TERM PAPER: COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” By Rene Wellek

Pan Literary Endeavour and the Problematic Of Comparison: A Re-Reading Of “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” By Rene Wellek

Wellek designates the overwhelming ruptures that could be observed with literatures across the world to political events since 1914. The reason for the ruptures is identified as the exclusive reliance on facts. Literature as a form of art may not be deciphered efficiently using facts regarding the author’s background alone. Wellek advocates a perspective that crosses temporal boarders on this issue. He triangulates a crisis in the method and focus of comparative literature. According to Wellek, literary critics like Benedetto Croce in Italy and philosophers like Wilhelm Dilthey in Germany argued before Wellek himself for a renewal in methods and practices in literary scholarship. Wellek stresses “re-examination” of present methods suggesting the concreteness of existing paradigms of literary scholarship and their apparent disintegration while facing varied streams of literary art.

            Wellek’s suggestion that “there is something to the passing, in the last decade, of several, asters: Van Tieghem, Farinelli, Vossler, Curtius, Auerbach, Carre, Baldensperger, and Spitzer” (Wellek 162) asserts his idea of the existence of a certain flaw in the present framework for reading literature. Comparative literature or literary scholarship in general, apparently, tends to incline towards two serious hollows: lack of “distinct subject matter” and “specific methodology.” “The most serious sign of the precarious state of our study is the fact that it has not been able to establish a distinct subject matter and a specific methodology” (Wellek 162).

            Wellek identifies failure in association with the endeavours to read literature by the earlier mentioned theorists. He asserts that “nineteenth-century factualism, scientism and historical relativism” are the reasons for the present crisis in comparative literature. According to Wellek, comparative literature attempts to incorporate the compartmentalisation of literature on the basis of nationalities. This seems to appear as the highest purpose of comparative literature within the epistemological terrain of literary scholarship. Wellek points out that compartmentalisation of national literature do not deserve merit as the Western literary tradition is “woven together in a network of innumerable interrelations” (Wellek 162) as a whole.

            Wellek registers his specific distrust towards what Van Tieghem separately addressed as “comparative” and “general” literature. Wellek notes this in relation to the dismantling of compartmentalisation in literary scholarship. According to Van Tieghem, comparative literature holds no further scope than just being a “study of interrelations between two literatures while “general” literature is concerned with the movements and fashions which sweep through several literatures” (Wellek 162). Wellek pushes these notions to the background by identifying them as “untenable and impracticable”. He suggests that although the commonsensical notions that bind today’s practices in comparative literature are inept and can only deliver enough to tarnish its appeal, in its essence, every act of literary analysis involves processes that are common to both the so-called comparative as well as general literature. This puts forth another argument that, maybe, what is known as “world literature” is essentially the potential field of comparative analysis. As Hassan writes “[w]hen Gœthe coined the term Weltliteraturin 1827, he was envisioning a future state rather than naming a contemporary canon. As René Wellek writes, for Gœthe “the term world literature. . . suggests a historical scheme of the evolution of national literatures in which they will fuse and ultimately melt into a great synthesis” (39). In Wellek’s notion, this scheme of fusing of national literatures foregrounds comparative analysis as an essentiality. This is why Wellek, in “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” condemns any form of study of foreign literature under the label of comparative literature, marking these literatures as separate from national literature. In such a scenario, comparative literature would be “broken off from meaningful wholes.” The totality of world literature proposed by Gœthe may not be visible in the continuum of literary interaction existing in the present scenario. This is evident in Hassan’s observations on comparative literature in the time of globalization.

For a long time, “world literature” was synonymous with European literature, but with the vigorous interrogation from a number of perspectives of the primacy of the Western canon, the rise to global celebrity of scores of non-Western writers (including several Nobel laureates and others equally canonized by the Western literary-critical establishment), and the increasing availability of English translations, the teacher of a world literature course today faces an unprecedented abundance of texts from which to choose. Yet this situation is fraught with difficulties of its own, for even as the “globalization of literary studies” emerges as the topic of the hour, the selective inclusion of non-Western texts in critical and pedagogical cadres often reveals new configurations of power and domination” (38).

            The challenges of incorporating literary interaction in the post-globalized era present quaky grounds for Wellek’s totality of literary endeavour. The notion of totality might give way to the varied “configuration” of power structures operating in the scenario. However, Wellek underscores that fragmentation in the methodology of comparative literature and the very act of comparing foreign works makes the stream of study denigrate. Such a scheme underpinning the stream of comparative literature may marginalize it into a “subdiscipline,” to use a term by Wellek. Separating methodology and subject matter of comparative literature and general literature may not be favourable to the general growth of literary scholarship. However, Wellek also raises questions on the existing methodology of comparative literature. Comparative literature is only concerned with minor authors, myths, and legends that affected the creative process of the authors, etc. This Wellek identifies as “nineteenth-century  positivistic factualism” and as “a study of sources and influences”. Such a methodology has serious implications regarding the survival of literary scholarship. Through analyses of motifs, themes, character, situations, plots, and various aspects of cultural influences during the period of the creation of the work, such a scheme narrows down the analysis into a cause-effect paradigm.

            “Works of art, however, are not simply sums of sources and influences: they are wholes in which raw materials derived from elsewhere cease to be inert matter and are assimilated into a new structure” (Wellek 164). According to Wellek, the social influences that benefit the author’s imagination or creative faculty should not occupy the central position in the analysis of a work of art. A work of art is conceived in free imagination and carries forward a set of signifiers and implications totally different from a science fact. Wellek’s attempt could be identified as an endeavour in “New Humanism”.

“Comparative literature arouse as a reaction against the narrow nationalism of much nineteenth-century scholarship” (Wellek 165). The pan literary model proposed by Wellek requires methods and subject matter that are universal in their affiliations. In other words, one may also term Wellek’s model of literature a ‘mega structure’ that defies any form or manner of disintegration and exists in totality. However, comparative literature has been shaped by those who have experiences of crossing geographical boundaries and political boarders. Those who exist on a third space, without any apparent affiliation to either side, may also practice, comparative literature. This event also undermines Wellek’s notion of the totality of “world” literature. The persons or groups that that occupy margins may well contain within themselves sets of signifiers that suggest schemes for practicing their version of literary activity, which may be different from the totality of world literature of the dominant strata. In other words, Wellek’s argument is questioned by its own innate desire to universalize.

