Showing papers on "Subaltern published in 2001"

Mapping subaltern studies and the postcolonial

Abstract: Initially inspired by Antonio Gramsci's writings on the history of subaltern classes, the Subaltern Studies authors adopted a "history from below" paradigm to contest "elite" history writing of Indian nationalists. Later the Project shifted away from its social history origins by drawing upon eclectic thinkers such as Edward Said, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. This volume is the first comprehensive balance-sheet of the project, presenting a collection of the most important writing from the last two decades and focusing the key debates between the main scholars in the field. The collection begins with the original manifesto of the Subaltern Studies project, by Ranajit Guha. In the following contributions Partha Catterjee and David Arnold, two of the founding members of the Subaltern Studies collective, examine concepts from Marx to Gramsci embedded in the writing of Indian peasant history. Critiques of the Subaltern project from C. A. Bayly, Rajnarayan Chandavarka, Rosalind O'Hanlon and Tom Brass set the terms for the controversies around which the book is organized. Marxist and deconstructionist tendencies cross and clash in the exchange between O'Hanlon, David Washbrook and the Subalternist Gyan Prakash. Sumit Sarkar charts the contemporary direction of Subaltern Studies in its movement away from a set of Marxist concerns, and Dipesh Chakrabarty and Gyanendra Pandey respond with a spirited defence of these new directions, criticizing not only Marxism but the whole idea of history as Eurocentric. The volume concludes with an interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on the future of the Subaltern Studies project and its vexed relationship with Marxism and Feminism

Theorizing Other discourses of tourism, gender and culture: can the subaltern speak (in tourism)?

Abstract: At its broadest level, this article is concerned with identifying, reviewing and developing synergies between three subject fields that have experienced rapid growth over the last two decades: tour...

Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East

Abstract: Joel Beinin's survey of subaltern history in the Middle East demonstrates lucidly and compellingly how the lives, experiences and culture of working people can inform our historical understanding Beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century, the book charts the history of peasants, urban artisans and modern working-classes across the lands of the Ottoman empire and its Muslim-majority successor-states, including the Balkans, Turkey, the Arab Middle East and North Africa Inspired by the approach of the Indian Subaltern Studies school, the book is the first to offer a synthesized critical assessment of the scholarly work on the social history of this region for the last twenty years It offers insights into the political, economic and social life of ordinary men and women and their apprehension of their own experiences Students will find it rich in narrative detail, and accessible and authoritative in presentation

Nuestra America Reinventing a Subaltern Paradigm of Recognition and Redistribution

Abstract: According to Hegel, universal history goes from the East to the West. This idea underlies the dominant conception of the 20th century as the European American Century. In this article, I submit that there has been another, subaltern 20th century, the Nuestra America American Century. The European American Century carries into the new millennium its empirical arrogance in the form of neoliberal globalization; the Nuestra America American Century, to be reinvented, bears the seeds of counter-hegemonic globalization. Counter-hegemonic globalization is understood as a set of transnational alliances and struggles focused on the dynamic equilibrium between the principle of equality and the principle of difference. The article identifies five main themes in which the clash between the two alternative globalizations will occur in the next decades.

Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890–1945

Abstract: HISTORY Laura Fair. Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890-1945. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001. 370 pp. Maps. Photographs. Figures. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $59.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. In his classic account of Zanzibar nationalism (Zanzibar: Background to Revolution [Princeton, 1965]), Michael Lofchie assumed that before World War II the island's poor had no political consciousness. Laura Fair's study of urban popular culture makes a major contribution by undermining that assumption, demonstrating that before the postwar era of party politics, the poor thought and argued about diverse issues of social and economic justice. Fair focuses mainly on leisure activities such as sport, music, and fashion. Invoking James Scott, she proposes that such pastimes can be shown to have served as "weapons of the weak": not only forums in which the poor engaged in debates with "each other, urban patricians, and their new colonial masters," but also tools with which they effected social change (8-9). Fair succeeds in supporting the second of these propositions only occasionally, but it is difficult to imagine how one might have documented that colonial social structures were changed by the songs of the taarab master Siti binti Saad or by the clothes worn by lower-class women. Her most satisfying accomplishment in this regard comes in the chapter on the groundrent strikes of the 1920s, which had a lasting effect in limiting the commercialization of urban landholding. Fair's greater achievement lies in her support of the first proposition and in documenting the social commentaries of the urban poor. Keeping faith with Scott, she argues that these commentaries constituted "alternative discourses,... trenchant critiques of the state" that "undermined" colonial authority (25-26). One might demur that this is placing the bar a bit high; Scott himself never demonstrated convincingly the subaltern's penetrating vision. Yet in showing how ordinary Zanzibaris sang about the corruption of colonial bureaucrats, gossiped about the unfairness of European soccer referees, or protested the injustice of landlords, Fair opens a valuable window on popular political consciousness before the war. Fair interprets early colonial Zanzibar as a postslavery society. This is a useful perspective that enables her to make sense of many of the urban poor's struggles to shape "new identities" via leisure activities. …

The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader

Abstract: Contents: Convergences of times: Subaltern Studies in South Asia/Latin America, Modern/Postmodern Opening Statement. Subaltern Studies: Projects for our Time and their Convergence - Ranjajit Guha The Impossibility of Politics? Theses on Subalternity, Representation and Hegemony - John Beverley Solidarity as Event: Communism as Personal Practice and Disencounters in the Politics of Desire - Maria Milagros Lopez A Storm Blowing From Paradise: Negative Globality and Latin American Cultural Studies - Alberto Moreiras Indigenous Peoples and the Coloniality of Power Rigoberta Menchu after the Nobel: from Militant Narrative to Postmodern Politics - Marc Zimmerman Aboriginal Communities and Nation-States in the Late Twentieth Century: A Colonial Pentimento - Patricia Seed Histiography on the Ground: The Toledo Circle and Guaman Poma - Sara Castro Klaren Subject Positions: Dominant and Subaltern Intellectuals? Slaps and Embraces: A Rhetoric of Particularism - Doris Sommer Beyond Representation? The Impossibility of the Local (Notes on Subaltern Studies in Light of a Rebellion in Tepoztlan, Morelos) - Jose Rabasa Questions of Strategy as an Abstract Minimum: Subalternity and Us Ungovernability: Authoritarian and Democratic Hegemonies From Glory to Menace II Society: African-American Subalternity and the Ungovernability of the Democratic Impulse under Super Capitalist Orders - Robert Carr 20 Preliminary Propositions for a Critical History of International Statecraft in Haiti - Michael Clark Death in the Andes: Ungovernability and the Birth of Tragedy in Peru - Gareth Williams Outside in and Inside out: Visualizing Society in Bolivia - Javier Sanjines Citizenship: Resistance, Transgression, Disobedience Dirty Bodies/Dirty Woeds: Hygeinization Policies (19th century) - Beatriz Gonzalez Apprenticeship as Citizenship and Governability - Ileana Rodriguez The Architectural Relationship Between Gender, Race and the Bolivian State - Marcia Stephenson Gender, Citizenship and Social Protest: The New Social Movements in Argentina - Marcelo Bergman Who's the Indian in Aztlan? Re-writing Mestizaje, Indianism and Citizenship From the Lacandon - Josefina Saldana Closing Statement. Subalternity and Coloniality of Power - Walter Mignolo

What are we fighting for? Rethinking resistance in a Pewenche community in Chile

Abstract: The contradictory reactions by members of an indigenous group in southern Chile to the prospect of their displacement by a hydroelectric dam presents an opportunity to reconceptualize ‘resistance’, studies of which have come under increasing attack in recent years. Using this case, I explore contemporary perspectives on ‘subaltern’ struggle and propose an alternative framework for the interpretation of this phenomenon that seeks to salvage a viable conception of ‘resistance’ for future study. I argue that resistance studies’ current critique finds the bulk of its substance in deficiencies of the ‘everyday forms of resistance’ paradigm presently dominating the field and offer a tentative outline of ways in which the field might be reconceived so as to transcend this paradigm and direct the study of resistance into more productive arenas.

