Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and LocationU of Minnesota Press, 1996 - 217 pages In the heated, often rancorous debates that are the "culture wars", identity politics has been at the centre of both popular and academic discussion. In this series of meditations on the relationship between theory and practice, R. Radhakrishnan probes the intersections of poststructuralism and postcoloniality that lie at the heart of contemporary controversies over identity difference. This book records Radhakrishnan's attempt to make theory accountable to the world, even while eschewing narrow methodologies or "isms". Rather than embracing one totalizing point of view, these essays move in the spaces "between" to establish a productive dialogue between different disciplines and critical practices - to elaborate what the author calls "common ground". Considering issues of location, language, tradition, gender, ethnicity, nationalism, colonialism, culture, and history, Radhakrishnan reclaims poststructuralism as a tool for both understanding postcolonial reality and working for social change. Momentous and wise, this book provides thought-provoking considerations of contemporary issues surrounding identity, serving as a map of the postcolonial condition, or, in the author's words, of how to be "both past- and future-oriented within the history of the present". |
Contents
1 The Changing Subject and the Politics of Theory | 1 |
Foucault or Gramsci? | 27 |
3 Ethnic Identity and Poststructuralist Differance | 62 |
Ethnicity and Beyond | 80 |
Toward a Poststructuralist Pedagogy | 96 |
6 Negotiating Subject Positions in an Uneven World | 119 |
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affirmation agency Althusser analysis Antonio Gramsci articulation authentic binary Burger's Daughter canon Chatterjee coalition colonialism consciousness constituency context Critical Inquiry critique cultural deconstructive Deleuze Derrida Derridean diaspora discourse dominant epistemic epistemological essay ethicopolitical ethnic Eurocentrism feminism feminist feminist historiography formation Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak gender global Gramsci Gramscian hegemony heterogeneous historicize historiography hybridity identity ideology India intellectual issue Jackson knowledge legitimate macropolitical Marxism mean mediation Michel Foucault mode multiple narrative nationalism nationalist nature one's organic Partha Chatterjee pedagogy perspective politics postcolonial poststructuralism poststructuralist problem problematic production pure question race racism radical reading reality relationship representation representative rhetoric Sangari sense situation Socratic solidarity space speak specific structuralist structure subaltern Subaltern Studies subject positions teacher thematic theme theoretical theorists theory third world thought tion trans transcendent transformation truth University Press valence valorize Western whereas Williams Williams's York