            Another crisis unveiled by Wellek in the field of comparative literature scholarship is expansionism. A culture or nation sees comparative literature as a tool for expanding their culture and national territories. Analyses such as the influence of one author in another culture or language, affirm the demarcation that in such cases literary scholarship must be identified universal literature. Such tendencies, Wellek identify as cultural expansionism. How one culture impacts another and the attempt to trace these impacts may be nothing more than “cultural bookkeeping, a desire to accumulate credits for one’s nation by proving as many influences as possible on other nations or, more subtly, by proving that one’s own nation has assimilated and “understood” a foreign master more fully than any other” (Wellek 167). Expanding this argument, Wellek quotes Farinelli’s comments on the “creditor debtor calculus in matters of poetry,” indicating the depth and breadth of cultural bookkeeping in contemporary comparative literature studies.

            Wellek’s seminal point is unravelled just as he ascertains his intolerance towards using comparative literature to propagate cultural expansionism. The crisis of comparative literature, according to Wellek, could be identified by making assessments over symptoms such as “a mechanistic concept of sources and influences,” and “a motivation by cultural nationalism” in the analysis of literature. These assessments suggest “an artificial demarcation of subject matter and methodology” (Wellek 167). In other words, Wellek presupposes a ‘natural’ methodology and essentialist paradigm in existence in order to analyse and test literatures across cultures. However, apparently, he does not provide logical explanations to what this natural methodology is, and what the various modalities are, concerning the essentialist paradigm of reading literatures.                         

            One may also observe some suggestions by Wellek toward reviving the spirit of comparative literature. He advocates dissolving the ‘artificial demarcations’ that apparently exist between ‘comparative’ literature and ‘general’ literature. Wellek asserts that ““Comparative” literature has become an established term for any study of literature transcending the limits of one national literature” (167). Wellek even goes for a general term for literary studies, underplaying the binaries of comparative and general literatures. Often, such a demarcation is the product of the academic imagination of the subject. Such ‘experts’ often use the cultural expansionist notions and factual elements of cause-effect paradigm to decipher literary art. This process of nineteenth-century humanist endeavour attaches the sense of authority with fragmentation and analysis based on geo-political boarders. The answer Wellek delivers to this crisis is “greater mobility and ideal universality”.

            In Wellek, the totality of a literary work of art finds its unique value only in relation to the universality of world literature. Wellek finds it relevant to draw the line of differentiation between contemporary practises of literary scholarship and comparative literature. Although in literary scholarship “theory, criticism, and history collaborate to achieve its central task: the description, interpretation, and evaluation of a work of art or any group of works of art” (169) comparative literature shuns this collaboration. It is this demarcation that caused Wellek to suggest a renewal of subject matter and methodology of comparative literature. Wellek comments on literary scholarship too. He argues that literature has a distinct space of its own, largely, as proposed earlier, due to its origins in the locale of free imagination. Although this free imagination may, at some point in time, be interpolated by the society of the writer existence, Wellek does not acknowledge this factor. Instead, Wellek imagines “an “ontological gap” between the psychology of the author and a work of art, between life and society on the one hand and the aesthetic object” (170).

            This ontological gap may also suggest a ‘no-signifier’ zone, where none of the existing signifiers of the present culture contribute any decipherable meaning. This location, because it is related to the creative act of producing a piece of literary art, could be within the subjective location of an individual. Wellek suggests, as a solution, a ‘holistic’ approach to the analysis, study, reading, and comparison of literature. This may, perhaps, be identified as the only visible solution offered by the author to the crisis of comparative literature.        

Works Cited

Hassan, Waïl S. “World Literature in the Age of Globalization:

Reflections on an Anthology”. College English 63.1 (2000): 38-47. Web. 22 October 2015.

Wellek, Rene, Stephen G. Nicholas. “The Crisis of Comparative

Literature”. Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Print.      

             

Term PaperEmancipating Education through Engaging Pedagogy: bell hooks’ Reconceptualization of Paulo Freire in the Age of Neoliberalism

Emancipating Education through Engaging Pedagogy: bell hooks’ Reconceptualization of Paulo Freire in the Age of Neoliberalism

Introduction

bell hooks is famous as a feminist who problematized the issue of race in the race myopic feminist discourses. Her writings on film and visual culture are widely read as essential texts for film studies and cultural studies. As a prolific author, she writes on various issues like sexuality, land ownership, class, democracy, war, environment etc. Her experience as a woman of colour and her studies about gender, class, race in the light of post-structuralist paradigms such as power/knowledge, discourse, performativity, subjectivity, ideology and deconstruction have made her a contemporary scholar par excellence. hooks’ methodology of deploying multiple tools from a set of schools like feminism, Marxism, postmodernism is both illusive and engaging for the reader. Although her writings on the subjects mentioned above are widely read, her contributions to pedagogy remain less acknowledged even by experts in the field. The trilogy of critical pedagogy known as “teaching trilogy” consists of Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994), Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003), and Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (2010). These books are both practical handbooks for a teacher at any level and theoretical texts for advocating the scope of critical pedagogy with the dialogical elucidations of many schools of thought in the context of neoliberal world’s educational practices. As obvious from the titles, these books engage the thoughts of eminent educationist Paulo Freire and share the fundamental lessons of critical pedagogy as by Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren and Michael Apple. But the travelling of the theory of critical pedagogy from the Brazilian Freire to the African-American hooks is a matter of multiplicities and tough and intricate trajectories of globalized world and the capitalistic U.S academia, hostile to radical left.

 Inheritance of Critical Theory: From Freire to bell hooks

Critical theory as a philosophical enterprise started by the Frankfurt school, especially by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer unambiguously posited the role of education in maintaining the status quo, specifically in the project of capitalism and exposed the oppressive nature of information devoid of knowledge as “the enlightenment as mass deception” for augmenting consumption in the culture industry (in During). Adorno’s critique of all sorts of apoliticization of education and its stake in liberal capitalism remarkably stated: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again” (Adorno “Education after Auschwitz”). Freire adopted the basic assumptions of this tradition, along with methodological inputs from an array of thinkers like Karl Popper, Gabriel Marcel, Karl Jaspers, among others and connected the lived experience of the Brazilian farmers to the world of epistemological discourse. His emphasis upon the directive nature of education cancels any endeavour to reappraise the utopian or romantic naturalism of Rousseau and others that naively believed in the innate formation of knowledge and natural blooming of life. Instead of a child thrown into the bounties of nature after the books burnt, Freire advocated “epistemological curiosity” and strategically provisional adherence to the existing dominant patterns for the formation of a critical consciousness. Similarly his plea for making education a cultural action for freedom intricately juxtaposed pedagogy within an Althussarian framework of ideology, i.e. there cannot be an outside in the constellation of ideology (Critical Consciousness). Giroux’s elaboration of the subtle interconnection between ideology and education has reflected the educative apparatus as essentially an ideological state apparatus. One could easily locate the interconnectedness of education and power in the post-colonial context as illustrated by The Masks of Conquest by Gaury Viswanathan and This Gift of English by Aditya Mukherjee in India’s experience of colonization and Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s Decolonizing the Mind in the African context.

