Spring semester got underway today. "Colonial and Postcolonial Criticism and Theory," taught by Dr. Suresh Raval, convened, and I have to say I'm excited about it. The class is small, the group is congenial, and we are tackling a hefty load of reading, beginning with Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon. We've also selected which recent critical books to present on, and for good or ill I chose Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel by Inderpal Grewal. The subject is interesting to me; whether the book proves to be I guess we will find out, though I have to say the introduction is not encouraging.
Grewal is applying a postcolonial lens, with a transnational feminist inflection (refraction? When we use "lens" as a metaphor, how do we avoid mixing it?) and undertones of Marxist criticism, to the "Euroimperial" culture of travel emerging out of the nineteenth century. As a lot of scholars of feminism and/or cultural studies tend to do, Grewal eats up a lot of her introduction talking not about her subject and how she is approaching it, but informing us of what she is not talking about--the various problematic dichotomies and binarisms she is avoiding that reinforce and reproduce hegemonic (and the hegemony she is referring to is Victorian England) notions about race, class, and gender. The book was published in 1996; I wonder what progress more recent critics have made, if any, in circumventing the endless exposition and justification that characterizes much of the prose operating in these theoretical frameworks. I was discussing things along these lines with my friend--let's call him "Max"--today, re: poststructuralism in general, but that's a subject I don't have the time to tackle right now.
*****
Fancy terms:
Casually Reading: Pax Britannica by James (Jan) Morris; The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk; Desert Queen (a biography of Gertrude Bell) by Janet Wallach
Grewal is applying a postcolonial lens, with a transnational feminist inflection (refraction? When we use "lens" as a metaphor, how do we avoid mixing it?) and undertones of Marxist criticism, to the "Euroimperial" culture of travel emerging out of the nineteenth century. As a lot of scholars of feminism and/or cultural studies tend to do, Grewal eats up a lot of her introduction talking not about her subject and how she is approaching it, but informing us of what she is not talking about--the various problematic dichotomies and binarisms she is avoiding that reinforce and reproduce hegemonic (and the hegemony she is referring to is Victorian England) notions about race, class, and gender. The book was published in 1996; I wonder what progress more recent critics have made, if any, in circumventing the endless exposition and justification that characterizes much of the prose operating in these theoretical frameworks. I was discussing things along these lines with my friend--let's call him "Max"--today, re: poststructuralism in general, but that's a subject I don't have the time to tackle right now.
*****
Fancy terms:
- Epistemology: A philosophical term meaning the study of knowledge
- Ontology: According to the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, ontology is "a philosophical term which denotes the study of being." Wikipedia says that ontology is a major branch of metaphysics (I love Wikipedia. Can you tell?). According to Grewal, the Euroimperial discourse of travel reflects ontological questions arising between the Self and the "Other".
- Subject formation: I suspected this term had something to do with Foucault, and turns out I was right. I can't really explain it briefly, but it's kind of a structuralist thing, having to do with how a subject doesn't simply exist but is a construct limited by our linguistic and cultural parameters (I guess?). I expect the significance of the concept in context has to do with how the Other's formation of self is constrained by the dominant discourse.
Actively Reading: Black Skin, White Masks by Fanon; Home and Harem by Grewal; Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
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