Reclaiming the political in Latin American history : essays from the North

Abstract: Acknowledgments I. The Politics of Writing Latin American History Reclaiming "the Political" at the Turn of the Millennium / Gilbert M. Joseph New Publics, New Politics, New Histories: From Economic Reductionism to Cultural Reductionism--in Search of Dialectics / Emilia Viotti da Costa Between Tragedy and Promise: The Politics of Writing Latin American History in the Late Twentieth Century / Steve J. Stern II. The Contestation of Historical Narratives and Memory The Decline of the Progressive Planter and the Rise of Subaltern Agency: Shifting Narratives of Slave Emancipation in Brazil / Barbara Weinstein A Past to Do Justice to the Present: Collective Memory, Historical Representation, and Rule in Bahia's Cacao Area / Mary Ann Mahony Revolutionary Nationalism and Local Memories in El Salvador / Jeffrey L. Gould III. Articulating the Political: The Intersection of Class, Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Generation The Flight from the Fields Reconsidered: Gender Ideologies and Women's Labor After Slavery in Jamaica / Diana Paton A More Onerous Citizenship: Illness, Race, and Nation in Republican Guatemala / Greg Grandin Nationalism, Race, and the Politics of Imperialism: Workers and North American Capital in the Chilean Copper Industry / Thomas Miller Klubock Good Wives, Bad Girls, and Unfaithful Men: Sexual Negotiation and Labor Struggle in Chile's Agrarian Reform, 1964-73 / Heidi Tinsman IV. Historians and the Making of History Bearing Witness in Hard Times: Ethnography and Testimonio in a Postrevolutionary Age / Florencia E. Mallon Afterword: A Final Reflection on the Political / Daniel James Contributors Index

David and Goliath: A Response to "The Oceanic Imaginary"

Abstract: Oubramani asserts that the forces of globalism must be resisted by Pacific intellectuals and writers. He says they can do this primarily by using ver nacular languages and epistemologies, the result of which is a change in the locus of power, from without to within. The emergence of a new lan guage of critique that does not mimic that of the west, an integrated approach to the pursuit of knowledge, the refusal to treat literature as a commodity, and the empowerment of the marginalized (what Subramani calls the "subaltern"), are some of the benefits that will arise when Pacific intellectuals and writers realize that where they are should be the center of their universe. According to Subramani, there are three variables—the nation-state, diasporic communities, and the global paradigm—that stand in the way of realizing the agenda he has outlined. To overcome these obstacles to the production of new epistemologies, Subramani provides examples of how intellectuals and writers can deal with opposing forces so that they become allies in the struggle. For example, he cites the contributions of intellectu als to constitutional reform in the aftermath of Fiji's first and second mil itary coups in 1987 (since then there has been another in 2000), the ways in which several Pacific writers explore the experiences of displaced Pacific Islanders in their fiction, and the role of the University of the South Pacific in the creation and promotion of Pacific literature, the teaching of Pacific languages, and the promotion of the visual and theater arts. Essentially, Subramani proposes the construction of a body of knowl edge rooted in and about Oceania that encompasses its "philosophies, car tographies, languages, genealogies, and repressed knowledges." This idea is not new. Albert Wendt's 1975 essay "Toward a New Oceania," early writings in the journal Mana by Marjorie Crocombe and others, and more recently Epeli Hau'ofa's essay "Our Sea of Islands" (1994) speak of the same concerns. Two other articles in this issue (by Gegeo and Meyer) have similar themes. According to Subramani, the greatest threat to such

Healing powers and modernity: traditional medicine, Shamanism, and science in Asian societies