Foucault’s power/knowledge problematic subverted the concept of objective/factual knowledge independent of mediation, and his study of discipline and punish essentially provided the parallels between school and prison, not only in their respective structural semblances but in the patterns of discursive formations of an invariable authority of control and incarcerated bodies supposed to be subjugated. His own writings on sexuality have divulged the systematic erasure of infantile sexuality in societal discourses, on the pretentions of universal education and the rectification of the juvenile delinquent; thereby the legitimation of schooling. Although the Foucaultian canon did not employ the vocabulary of pedagogy or directly discussed the issues of schooling and education in the vocabulary of educational philosophy, Foucault problematized the very notion of knowledge itself and decentred almost all important systems of thought since the publication of The Order of Things and culminated it in The Archaeology of Knowledge. These poststructuralist postulations are keywords for understanding the writings of bell hooks in general. Her appropriation of the concept of gaze is one among many instances of the post-structuralism’s continuum in her schemata of thought. Yet it is the tradition of critical theory in Freire’s way that is determinant in her teaching trilogy.

Eric Fromm’s ideas about freedom and the fear of freedom in an authoritarian environment have been reconceptualised in Freire’s works and his emphasis upon the desire for freedom and its connection with naming the world and naming oneself was the result of the influence of Frankfurt school. Adorno’s ‘collectivization’ became ‘massification’ in Freire’s work, and the very notion of critical consciousness is the direct descendible term of critical theory.  As a theory of cultural critique and Marxism, critical theory upheld the enlightenment reason and it has been taken to the plan of the critical pedagogue. The decadence of reason against itself by the relativism of modernity has been critiqued in the notion of negative dialectics. In Freire the dialogic is essentially grounded on ethical givens, thereby a set of universals also.

Education as Cultural Action for Freedom

Conservative educationists and traditional pedagogues consider education as a disciplinary mechanism or a training program. From Aristotle to B F Skinner, a number of pundits put forward the ideas of conditioning in various forms that would enhance the skills of students for the future benefits (in neoliberal phase the monetary benefit for sustaining reification) of the students and the society at large. Cats, dogs, monkeys and birds are the testing subjects of these models and the teacher’s role is that of a ring master in a circus. Seeing the children as subhuman imperfect beings and education as a finishing programme is the rationale behind it. On the other hand, the banking model, relatively modern, that sees students as tabula rasa (Locke) believes that investing a lot of knowledge and information in the empty heads of students for gaining the interest is the aim of education. Freire confronted this model in the post-World War period, in a post-colonial situation in South America, and later in other parts of the world. Freire found that the banking model’s repercussions on the minds of students were detrimental and long lasting.  A project of unlearning is required to overcome this situation. Thanks to the theories of psychologists like Jean Piaget, Albert Bandura, Abraham Maslow and Erik Erikson a new set of ideas relying on the uniqueness of each individual explained the complex phenomenon of human personality. Individual autonomy gained prominence in the discourses of education. Emancipatory theories of education, namely in four: liberalism, critical theory, postmodernism relied on the singular idea of autonomy as their raison dꞌetre (Fletcher 25-30). All these theoretical categories blatantly opposed the assembly-line model that got the severest biting in Pink Floyd’s song “We don’t need no education”. However, the hegemonic power structures of the world obstinately uphold the traditional banking model almost on all levels of education. And the sole of aim of education in this programme of neo-conservative ideology is to increase economic productivity and consumption of market goods. Yet in recent times the ideas related to sustainability, environment, multiculturalism and the return of the spiritual questioned the dominance of the banking model. Constructivist approach of Lev Vygotsky and the deschooling propositions of Ivan Illlich (1971) have been deconstructed by the critical pedagogy endeavours with the help of Freire’s notions of education.  The arrival of bell hooks in this historical juncture with a mission of juxtaposing a number categories such as gender, race, class, autonomy, universals, authenticity, and particulars in a mutually complementary way in the field of education has changed the once prevalent homogeneous. Her totalization of educational discourses on the basis of transgression in the sense of crossing boundaries has thrown open a new door to the once prohibited area of educating the educator. A new gestalt of sexuality, ecstasy, community, values, spirituality, decolonization, critical thinking, integrity, imagination, conflict, political wisdom, and self-esteem has set the goals of the classroom. Instead of an apparatus of conditioning and indoctrination, education is imagined as a quest for self and freedom in the socio-political context of enunciating subjectivity so that both in individual and in society an evolving change to the direction of multiple aims of progress takes place. In other words, a will to know is clubbed together with a will to become. Unlike the critical pedagogy of the past that overlooked the problems of splitting mind and body, the engaged pedagogy ascertains the holistic approach of intertwining the mind-body-spirit with the curriculum. Inner well-being of both the teacher and the student takes the centre stage here. For manifesting this self-actualizing, healing, and progressive education hooks suggests a new pedagogy that is engaging and engaged. The following is a brief but intimate analysis of the aspects of the engaged pedagogy propounded by hooks in her Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.

Engaged Pedagogy and Race

The issue of race in the American classroom has been ignored largely by the scholars of education citing the integrationist policies in the post-civil rights period. Toni Morrison’s account of the everlasting pain of shame whenever the word nigger is uttered in her classroom and the reading of American canonical narratives with venomous references to blackness within the derisive Ohio schools may be the most profound critique of racially discriminating educational practices (Morrison 1992). One of the most distinguishable features of the engaged pedagogy is the foregrounding of the issue of race in order to sabotage the educational apparatus’s exclusionary project to erase the black experience. Her observation that many white liberal professors who profess the critical pedagogy and claim the tradition of Freire are not so in practice but autocrats in the mini-kingdom of classroom is revelatory of what is wrong with the profession of teaching. Any curriculum that does not take into account the complex and divergent experience of the learners cannot provide a durable experience of learning or a situation of growth and development.

