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Call for Publications Theme: Towards a diasporic New-World order of a global 21st century Subtitle: Retrieving the cultural heteroglossia of our pasts Publication: Collected Volume Deadline: 1.4.2016 __________________________________________________ This is a call for a collection that argues for new interpretative methods of analysing the colonial past and the diasporic present. The focus is on retrieving primary texts that would critique and displace the existing, dominant theoretical models. Postcolonial theory assumes that the dialectics between the civilizing mission of the Empire and the colonial wanna-be subject affect both the colonial discourse/ power that aims to keep the subject under a panopticon method of surveillance, and the subjugated native. There is an eternal desire to create perfect natives who always fall short in this act of mimicry and this act of becoming is never brought to a conclusion. The onslaught of the superior western powers is so rampant and absolute that it enables for the perpetual erasure and denigration of the “native” cultures; and as the foremost postcolonial theorist argues, “[t]he line of descent of the mimic man can be traced through the works of Kipling, Forster, Orwell, Naipaul, and to his emergence, most recently, in Benedict Anderson’s excellent work on nationalism, as the anomalous Bipin Chandra Pal. He is the effect of a flawed colonial mimesis, in which to be Anglicized is emphatically not to be English.” (The Location of Culture, pp. 85-92) I would also position Homi Bhaba himself within this list of “mimic men” – whose scholarship in itself is an “effect of a flawed colonial mimesis.” If only Homi Bhaba had read a few “native” texts, had lived in Bengal, knew Bengali and imbibed a Bengali literary tradition – and had not been so busy reading Freud, James Mill, Charles Grant and the ever-so-famous Thomas Macaulay, and sucking up to western academia ad nauseum – maybe, postcolonial theory would not be in the Sisyphean chaos that it is presently. And the tales that we are taught in graduate school, in a rote-like manner – about the civilizing gaze of the West – might never have been told. Homi Bhaba, indeed, is a funny man – a very comic writer. To understand the colonial past, it is more relevant to read someone like Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-1894), who wrote a paper titled, “A Popular Literature for Bengal” and presented it to Bengal Social Science Association in 1870: "As long as the higher education continues to have English for its medium, as long as English literature and English science continue to maintain their present immeasurable superiority, these will form the sources of intellectual cultivation to the more educated classes. To Bengali literature must continue to be assigned the subordinate function of being the literature for the people of Bengal, and it is as yet hardly capable of occupying even that subordinate, but extremely important, position. … I believe that there is an impression in some quarters that Bengal literature has as yet few readers, and that the few men in the country who do read, read only English books. … But it is not altogether correct to entertain the idea that the absolute number of purely Bengali readers are in reality so few. The artisan and the shopkeeper who keep their own accounts, the village zemindari and the mofussil lawyer, the humbler official employé whose English carries him no further than the duties of his office, and the small proprietor who has as little to do with English as with office, all these classes read Bengali and Bengali only; all in fact between the ignorant peasant and the really well-educated classes. And we Bengalis are strangely apt to forget that it is only through the Bengali that the people can be moved. We preach in English and harangue in English and write in English, perfectly forgetful that the great masses, whom it is absolutely necessary to move in order to carry out any great project of social reform, remain stone deaf to all our eloquence." The reformist, civilizing gaze of the West – did not necessarily create partial colonial subjects, who were perpetually caught between the desire to be and not being able to become. There would have been “great masses” of natives who simply shrugged off the West and the civilizing gaze, even as James Mill and Charles Grant were busy theorising about them. The onslaught of Difference created new subjects who carried with them the past alongside certain aspects of the new. The refusal to allow themselves to be moved into complete subjugation or the impossibility of doing so – because of their blind adherence to socio-cultural-religious beliefs – allowed for the perpetuation of old cultural systems. These archaic practises of the natives that refused to be buried and still continued even in the face of stiff socio-intellectual opposition, allowed for the sustenance of a diverse, heteroglossic society. This text will be published by Lies and Big Feet, an independent publishing house: www.liesandbigfeet.wordpress.com Deadline: April 1st, 2016 Please send a 500 word abstract to the following email: [email protected] Contact: Tapati Bharadwaj Lies and Big Feet #894. 4th Floor 1st. A Main. 1st Block Koramangala Bangalore - 560034 India Email: [email protected] Web: http://www.liesandbigfeet.wordpress.com __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