Abstract: Introduction Healing Powers in Contemporary Asia by Linda H. Connor Healing in the Modern State: Korea, Malaysia, and India The Cultural Politics of "Superstition" in the Korean Shaman World: Modernity Constructs Its Other by Laurel Kendall Tradition and Change in Malay Healing by Carol Laderman Modernity and the Midwife: Contestations Over a Subaltern Figure, South India by Kalpana Ram The Political Ecology of Health in India: Indigestion as Sign and Symptom of Defective Modernization by Mark Nichter Healing on the Margins: Malaysia, Indonesia, and China Engaging the Spirits of Modernity: The Temiars by Marina Roseman Presence, Efficacy, and Politics in Healing Among the Iban of Sarawak by Amanda Harris Sorcery and Science as Competing Models of Explanation in a Sasak Village by Cynthia L. Hunter Medicines and Modernities in Socialist China: Medical Pluralism, the State, and Naxi Identities in the Lijiang Basin by Sydney D. White Healing Power and Identity in Tibetan Societies Tibetan Medicine at the Crossroads: Radical Modernity and the Social Organization of Traditional Medicine in the Tibet Autonomous Region, China by Craig R. Janes Partuclarizing Modernity: Tibetan Medical Theorizing of Women's Health in Lhasa, Tibet by Vincanne Adams Tibetan Medicine in Contemporary India: Theory and Practice by Geoffrey Samuel Glossary of Tibetoan Terms Index

Controlling images and the gender construction of enslaved african women

Abstract: This article examines the antebellum popular culture that was created by pro-slavery intellectuals and that contributed to the subordination of female African slaves. It argues that southern ideologues produced a dominant ideology that facilitated the exploitation of enslaved Black women and contributed to the social construction of their gender. This article contributes to Black feminist theory that, since the early 1970s, has been developing as a counter-hegemonic advocate for the subaltern African American woman.

Experience and Identity: A Historical Account of Class, Caste and Gender among the Cashew Workers of Kerala, 1930-2000

Abstract: Since the 1930s female cashew workers have constituted a majority of the registered workers in the South Indian State of Kerala and today number some 200,000. This group challenged the stereotypical view of Third World women because they were organized into unions, worked in the formal sector, and were literate. The background for this thesis has been the ?Kerala Model?, i.e., the political context of a state known for its radicalism, redistribution of resources, and high social indicators for citizens (men as well as women). How did the encounter of women of different castes at the cashew factory take place? How was the factory work structured with regard to gender and caste? How did membership in unions shape women's view of their own lives? How have marriage and motherhood influenced their identities? Why did females suffer more pronounced capitalist exploitation than males? At a theoretical level this interdisciplinary study engages in a dialogue with Marxist, Subaltern, postmodern, and feminist scholars. In the analysis, change and continuity have been considered not only with regard to material ?realities?, but also in terms of discourses and ideologies. Among the main themes traced over the period 1930-2000 are the organization of work in the factories, wages, trade unions, and marriage; and how elements in these spheres have interacted in the formation of identities based on class, caste, and gender. The limitations imposed upon female laborers by poverty and extremely unequal power relations between capital and labor alone cannot adequately account for the discriminatory treatment of female workers over males. Neither can women's lack of class-consciousness serve as a justification. The story of the Kerala cashew workers chronicles not only shameless, brutal capitalist exploitation, but also demonstrates that we have to go beyond economic structures to explain oppression and lack of empowerment: cultural and ideological factors must be incorporated in the analysis. Low-caste female workers have gone through a process of effeminization which has acted to curb their class-identity and limit their scope of action. The historical development traced shows a widening gap between femininity and masculinity, with a more dichotomized gender ideology visible among low-caste cashew workers. While it does not mean to imply a deterioration of living conditions for women, it should not be taken as idealizing a better and more gender-equal past; rather, it seeks to highlight the complexity of historical analysis. The thesis has striven to show that, once one takes a gender perspective, a polarization such as ?traditional? or ?modern? is seen as flawed. Capitalist forces were active in spreading a patriarchal, high-caste gender ideology among lower castes, who were seen to ?modernize? their gender relations by introducing male breadwinners and dependent housewives as the ideal. Union leaders themselves ?modernized? gender relations by supporting an internationally-acknowledged wage system which was institutionalized by the minimum wages committees in 1953 and 1959. This study shows that the radicalism of males turned to be built upon women's maintaining of the families-a reality which strongly contradicts hegemonic gender discourses and confuses gender identities.