            The   interconnectivity of gender, race and capitalism, reproduces the hegemonic ideology by obliterating many of these problems in the guise of raising one at a time and disorient each issue in the academic enquiries. By pointing out the larger scheme of building up community as a counter discourse, hooks encapsulates the Marxist possibility of praxis: the action and reflection pattern of theorising and practising. Thus race becomes an issue of the community rather than the personal experience of being excluded. The collectivization of experience and its foregrounding in educational discourses once again might lead the oppressed to the ways of changing the world and changing themselves. Race matters in the academia because of its dispersion in the entire society and history.

Critical Pedagogy and Gender

Many of the feminists attacked Freire for his sexist language and some accused him of turning a blind eye to the issue of gender. This Euro-centric white feminist angle lost sight of the third world’s experience of fighting neo-colonialism and the lingering colonial legacy in education. The success in enabling the illiterate Latin American farmers for their political and individual autonomy and the liberation of minds from the spiritual oppression as envisaged by Freire and his comrades did not make a great impact upon this kind of feminism. The convergence of Freire and black feminism has equipped hooks to overcome this distortion of critical pedagogy. “Deeply committed to feminist pedagogy, I find that, much like weaving a tapestry, I have taken threads of Paulo’s work and woven it into that version of feminist pedagogy I believe my work as a writer and teacher embodies” (52).hooks states that her discovery of Freire helped her remain in the field of education as a student, and later as a teacher. Yet she does not desist herself from critically interrogating Freire, especially regarding the phallocentric nature of his language.

            The scope of feminist classroom in the radical tradition of critical pedagogy is extended by hooks’ critical reception of Freire. The idea of conscientizacao refers to the perception of social, political, and economic contradiction in order to take action against the oppressive elements of reality. Gender, as the oldest form of oppression cannot escape the formidable encounter with the critical pedagogy, and hooks underscored the matter by positing it in larger context of experience and theory.

Pedagogy and Community

The emphasis on self and subjectivity in the critical pedagogy does not mean the individuation or creating islands of isolated individuals. The idea of self-actualization at the top most rung of the taxonomy of educational goals never refers to an all independent single individual. The notion of community, against the separation between the private and the public, is central to the programme of the engaged pedagogy. In her critique of conservative education, hooks linked the ability to love to the community. Communion manifested as the ability to love is ever present in the engaged pedagogy. The inner well-being of individuals is possible only through breaking the compartmentalization in various forms imposed on the pretext of solving social problems on individual level. The idea of revolutionary transgression is required for breaking the divisive specializations. As in the cultural studies, a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach is endorsed for building a community of learners and teachers.

            Subjectivity, a singular entity, cannot exist without developing itself into inter-subjective multiple entities. Similarly, identity cannot sustain apart from the ever evolving self and its indeterminate future. The role of community as a niche of care and commitment is vital in this regard. The engaged pedagogy, as conceived by hooks takes up building and maintaining community, sees community as inevitable because of these inevitable handicaps of the individual self.

Engaged Pedagogy and Sexuality

Engaged pedagogy never shies away from the natural growth and development of sex in the educational circumstances. Providing adequate space for the all-round development of each student is the avowed goal of most of the idealistic schools of educational thought, for instance the Gandhian one. Yet almost all of the real life classrooms fail miserably in achieving this goal with regard to sex and sex education, or there is no sign of any real success in this direction. And many of the idealistic schools of educational thought harmed the students by compulsory celibacy; Gandhi’s case is the often cited example in India. Of course, the experiments of Bertrand Russel and some of the fringe elements of Neo-Marxism, Georg Lukacs, and the controversial and short lived attempt of Wilhem Reich are there in history, but not to remain in the present. The problem of erasing sex from curriculum is problematized by hooks in her engaged pedagogy. Need for love and belongingness is the strongest need and most difficult to achieve in the present day world of competition and unlimited consumer impulses. Realising this, hooks suggests a fresh approach to sex in the classroom.

            One of the most notable theories of emancipatory tradition is caring, that involves touch as a semiotic process of love and affinity. Filiations and affiliations embodied in the act of touch may receive unpredictable sexual connotations in a classroom environment. Eros, eroticism and the pedagogical practice converge to formulate a lifelong bondage between learning and real life in the engaged pedagogy envisaged by hooks. She locates the taboo over sex with regard to the unnatural split between mind and body in the Western metaphysical tradition and taking supportive points from the Buddhist notion of mind-body-spirit unity, endorses engaging sex in the academic environment. She elaborates the point by explaining the special instance of romancing in the classroom atmosphere by recalling her own experience of erotically attracted to a student. When the school therapist talked to her after many students of the class stated that she ill-treated a particular boy, she was unable to identify the student to whom she was “unusually gruff, rude and downright”. But, later she realized the student and recognised her own passionate love that was suppressed by the conditioned response of her own unconscious: “And my naïve way of coping with feelings in the classroom that I had been taught never to have was to deflect (hence my harsh treatment of him), repress and deny. Overly conscious then about ways such repression and denial could lead to the ‘wounding’ of students, I was determined to face whatever passions were aroused in the classroom setting and deal with them”(192-193).

            A classroom that seems neutral hides the male dominated sexual territorialisation in it. The apathy toward sex and outrage against sex education in conservative countries like India- a safe haven of the abject practice of child marriage indicates the hidden motive of sustaining patriarchy without any injury. Engaged pedagogy is passionate in its materialization of gender equality.  Quoting Jane Gallop, hooks points out the male dominant idea of a disembodied and universal man as the basis of gender oppression and demands we enter the classroom whole. Feminist education for critical consciousness must uphold the inevitable presence of body and its potential as a force of Eros to move forward.  Hygeology (health and well-being) is the immediate result of this holistic approach. The movie The Dead Poets Society presented a highly liberal teacher who could accommodate the passion of his students in the classes but the institutions barely allow such a thing (198).

