive undoing' of the legacy of the aesthetic coupled with the structure of the double bind (1). At times this lofty project is undermined by a determined insistence to use the double bind framework even when the fit isn't comfortable, leading to several unnecessarily opaque moments. The introduction also is mired in a selected history of the double bind that contain large tracts of quoted text, with little exposition, that divert readers from Spivak's more urgent claims. To be fair, Spivak asks for 'an interactive reader' that is willing to take this journey with her in which the 'reconsiderations and realizations' of the introduction are not always expounded in the essays themselves (3).The book is not divided into sections, but there are narratives that reflect a progression of ideas. Spivak's essays transition fluidly from issues of difference to translation to disciplinary concerns. Throughout these movements, readers will observe Spivak's willingness to draw from intimate, often private moments to forward a thesis. It is this vulnerability that reveals the stakes of Spivak's work. The most striking moment of intimacy occurs in the final chapter, 'Tracing the Skin of Day,' Spivak takes readers on her journey to view Chittrovanu Mazumdar's Nightskin. We walk with Spivak through the museum, and it is here that Spivak brings her discussion of the aesthetic to a close, remarking how 'in the visual, the lesson of reading is the toughest' (507). Spivak offers a poststructural meditation on Mazumdar's artwork, suggesting that his work 'protects the trace away from the promise of the sign' leaving viewers 'with no guarantees' (502). …

An Aesthetic of Education in the Era of Globalization

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2012For decades now we have been hearing about a "crisis" in the humanities Authors from across the disciplinary and political spectrum have weighed in on the challenges raised by budget cuts, student debt and the resulting professionalization of college degrees, and the political attacks on critical studies with its focus on issues of race, class, and gender3 One of the primary casualties of this crisis has been the widespread elimination of language programs and comparative studies across the US university system4 The publication of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization is a welcome addition to this ongoing debate A collection of articles and talks spanning almost a quarter century, it is also a reflection of the changes and challenges to the humanities taking place on an international scale during the post-Cold War era Both the global focus of the book and Spivak's own challenging, rigorous, and demanding approach to literary theory not only expands the scope of the humanities debate but characteristically challenges the platitudes and conventional wisdom that underlies much of that debateThis collection is not the first time that Spivak has addressed this crisis: previously in Death of a Discipline she had examined the assault on the humanities within the United States specifically The global scope of the writings herein takes what can often be a provincial and professional discussion amongst first-world educators and extends it to issues of cultural diaspora, post-nationalist and post-colonial politics, gender, and class status The collection reflects Spivak's dual identity as an intellectual worker in the United States (currently she is University Professor at Columbia University) and an advocate for rural education and trainer of teachers in her native India This broader view reveals the role that humanities can and does play beyond the US It also shows that when identifying threats to the mission of humanities, one cannot blame the usual state-side suspects In this Spivak does not disappoint, finding some rather surprising targets for critiqueSurprising, that is, for readers unfamiliar with Spivak's epochal essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?"5 which examines the imperial mission to ban suttee, the traditional self-immolation of Indian widows, as the trope of "white men saving brown women from brown men" Among the contemporary forms of white man's (and woman's) burden that Spivak identifies is microlending, which intends to open "the huge untapped market of poor Southern [Hemisphere^ women to the international commercial sector The placing of the poorest women of the South upon the spectral grid of finance capital" warns Spivak "is once again the instrumentalization of body and money-form in the interest of the abstract" (106) While admitting the "eminently efficient and benevolent" nature of such activities, she indicates her preference for "the far less bold and confident and far wiser premises of an aesthetic education" (99)In choosing the banner of "aesthetic education," Spivak places both the "sensory equipment of the experiencing being" (2) and the ability of cultural and cross-cultural interpretation "to borrow and anticipate the speech of the other" (218) in opposition to the instrumentalization and abstraction of globalization The sensory and the interpretive themselves are not frictionless partners in this enterprise but are but one example of what Spivak sees as essential to this orientation, "the double bind" Spivak, "following the rule of 'In literary criticism, when you look for something, you find it,'" (ix) finds double binds in many places: the encounter of self and other, capital and culture, caste and class, the counter-intuitive, and the intuitive Derived in part from the work of the British-American polymath Gregory Bateson, the double bind takes on a kind of ubiquity for Spivak that epitomizes the process of learning itself:When we find ourselves in in the subject position of two determinate decisions, both right (or both wrong), one of which cancels the others, we are in an aporia which by definition cannot be crossed, or a double bind …

An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization

This essay explores the limitations of a settler colonial analysis in writing Palestinian history. While the past decade has witnessed a plethora of interventions exploring this very concept, this ...