Authoring Ethnicized Subjects: Rigoberta Menchú and the Performative Production of the Subaltern Self

Abstract: The debate over Rigoberta Menchu's testimonio has centered on whether or not Menchu told the “truth” regarding details of her personal life. According to her critics, her “lies” discredit her testimony and reduce the moral authority of leftist intellectuals who teach testimonial texts. This focus on verifiable facts ignores the literary value of testimonios in general and the importance of Menchu's testimony in particular in a discursive war tied to cold war politics. This essay explores the problematics of truth, the nature of testimonio as a genre, and the relation between political solidarity and subaltern narrative. It also examines the function of Menchu's testimonio as a discourse on ethnicity and considers the relation among the anthropologist, the subaltern subject, and truth. The conclusion deals with the need to rethink the concept of identity, with the desires and fantasies of subjective transformation, and with the notion of identity politics.

Disrupting Savagism: Intersecting Chicana/o, Mexican Immigrant, and Native American Struggles for Self-Representation

Abstract: Colonial discourse in the United States has tended to criminalize, pathologize, and depict as savage not only Native Americans but Mexican immigrants, indigenous peoples in Mexico, and Chicanas/os as well. While postcolonial studies of the past few decades have focused on how these ethnicities have been constructed by others, Disrupting Savagism reveals how each group, in turn, has actively attempted to create for itself a social and textual space in which certain negative prevailing discourses are neutralized and rendered ineffective. Arturo J. Aldama begins by presenting a genealogy of the term “savage,” looking in particular at the work of American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan and a sixteenth-century debate between Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolome de las Casas. Aldama then turns to more contemporary narratives, examining ethnography, fiction, autobiography, and film to illuminate the historical ideologies and ethnic perspectives that contributed to identity formation over the centuries. These works include anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s The Mexican Immigrant: His Life Story, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and Miguel Arteta’s film Star Maps. By using these varied genres to investigate the complex politics of racialized, subaltern, feminist, and diasporic identities, Aldama reveals the unique epistemic logic of hybrid and mestiza/o cultural productions. The transcultural perspective of Disrupting Savagism will interest scholars of feminist postcolonial processes in the United States, as well as students of Latin American, Native American, and literary studies.

O olhar etnográfico e a voz subalterna

Abstract: The essay presents, firstly, a review of anthropological theory, assessing its role in the context of contemporary theoretical developments in the Humanities. To do so, I developed the metaphor of the metamorphoses of the ethnographic eye, which allowed me to detect some crucial moments of the reception and reproduction, in peripheral countries such as Brazil, of this knowledge created in metropolitan places in the days of colonialism. Secondly, I review the ideas of some leading theorists of postcolonial and subaltern studies, such as Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha. Thirdly, I discuss the possibilities of a postcolonial ethnography, aimed at the narration of subaltern voices, which puts Anthropology close to Comparative Literature. Finally, I illustrate these discussions with the presentation of an extraordinary narrative of a woman gatherer of babacu coconut from Maranhao. I compare her text with Heidegger's reading of one of Holderlin's poems on the subject of unhomeliness. This crossing of texts opens a wide range of references about the condition of homelessness which affects us all, both our so-called natives and ourselves, ethnographers and intellectuals of peripheral nations of the world system.