Engaged Buddhism and the Idea of Ecstasy

The Buddha taught the world the great message of the enlightenment through the process of self-awareness via various routes including meditation. By denying the religious monopoly in spirituality he paved the way for a liberation theology that negated the existence of god finally. The teachings of Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh attracted bell hooks in her way to engaged pedagogy because of this great tradition of the Buddha that centred self-actualization rather than rituals and invisible gods. As the monk suggests the separation of body, mind and spirit will result in a dangerous imbalance in knowing the world and knowing oneself.  Goals set by the world often create conflicts in mind and disengage the learners in the classroom. The goals of mind hardly ever get recognition or fulfilment in the capitalistic world order that relies on a vulgarly materialistic worldview of relentless consumerism (Barnhill 56).

The differentiation between pleasure and happiness in Buddhism is central to the understanding of life in the context of the estrangement of individual and self in the everyday (Ambedkar 35). Thich Tri Quang, Thich Nhat Hanh and others realized that happiness is inextricably connected to society and the immediate as well as distant surroundings of humans. Like Ambedkar the reconstitution of spiritual Buddhism as an inner force to change the social order has been taken up by the followers of engaged Buddhism, that the socio-political becomes as important as salvation of soul. Thich Nhat Hanh’s ideas on spirituality and society combined Zen and Mahayana philosophical traditions with insights from western psychology, and that made a great impact upon hooks’ mind. She associates the idea of ecstasy or the mindfulness of joy to the pedagogic activity for attaining a classroom of social justice.

The view of Buddhism held by many Westerners is one-sided, but not

totally without foundation. From its very beginning some 2,500 years

ago, there has been within Buddhism a tension between the this-world

ly and the other-worldly. This tension was at the heart of many early

doctrinal controversies about such matters as the nature of Nirvana, the

purpose of monastic life, and the character of the relationship between

monks and the laity. Its origins go back to the life of the founder, Sidd-

hartha Gautama, known as the Buddha, or the Enlightened One (Swearer 82).

  The critical and dialectical approach of hooks could locate this worldliness of Buddhism and adopt that into the framework of engaged pedagogy. It is not the way of an otherworldly philosophy but the way of the real world and real people. Ambedkar’s reconstruction of Buddhism as a socio-political emancipatory project of Navyana is similar to this attempt.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor. “Education after Auschwitz”.  osswinn.org/wp-content. Web.

Ambedkar, B.R. The Buddha and his Dhamma. New Delhi: Oxford. 2011.Print.

During, Simon.ed.  The Cultural Studies Reader. London: Routledge. 2005. Print.

Barnhill, David Landiss. “Good Work: An Engaged Buddhist Response to the Dilemmas of           Consumerism”. Buddhist-Christian Studies 24.1 (2004)         55-63.web.

Fletcher,Scott..Education as Emancipation. New York: Teacher’s College.2010.Print.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Hope. Chennai: Continuum.2005.Print.

---. Education for Critical Consciousness . Chennai.2005. Print.

Giroux, Henry. Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education.NewYork:                                                                                                        Routledge. 2005. Print.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom .New York:                                                                                                                 Routledge.1994.Print.

Kumar, Krishna. “Freire’s Legacy”. Economic and Political Weekly..November 14, 1998.                                                                                                                         pp-2912-2915.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary Imagination. London:                                                                                                          Vinatage.1993.Print.

Swearer, K Donald. “The Worldliness of Buddhism” The Wilson Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 2            (Spring, 1997), pp.81-93.  jstor.org accessed: 15-10-2015.

Wardekker, Willem L.  and Siebren Miedema. “Critical Pedagogy: An Evaluation and a    Direction for Reformulation”. Curriculum Inquiry, Vol.     27, No. 1 (Spring,1997), pp. 45-61.    http://www.jstor.org Accessed: 05-10-2015.

The Bodily Encounter with the Mother—Lucy Irigaray

Lucy Irigaray, the famous Student of Jacques Lacan, is the prominent figure in the contemporary French Feminism. The interdisciplinary thinker whose plethora expands through philosophy, psychoanalysis and linguistics, provides a comprehensive study and account of the elimination of women form the history of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and structural linguistics. Irigaray argues that women are traditionally associates with matter and nature. The subjectivity of women is always in question unless women associates themselves with the subjectivity of men. While there is an independent subject position is present for men, the subject positon of women is absent. Irigaray questions this object-position of women and tries to unveil this absence of “female subject position, the relegation of all things feminine to nature/matter, and, ultimately, the absenceof true sexual difference in Western culture” (Donovan).

According to Irigaray, since the ancient times women are associated as mothers. Even though they are not mothers their identity is moulded on the very concept of motherhood. They are often identified with nature and unthinkable matter. In contrast to this, men are always associated with culture and subjectivity and women who are precluded from subjectivity are positioned to provide unacknowledged support. That means, even though women are not privileged with a subjectivity, their role is essential in the well-functioning of society. According to Irigaray, the Western culture itself is founded upon a primary sacrifice of the mother, and all women through it. In her famous essay, “This sex which is not one,” she observes, “female sexuality has always been theorized within masculine parameters” (Irigaray, “This Sex Which is not One” 384).

Irigaray argues that sexual difference does not exist. Because, in true sexual difference both men and women could reach subjectivity. But in reality, while men enjoys the elevated power of subjectivity, women are “the other” or this subjects. For Irigaray only one form of subjectivity exists in Western culture and it is male.

There are two main discourses that played important role in the formation of critic in Irigaray; the psychoanalysis and philosophy. Lacanian view of sexual difference as a difference that is assigned in language is acceptable for Irigaray. She is influenced by Lacanian interpretation of Freud’s theory of subject formation. But she is not uncritical about Lacan.

According to Irigaray, in Western culture, the imaginary body which dominates on a cultural level is a male body. Irigaray thus argues that Western privileges identity, unity, and sight-all of which she believes are associated with male anatomy. She believes that fields such as philosophy, psychoanalysis, science and medicine are controlled by this imaginary. (Donovan)

Like Freud, Irigaray argues, Lacan also failed diagnose the error of his predecessor and understood the world and language in one-sex model of sexuality and subjectivity. Even science, according to her, is biased to the category of masculine.

Scientific discourses and serious scientific practices are still the privilege of men, as is the management of the political in general and of the most private aspects of our lives as women. Their discourses, their values, their dreams and their desires have the force of law, everywhere and in all things. Everywhere and in all things, they define women’s function and social role, and the sexual identity they are, or are not, to have. They know, they have access to the truth; we do not. Often, we scarcely have access to fiction. (Irigaray, “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” 533)

 Western culture has yet not grown to accept the alternative paradigms of subjectivity and sexuality. She disagrees with Lacan in two key manners. Firstly, Lacan’s depiction of Symbolic order as ahistorical and unchanging is unacceptable for Irigaray. And secondly, Irigaray is unconvinced of Lacan’s claims that the Phallus is an ahistorical master signifier of the Symbolic order that has no connection to male anatomy.