Writing/righting Palestine studies: settler colonialism, indigenous sovereignty and resisting the ghost(s) of history

This book is an important and timely intervention in the domain of postcolonial theorization that offers the most comprehensive critique to date of subaltern theory. Vivek Chibber provides an alter...

Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital

2006) with a view to encircle the capital Kabul (2008 onwards – beginning with the bombing of the Indian embassy), where it continues to orchestrate high-profile spectacular attacks, suicide bombings, kidnappings and extortion. Accordingly, analyses of its linkages and group dynamics tend to be confined to this narrow geographic area. The book throws new light on the typology of linkages and the ‘strategic effect’ between Al Qaeda and the Haqqanis far beyond personalised contacts into the realm of ideology. Troop surges, drone attacks, peace talks and political settlements are of limited utility. The book surmises that ‘there are very good reasons to question whether reconciliation with the Haqqanis is in the United States’ long term interests’ at all (238). The book’s findings are also instructive on the Pakistani military’s strategy of cultivating and nurturing various terrorist groups as strategic assets. While the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) is abhorred, the Haqqanis, an instrument of the state’s strategic depth strategy in Afghanistan, remain untouched in North Waziristan. The book underlines that while the network has worked to limit any public association with the insurgency in Pakistan, it does play the role of an enabler for the TTP, indirectly augmenting its capabilities and thus contributing to the inherent tensions between the three major actors. Is Fountainhead of jihad a seminal work on the Haqqani network? It makes no such claim. It does not provide any prognosis for the future. Neither does it provide policy prescriptions to deal with this network at a time of uncertain security and political transition in Afghanistan. However, by digging into the past, it does manage to provide substantive indications of the group’s future evolution, its ideological orientation, and importantly, its proclivity for peace. Policy-makers contemplating US withdrawal from Afghanistan may be encouraged by this prediction: ‘(o)ne thing is certain: lacking the unifying factor of a full-scale American military presence, Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s jihadis will struggle to retain the level of focus and cohesion that they hitherto enjoyed’ (241). The concerned states’ capacities to meet the new dispersed challenge, however, still need some serious examination.

India today: economy, politics and society

A large number of works on the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) already exist. By the editors’ own admission, the present book under review is an addition to that burgeoning list. What makes this ...

Occupying political science: the Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the world

The work of Chantal Mouffe is seldom discussed in the theoretical parlance of post-colonial studies. Although there are notable recent critical interventions in the domain of post-colonial theory, ...

Postcolonial Agonistic Demo-crazy: Artivism and Mestiza Pluralism as the Dissensual Politics of the Governed

Nabarun Bhattacharya, the radical literary voice of Bengal demonstrates notions of dissidence and aesthetic Bolshevism. His fictive dissenting subjects, the fyatarus typify rebellious roles in a post-ideological era when complicity and conformity are rewarded as the norm. Nabarun`s  literary crusade interrogates the status quo and composes counter-currents of subjectivities. As a revolutionary saboteur he redefined the mode of subaltern representation by scripting the prose of counter insurgency through literature. The present excursus pays homage to this noted maverick writer of dissidence and attempts an analysis of the singularity of Nabarun`s fictional domain with specific references to some of his best known fictional works which constitute and explicate his prototypical subaltern anti-heroes such as fyatarus and Choktars who emerge as brilliant metaphorisation of dissent and disgust at our contemporary socio-political praxis. While the popular literary trends of the day have colluded with the hegemonic narrative of global capital that prevents the litterateur to coronate revolutionary anarchism or insurgency, Nabarun has consistently caused epistemic tremors through his overt advocacy of radical violence and systemic change. Keywords: Nabarun Bhattacharya; Author as Saboteur; Subaltern; radical    violence; literary Bolshevism.

Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha

Papers

Postcolonial theory and the specter of capital

India today: economy, politics and society

Occupying political science: the Occupy Wall Street Movement from New York to the world

Postcolonial Agonistic Demo-crazy: Artivism and Mestiza Pluralism as the Dissensual Politics of the Governed

Fyataru and Subaltern War Cries: Nabarun Bhattacharya and the Rebirth of the Subject