Matters of Intimacy as Matters of State: A Response

Abstract: Cross-disciplinary dialogues are as interesting as the openness of those engaging in them. It is my good fortune to have thoughtful and able commentators whose concerns confirm, challenge, and take seriously my own. While there are marked differences in emphasis, their resonant queries suggest a need to clarify two fundamental points: (1) how and why I see the intimate as a strategic site of colonial governance, not a supplementary point of entry into the subtle injustices of the colonial order, but a charged space of colonial tensions; and (2) why a focus on empire and its racialized regimes is not a distraction from local, subaltern histories and the quotidian struggles of ordinary men and women, but a critical vantage point for identifying how categories of exclusion were fortified and made common sense, shaping the constraints in which subjects and citizens were produced, their refusals framed, and their lives lived. Thus, rather than rehearse the common ground that the commentators have so clearly stated, in the spirit of furthering debate and specifying the scholarly and political issues at stake in our differences, I focus here on the misrecognitions that remain and some sources of them. Let me start with the comments of Ramon A. Gutierrez. Professor Gutierrez misconstrues my argument, and ironically, the position he takes here represents an odd retreat from his own. He critiques my focus on intimacies as a "naturalized, tenderized" study of colonialism, which is thereby "made palatable and opaque." Yet in his own work on eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century New Mexico, he attends explicitly to the distinctions between "the head and heart," "between sentiment and reason" that, he once argued, provided colonizing Hispanics with the "categories to explain their behavior." His related worry that attention to "affective histories" voids colonialism of "blood and sweat and tears" narrows the range of sentiments that should be under consideration: It includes ressentiments and their virulent expression.1 In so doing he ignores the work of fellow historians of the Americas who have argued that the emotional economy of colonialism has been central to the strategies of labor control of colonial regimes and has constrained the domestic and conjugal arrangements of those ruled.

Barbarian Theorizing and the Limits of Latin American Exceptionalism

Abstract: Two important concepts for Latin American(ist) cultural criticism1 define the focus of this essay: exceptionalism and Eurocentrism. The objective of my critique is to interrogate the limits of Latin American exceptionalism by placing it in dialectical tension with Eurocentrism. I aim to signal the ways in which exceptionalism as a mode of theorizing Latin American singularity-while ultimately a critical endeavor-tends to overlook its own symptomatic relationship with Eurocentrism, and thereby succumbs to the same problems that it identifies in Eurocentric discourse. Exceptionalism, I propose, is not simply a reaction to or result of external factors, such as Latin America's marginalization from the construction of Western knowledge. It is also a symptom of the tenacity of Eurocentrism within Latin American(ist) criticism. Just as Eurocentrism elides the intellectual contribution of peripheral or subaltern cultures to the epistemological constitution of the so-called West, so does exceptionalism reach its limits by focusing attention upon this very issue. Left aside is the engagement with epistemologies uncommonly, if ever, taken seriously in the rarefied discourses of Western knowledge production. At stake then is the role of the Latin American(ist) intellectual as complicit in the erasure of the epistemological plurality of Latin America.

We are all hybrids now: The dangerous epistemology of post‐colonial populism

Abstract: This review article considers the political effects of the construction by postcolonial/postmodern theory of an emancipatory project embodying an alternative modernity. It is argued that, in the case of the north Indian peasantry, what is perceived as a subaltern hybridity entails a paradoxical combination: namely, science‐driven technology with an irrational, pre‐scientific worldview. The latter elements, according to postcolonial theory, correspond not just to an authentically indigenous knowledge emanating from an undifferentiated ‘people’ but also to the way in which in non‐Western societies resist the continuing dominance exercised by erstwhile colonial masters through a system of Enlightenment/Western values. Epistemologically, however, such a backwards‐looking critique of science, technology and development has much in common with the discourse of the political right. Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India, by Akhil Gupta. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Pp.xv...

The functionality of market‐based discrimination

Abstract: Advances a framework for understanding the mechanisms that maintain unearned or inherited advantage or privilege in a hierarchical world of unequal rewards and differential opportunity. Central in this framework is the presence of a dominant group and a subaltern group in an environment where there is rivalry over social rewards. A dominant group can seek to structure and control access to the credentials required for preferred positions to insure admission of their own and to keep out others. This could involve, for example, deprivation of subaltern group members of schooling, both in quantity and quality. In other words, the dominant group can take steps to influence the “premarket” characteristics of the members of the subaltern group to the disadvantage of the latter. The dominant group emphasizes the cultural, cognitive, or motivational deficiences of the subaltern group significantly by silently rendering them non‐competing, all the while denying any discrimination.