In the philosophical side, her books, Speculum of the Other Woman and An Ethics of Sexual Difference is apt examples of her grasp in the discourse. She questions the traditional thinkers like Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel and their elision of all things that are feminine.

The mother/daughter relationship is a constant theme in Irigaray’s work. She believes that women’s social and political situation must be understood in a global level. She adheres that changes must begin from the individual relationship between women. She also insists they to assert the subjectivity of women, men also reposition their subjectivity to inculcate women’s subjective role.

In her essay, “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” all these motifs can be observed. She argues that, “relationship with the mother is a mad desire, because it is the ‘dark continent’ par excellence. It remains the shadows of our culture” (The Bodily Encounter with the Mother 533). The maternal feminine power is always underpinned. It is always used for the satisfying of individual and collective needs and her desire, desire for her, is forbidden by the law of the father figure. The patriarchal power always censor, repress, the desire of the feminine or mother. Women’s sexual identity is relational to men’s sexuality. Her own subjectivity and sexuality is at stake.

Irigaray point out, in the primary level, our culture and society functions on the basis of matricide. Irigaray points out that while Freud in his Totem and Taboo explains the murder of the father as founding the primal horde, he forgets amore archaic murder, that of the mother. She uses the mythological background of Clytemnestra in the Oresteia to explain the point. Clystmnestra, who slays her husband, is killed by Orestes, her son. Because the rule of the father requires it. Irigaray points out that even in the contemporary society, the women in struggle are kept under the rule of the father, the patriarchy. They are placed at the sanctuary of home, within the orders.

Irigaray argues that through the rules of the father, the patriarchal power, the feminine self, the motherhood is ousted from the cultural and social space. The umbilical cord, which connects the child and mother, nourishes the body of the child is replaced by the phallus.

The phallus erected where once there was the umbilical cord? It becomes the organized of the world of and through the man—father, in the place where the umbilical cord, the first bond with the mother, gave birth to the body of both man and woman. That took place in a primal womb, our first nourishing earth, first waters, first envelopes, where the child was whole, the mother whole through the mediation of her blood. They were bound together, albeit in an asymmetrical relationship, before any cutting, any cutting up of their bodies into fragments. (“The Bodily Encounter with the Mother” 536).

Irigaray argues, when a child is given a proper name, it replaces the most irreducible mark of birth, th enavel. It eraces the very identit of the child and a new coating is given to the child, a “coating” based on the rules of the father. The mother is kept forbidden and excluded from the child.

The possibility for the going back to the primal womb, seeking refuge in open body is prevented by the threats of the contagion, contamination, illness and madness and death. Thus, the opennes of the mother and the opening ot the mother is prevented. “The mother has become a devouring monster as an inverted effect of the blind assumption of mother” (537).

In the desire to take the role of the sole creator and denying the role of mother, the father creates his own universe of language and symbols which is totally fatal to the mother. The female sex and subjectivity are alien to this universe of language and symbols. In Irigaray own words, it makes “hole in the bellies of women and in the site of their identity” (537). As a result, the female womb, the very sacred place where bodies are formed is imagines as a “devouring mouth, a cloaca or anal and urethral outfall, a phallic threat” (537). Since there is not any valid representations of female sexuality, the imaginary womb merges with the women’s se as a whole.

Irigaray adheres for a change, a creation of new dimension in the relationship with the women, in the creation of a new language, which represents the female subjectivity and identity. Women not only mother they are also the creators of love, desire, language, art, the social, the political, the religious etc. But they are forbidden from them for centuries. Women must also appropriate this maternal dimension. Irigaray points out that women have to aware about “our sexual identity, the singularity of our desire, of our autoerotism, of our narcissism, of our heterosexuality and of our homosexuality” (539).

The importance of the formation of a female genealogy is very important for the assertion of female identity:

It is also necessary, if we are to be accomplices in the murder of the mother, for us to assert that there is a genealogy of women. There is a genealogy of women within our family: on our mother’s side we have mothers, grandmothers and great-grand mothers, and daughters. Given our exile in the family of the father-husband, we tend to forget this genealogy of women, and we are often persuaded to deny it. Let us try to situate ourselves within this female genealogy so as to conquer and keep our identity. (539)

Irigaray concluded with the necessity of forming a female subjectivity and asserting female sexuality. Instead of the singular subjective position, singular sexuality, the women also could identify her own subjectivity and sexuality. The father-husband rules that cemented in the cultural and social space must be rearticulated to place the distinct and multidimensional female sexuality and identity.

Bibliography

Donovan, Sarah K. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. n.d. Web. 22 November 2015.

Irigaray, Lucy. “The Bodily Encounter with the Mother.” Lodge, David and Nigel Wood. Modern Criticism and Theory. Harlow: Pearson, 1998. 531-540. Print.

Irigaray, Lucy. “This sex which is not one.” R., McCann Carole and Seung-kyung Kim. Feminist Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2010. 384-389. Print.

Arundhati Roy’s Gandhi and Ambedkar: Issues of Mediation

Arundhati Roy’s Gandhi and Ambedkar: Issues of Mediation

Arundhati Roy’s longer than text introduction to B.R Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste has become an instant success in the book market and soon invited both biting criticism and venerating praises. Roy’s critique of Gandhi has been interpreted as untimely because a small section of Indian people has started glorifying Godse, the assassin of Gandhi and the fascists of the country are about to seize power and sabotage the constitution. Roy juxtaposed Ambedkar against Gandhi and missed the real rival of Gandhi that was Godse and the ideology of Hindutva. Gandhi’s patronising approach to the Dalits and his stance against Communal Award along with his untoward remarks about the black in South Africa are serious mistakes committed by the mahathma. There is no scope for contention regarding Gandhi’s anti-modernity that deprived women of individuality, vilified industry, infringed personal freedom in matters like drinking alcohol, and foregrounded sanatana dharma in Indian politics. Ambedkar’s own fierce critique of Gandhi that produced texts like Beware of Gandhi and What Gandhi and the Congress did to the Untouchables, Mr. Gandhi and the emancipation of the Untouchables, not to mention scores of speeches and press statements, exposed the ideological follies of Gandhi.

