Abstracts
Post-Colonial and Other Pedagogies: Around the work of Gayatri Spivak
10 October 2008
Nayanika Mookherjee (University of Lancaster)
Fuljaan’s story from an(other) Asia
This paper explores the ‘enabling violation’ of universalist feminisms relating to gendered violence during wars. ‘Fuljaan’s story’ allows an interrogation of the evidentiary mode within testimonies and the geographical-ideological mapping of ‘violence-prone’ and ‘peaceful’ areas in the vein of critical regionalism. Identified through the stereotypes of excess and lack, the imaging of Bangladesh and its war of 1971 further underline its location within the hierarchies of an(other) Asia.
Shruti Kapila (University of Cambridge)
A Tragic Pedagogue
By recounting the life of the insurgent-internationalist Har Dayal (1884-1938), my paper will discuss the prefiguration of 'Other Asias' in the age of anti-colonial nationalism. I will argue that Har Dayal's laboured subjectivity was a confrontation with History. Elaborated through extra-territorial networks and constituted through radical violence this form of politics intimated the tragedy of the nation in the twentieth century.
Santanu Das (QMUL)
The Singing Subaltern
The paper concerns the recovery of the voices of the Indian sepoys, and the questions it posits in relation to Spivak’s wok on subaltern speech. It will include recordings of voices and songs of Indian POWS in Berlin in 1916.
Ben Etherington (University of Cambridge)
"Setting to Work" in Ignorance: Fanon and the
Problem of Knowledge
In Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon claims that 'A consciousness
committed to experience ignores, has to ignore the essences and the
determinations of its being'. I will discuss the ways in which Fanon tries
to establish a kind of knowing that is arrived at through absolute
commitment to experience, experience which ignores its own ends (i.e. its
'determinations'). This will lead to a broader consideration of knowledge
in the context of 'postcolonial pedagogies'.
Molly McDonald (QMUL)
"Suturing" as a Concept-Metaphor
The paper works predominately with Spivak's 'Righting Wrongs' article to think through the concept of Suturing, but will briefly discuss other aspects of the concept itself that her work helps to uncover.
Jarad Zimbler (University of Cambridge)
Caring, Teaching, Knowing: Spivak, Coetzee and the Ethics of Postcolonial Pedagogies
This paper will bring Spivak's essay on Disgrace into dialogue with Foucault's work, in the History of Sexuality and The Hermeneutics of the Subject, on the notion of care of the self.
Ankhi Mukherjee (Oxford)
'This Traffic of Influence": Spivak and Derrida
The paper will focus in particular on Spivak's reading of scenes of reading in Derrida's The Post Card, and speculate on Derrida's debts to Spivak in The Politics of Friendship. It highlights instances of transference and telepathy that mark the just friendship between Derrida and Spivak.
Shahida Bari (QMUL)
Spivak and the Secret of Spirit: Beneath the Bangladeshi Flood Plains
This paper addresses Chapter 2 of Other Asias, Spivak's reading of
Derrida and her account of the Bangladesh flood plains, offering a
theoretical approach plus a critique of the development industry, and
some observations on Spivak's style.
Simon Swift (Leeds University)
The Lesson of Gayatri Spivak: Teaching and Ethics
This paper explores the relation between Spivak's thought and Paul de Man, framed around issues of pedagogy, dissemination and ethics, and reflecting on Spivak’s encounters with de Man, mainly via the reading of Kant in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.