Regarding Ireland in a post-colonial frame

Abstract: This essay considers the applicability of postcolonial theory to Irish culture and history. It develops the concept of multiple rhythms or temporalities of social struggle for which only that of nationalism is determined punctually by the struggle for the state. The domination of Irish historiography by state-oriented narratives occludes the histories and the formal or organizational aspects of other forms of social movement, such that the postcolonial project is directed simultaneously towards the mapping of such alternative movements and to the critique of statist historiographies, whether imperialist, nationalist or ‘revisionist’. Where postcolonial theory has tended to emphasize the ‘hybrid’ nature of colonial cultures, this essay prefers to focus on the productive interface between the incommensurable social and cultural formations of colonial modernity and colonized non-modernity. At this interface emerge continually both new subaltern social formations and practices, which cannot be understood as ‘...

Doctors for the empire: The medical school of Goa and its narratives

Abstract: This paper studies the establishment of medical teaching in Portuguese colonial settings as a means to understand the ways of empire building. The rules and regulations regarding surgeons and doctors in the African and Asian colonies evidence a structure of subalternities within the empire. Goa, in India, emerges as the second to the metropolis within that hierarchy, and the Medical School of Goa becomes the ultimate producer of doctors for the empire. We will bring to the analysis the narratives and representations of Goan doctors about their Medical School and its role in empire building. The analysis raises a number of issues that deserve further discussion: the ideologies of colonialism and the colonial condition, the formation of hierarchies within imperial structures, the tensions between social groups defined by the empire, the interaction between different bodies of knowledge and medical practices in the context of colonization, and the ambiguous position of creole elites within a colonial system.

Megawords : 200 Terms You Really Need to Know

Abstract: Aberrant Decoding Abject/Abjection Activism Aesthetics Agency Agenda Setting Alienation Alterity Androcentric Anima/Animus Anomie Aporia Appropriation Arbitrary Archaeology Archetype Articulation Audience Aura Authenticity/Authentic Author/Authorship Authority Base/Superstructure Behaviourism Bias Binary Oppositions Bisexuality Black/Black Politics Body Bourgeois Brand Bricoleur/Bricolage Bureaucracy Camp Canon Capitalism Carnival Castration Complex Celebrity/Celebrity Culture Chaos Theory Chora Citizenship City Civil Society Civilisation Class Code Collective Unconscious Colonial Subject Colonialism Communication Conflict Theory Connotation/Denotation Conspiracy Theory Consumption Copernican Revolution Counterculture Critical Theory Cult Cultural Capital Cultural Populism Cultural Reproduction Cultural Studies Culturalism Culture Cyberpunk Cyberspace Cyborg Deconstruction Desire Determinism Diaspora Difference Discourse Division of Labour Dominant/Residual/Emergent Doxa Ecology Economic Rationalism Ecriture Feminine Empiricism Encoding/Decoding End of Philosophy Enlightenment Enconce/Enonciation Episteme Epistemology Essentialism Ethics Ethnicity Ethnography Existentialism Fake TV Feedback Feminism Flaneur Flow Fordism Formalism Frankfurt School Functionalism/Structural Functionalism Gaze Geek Gender Genealogy Genotext/Phenotext Globalisation Governmentality Grand Narrative Habitus Hegemony Hermeneutics Hot and Cold Media Humanism Hybridity Hyperreality Icon/Iconic Identity Identity Politics Ideology Image Imperialism Indigeneity Information Age/Information Revolution Intellectuals Interdisciplinarity Interpellation Inter-Textuality Interpretive Communities Irony Jouissance Knowledge Liberli/ism Logocentrism Marginality/Marginalisation Mass Media Materialism Mediascape Message Metanarrative Metaphor/Metonymy Methodology Modernism Moral panic Multiculturalism Myth Nationhood Nature Neo-Liberalism Network Society New Age New Historicism New Man New Times News Values Nomadic Theory Norm Ontology Orientalism Other Paradigm Parapraxis Pastiche Patriarchy Phallocentrism Phenomenology Pleasure Pluralism Political Correctnesss Political Economy of the Media Polysemic Popular Culture Positivism Post-Colonialism Post-Feminism Postmodernism/Postmodernity Poststructuralism Power Psychoanalysis Public/Public Sphere Queer/Queer Theory Race Radical/ism Reader-Response Theory Realism Received Ideas Reductionism Relativism Reflexivity Representation Risk/Risk Society Self Semiotics/Semiology Sign/Signifier Socialism Society Sociobiology Space State Structuralism Subaltern Subcultures Subject/Subjectivity Sustainability Symbol Technological Determinism Terrorism Thatcherism Travelling Theory Unconscious Utilitarianism Utopia/Utopian Virtual Reality Whiteness Writerly/Readerly