The spine of Roy’s critique of Gandhi is that, Gandhi was a moderate and Ambedkar repudiated the very idea of a moderate Hindu on the ground that a Hindu is essentially fanatic. She argues that Ambedkar’s project was to destabilize the moderates, but he never targeted the extremists. This distorted interpretation reaches the point of surreptitiously legitimizing Godse by saying that the assassin and the assassinated upheld the same text Gita. In this logic, Trotsky’s murder can be justified on the ground that Das Capital inspired both the murdered and the murdered.

Her own autobiographical statement “My father was a Hindu, a Brahmo…I grew up with my mother in a Syrian Christian family in Ayemenem, a small village in communist-ruled Kerala” (12) is both a domineering statement about her lineage, and the remarks about Kerala, with a hidden sarcasm against the communists (that she started in her novel and took a short-cut at the cost of valorising the extreme left to decentre the left) torpedoes her credentials as an anti-Brahminical intellectual.

The dalit intellectuals of Kerala, especially K.K Baburaj, O.K Santhosh and many youngsters questioned Roy’s right to introduce Ambedkar because many Dalit intellectuals proved their scholarship in the field of Ambedkar studies. M.S.S. Pandian, one of the most remarkable intellectuals in the field of cultural studies, an intellectual belonging to dalit community raised doubts about the credentials of S. Anand, the publisher who once supported the anti-reservation agitation in his student days. The focal point of this kind of criticism is the issue of mediation. Dalits in India no longer needs mediators, or adopted children because they have created their own subjectivity, agency and given birth to plenty of children to speak for themselves. Should we see this introduction as a lesson in book marketing is the remaining question?

Reference

Ambedkar-Annihilation of Caste, Mr.Gandhi and the Emanciaption of the Untouchables.

Arundhati Roy-Doctor and the Saint

Raj Mohan Gandhi-(“Independence and Social Justice: TheAmbedkar–Gandhi Debate,” EPW, 11                                                                                                                                                              April,2015.

Response: Gender Trouble

Judith Butler

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) was an iconoclastic distillation of feminist theory that questions the very notions of natural gendered behaviors. Butler laid the foundation for the queer studies and broadened the concept of feminism. The theoretical formulations of Butler has influenced political philosophy, ethics and literary theory.

Gender Trouble was first published in 1990. The book critically scrutinized and criticized the preceding feminist critics like Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig, and famous post poststructuralist critics Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, and finally Micheal Foucault. In Gender Trouble, Butler questions the naturality of the male/female binariness stating the cultural construction of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality. “Butler argues that even anatomical differences can be experienced only through the categories and expectations set out by the culture’s signifying order. Moreover, anatomical differences are mapped to expectations about sexual desire, specifically to society’s ‘compulsory heterosexuality’” (Judith Butler 2485). Butler is against the ill-equipped binary division between male and female, “or desires that cross, combine, or otherwise fail to conform to a fairly narrow understanding of sex as genital intercourse between two people, one ‘naturally’ female, the other ‘naturally’ male” (2485).

Judith Butler’s initial argument is that a language that is fully developed to foster the political visibility of women is necessary for the development of feminist theory. Butler reminds the cultural condition, where women are always misrepresented or not represented at all.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Oxon: Routledge, 2008. Print.

“Judith Butler.” Norton Anthology of Theroy and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B Leith. New York: Norton & Company, 2001. 2485-2501. Print.

Response - Judith Butler (LCL071510)

            Judith Butler’s groundbreaking Gender Trouble: Femiuism atld the Subversion of Identity (1990) was a powerful critique of heterosexual assumptions in feminist theory, of the dualism of masculinity and femininity, in the contexts of Western metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and power structures. It is a founding document of queer theory and a key statement of "performative" accounts of cultural meaning. Her goal is to uncover the assumptions that "restrict the meaning of gender to received notions of masculinity and femininity.      The feminist theory has been formulated as per an assumption that there is some existing identity as ‘women’ for whom a need of political representation was raised. The feminist theory found it necessary to develop a language which would be able to foster political visibility of women. The demand is viewed as somewhat essential but she problematizes the very category of ‘women’ as subjects. She describes the changes in perception of women as a category who no longer understood in stable or abiding terms and of what they are constituted of. There is a question of who is she to be politically represented and representation is needed only to what can be acknowledged as subject.

            She insisted that nothing is natural, not even sexual identity. Feminists have sometimes distinguished between "sex" as the anatomical difference between male and female bodies and "gender" as the meanings attached to those bodily differences in various cultures. Butler argues that even anatomical differences can be experienced only through the categories and expectations set out by the cullure's signifying order. Moreover anatomical differences are mapped to expectations about sexual desire, specifically to society's "compulsory heterosexuality" (a term Butler borrows from Adrienne Rich), which posits that there are two sexes and that desire runs from one sex to the other. Our culture's understanding of sexuality is ill-equipped, therefore to recognize bodies that confound the strict binary division between male and female, or desires that cross, combine, or otherwise fail to conform to a fairly narrow understanding of sex as genital intercourse between two people, one ;'naturally" female, the other "naturally" male.

           

            She stresses that modern culture sees sexuality as a fundamental constituent of identity. Our sex and our sexual desires and activities are profound indices of who we are. Butler hopes like many contemporary critical theorists-to reveal that the seemingly "natural" is actually socially constructed and, thus contingent. The established and conventional connections between anatomy and desire, and between sexual activities and ascriptions of identity, are not inevitable; they have been different in other cultures and in other historical eras, and they are open to revision or "resignification."

            Butler follows the accounts of subject formation found in Foucault and Lacan.  By drawing from Foucault’s ideas on subject as the products of juridical systems of power Butler opines that the subjects are the creation of power structures who are created in accordance with the power structures who are created in accordance with the power structures by means of limitation, prohibition, regulation, control or ‘protection’ of individuals as per its own requirements.  For Foucault discourse (the articulated categories of thought) orders knowledge along lines that produce subjects open to power's control. Such power, he stresses, works at the level of daily routine. For Lacan, individuals achieve an identity a recognized place in the social order by passing into the Law (the culture's signifying order')-at the cost of creating the unconscious and establishing a permanent split, an alienation of self from desire within the subject. Butler observes that women as the subject of feminism is itself a discursive formation and effect of a given version of representational politics. But the system produces gendered subjects along a differential axis of domination and also those who are presumed to be masculine.

            Butler finds that ‘the subjects’ are invariously produced through certain exclusionary practices by the juridical system of power. She highlights the need to inquire into how women might become more fully represented in language and politics but also to understand how the category of women the subject of feminism is produced and restrained by the very structure of power through which emancipation is sought. The term ‘woman’/ ‘women’ tend to transcend specific paraphernalia of its gender since it intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual and regional modalities. She finds that the categorization is not exhaustive. There was an attempt to colonize and appropriate non-Western cultures to support highly western notions of oppression. There is question against the specificity of gender and thus the singular notion of identity becomes misfit. Butler says that a stable notion of gender no longer proves to be the foundational premise of feminist politics and hence a new sort of feminist politics is now desirable. According to her, this will contest the very reification of gender and identity. The text made her something between a celebrity and a cult figure, especially in gay and lesbian subcultures, and she has responded by jealously guarding her personal life from public scrutiny.

            

Response to Fanon's "Concerning Violence" - LCL071510

            Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), is a leading theorist and activist of third world struggle against colonial oppression. He is one of the most powerful voices of revolutionary thought in the twentieth century. He fought against Nazism in France and there he got trained as a psychiatrist. He experienced both racism and colonialism. Aime Cesaire, a leader of the negritude movement, had a great influence on him. Black Skin, White Masks (1967). He supported the Algerians in their fight against French rule. He produced a number of writings connected with Algerian and African revolution. The Wretched of the Earth is his most comprehensive and influential work. It analyses the conditions and requirements for effective anti-colonial revolution from a Marxist perspective. It also articulates the connections between class and race. Fanon points out the utter difference in  historical situation between the European bourgeois class which once overturned feudalism and the African bourgeois emerging as successor to colonial rule.

            In the particular essay “Concerning Violence” Fanon observes that the decolonization process, which is usually hailed as liberation, renaissance of a nation etc. is often associated with violence. Decolonization is a phenomenon which results in the substitution of one species by another. The colonizer will always have certain demands and will target the whole social setup to change from the bottom up. This suggests that the consciousness of the native is not a tabula-rasa. Later, this would come out wearing the mask of liberation and decolonization offering the colonists nothing but a terrifying future. That is, the change in social structure is often associated with violence of one species over the other. The process involves practicing the idea in the statement “the last shall be the first and the first last” and creates a sense that the process of decolonization is a successful one.

             Fanon detaches himself from the prejudice of a colonized and the colonists and views them as two protagonists who shed blood for achieving the status of last to the first and first to the last. In his examination the colonized will find it suitable to use the means of violence to turn up this order. Fanon suggests a compartmentalized world; a world cut into two as settlers and natives where the frontiers are the policemen who act like spokesperson between the two. These intermediaries use the language of pure force but they neither lighten the oppression nor seek to hide the domination. In Fanon’s perspective, in the colonized state the government and the natives communicate and sustain the relationship involving oppression and domination through the spokesperson who are the policemen. They bring violence into the home and into the mind of the native.

            Then Fanon moves on to describe the structure of the colonial world where the two segments do not work for a higher unity but settlers always stay immersed in the fear of being displaced from a comfort zone sustained in their town. The native is envious about the settler’s place. The Marxist analysis on colonial imperialism has much more to incorporate to interpret colonial phenomenon. The economic reality, inequality and the difference of ways of life has to do with certain human realities such as belongingness and not belongingness to a particular race. Colonialism has brought forth certain human realities related to their sense of belongingness to a particular race and this demands Marxist analysis to extend itself while dealing with colonial problem. In colonial states foreigner despite of his acts of economic wielding remains a foreigner as ‘the other’. The conflict never exists only among the rich and poor.

            The colonial world tries constantly to bring ‘order’ which is done usually by breaking the native social forms, customs of dress, external life. But anyhow this causes the emergence of a mental picture in the native to wreck this colonial world from its root.

            Fanon talks about how the colonial world apart from physical delimitation establishes the prejudices and ideas against the natives as ‘quintessence of evil’. The natives get declared as incapable of knowing and distancing values as well as destroying ‘beauty’ and ‘morality’ by the settlers. How the natives are ideologically established as inferior through the production and propagation of new ‘knowledge’ can be observed here. It is said that the natives are often pictured in terms of zoological terms. In India the propagation of prejudices in relation to lower caste people as having no intellect to discern does remind the same attitude towards the marginal sections. "Would you teach the Gospel to a cow?" he told a Christian missionary in 1936. "Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in their understanding" (Roy 245) are the statements which seem analogous with the views of settlers.. Christian church, missionaries play a major role in promoting acts of separation of ‘bad’ from the ‘evil’ and they, however, did not call the natives to God’s way but to the white man’s the oppressor’s way.

            How the language gets constituted of colonial vocabulary and how it is used to describe and also to advocate Manichean ideals is shown by Fanon. But on the contrary the native, however, knows his ‘bestial’ nature and laughs at settler’s words and always remains ready  to counterattack and mock at the Whiteman’s values. The intermediary on the other hand can never expect a co-existing of two parts. It tries to establish in the new world after the decolonization process by making the settler take a very concrete jump into the unknown. In other words, the native finds the settler similar in several aspects and attains a status of mind which would but focus on the settler’s flight. Thus, this consequently leads to a unification of natives in a national level disregarding their heterogeneity in terms of race, and other forms of divisions.

            In India Gandhi took similar ground while dealing with caste practice which led him to treat it as an internal matter that should be dealt once freedom is achieved. The colonialist bourgeoisie will continuously be hammering ideas in the minds of natives of the importance of individual thought but as soon as the native come in contact with his people during the struggle for freedom, forgets the importance of individualism. He comes across a different vocabulary consisting terms such as brother, sister, friend that will change the attitude of the native and the interest of one native will be discovered by the troops as everyone; either as everyone saved or everyone massacred.

            The text attempts to highlight the hypocrisy of proponents of decolonization which wears the mask of liberation or renaissance and at the end of which instigate violence to the individual; who are the species cut among the two worlds as natives and settlers. The text sheds light upon the psychological aspect of individuals involving in the process of decolonization. The Marxian perspective must extend itself so that it can explain social phenomena involving aspects that cannot be dealt under mere economic terminologies.

References:

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press,                             1964. Print.

Roy, Arundhati. "The Doctor and the Saint." R., Ambedkar B. Annihilation of Caste. New Delhi:                    Navayana, 2014. 245.