Subaltern dialogues: Subversion and resistance in soviet Uzbek family law

Abstract: We must address this question very seriously. We can no longer be patient with violations of women's rights. Our country is growing [and] moving ahead; the collective farms are growing; culture is expanding; we are moving forward on all sides with regards to women. We must take care to help them. Among us Uzbeks it is said that only a crazy person gets mixed up in family matters between a husband and wife. This is not so: what about the cases in which signals arose of [bad] relations between husband and wife, [but] based on this sentiment no attention was paid and bad results [followed]. This [advice to leave family affairs alone] is the invention ofbois [wealthy people] and the religious clergy and only serves their hostile ends. -Abdurakhmanov to a conference of Uzbek Stakhanovite kolkhoz women, 1940

Playing in the land of God: Musical performance and social resistance in South Africa

Abstract: This essay treats the performances of Venda musician Solomon Mathase as a form of resistance to corruption and poverty at the end of the colonial period. In his music resistance is religiously legitimated through his concept of “God's land”, a moral philosophy that promotes supportive co‐existence. The tenets of this philosophy are powerfully articulated in communal performance through Mathase's manipulation of interactive musical techniques, which place him in a position of emotionally regenerating ritual power, while inducing states of intense shared consciousness among the participants in his performances. Performance thus shapes group identity, while allowing musicians to express their thoughts on their poverty and subaltern status and to speculate on creative solutions to their problems. Accordingly, music‐making functions as more than mere reflective symbolic action in that it provides an ideological foundation for socio‐economic change.

Galvão among the cannibals: The emotional constitution of colonial power

Abstract: Colonial domination was not a simple act of violence. Rather, it was written into the bodies and the hearts of the people—"white,” “black,” or whatever other combination might be held to exist. Using the example of the Portuguese African colonies in mid‐twentieth century, this paper aims at illuminating the emotional constitution of colonial power by exploring the uses of the trope cannibalism. In order to do that, recourse is taken to a reading of the non‐fictional writings of Henrique Galvao—one of the most active Portuguese intellectuals and Africanist politicians of the period. Subaltern persons were attributed terrible and mysterious tendencies that escaped simple rationality (they were zombified). In this way, a phantasmagoria of subalternity was constituted that, through fear, transformed domination into a structure of emotions. Thus, the repressive attitudes of colonial power were made to appear natural and unavoidable.

Feeling, the subaltern, and the organic intellectual

Abstract: (2001). FEELING, THE SUBALTERN, AND THE ORGANIC INTELLECTUAL. Angelaki: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 65-74.

Television's Unintended Audience

Abstract: Jayasinhji Jhala introduced the idea of the “unintended audience” in his 1994 article of the same title in which he explored the impact of ethnographic films on those viewers who are generally not considered by the filmmaker as being included in his or her intended audience.1 I borrow this concept here in discussing subaltern audiences2 of First World television. The “other” viewing the “self” highlights the ramifications of the question “Who are ‘they'?” vis‐a‐vis notions of “Who are ‘we'?” I contend that the answer to the former directly shapes and informs the latter as Fourth World people are forced to negotiate their identity upon exposure to First World television. The result is a transformative process whereby Fourth World viewers reassign the roles of “self” and “other” in order to preserve, defend, and construct their own selfhood.