stock clearing

From last December (2010):


Since I have come back from Scotland I have been overwhelmed by an avalanche of new classes to teach and piles of untouched lonesome journal articles resting on desk and top of the bookshelves and awaiting me to read and extract after I returned.

It might not be exaggerated to say that with the help of my supportive colleagues and seniors I championed one and a half new courses. Journal articles printed before, some long before, I left are yet to be read. The first semester is coming to an end and boxes of students' paper have been cleaned (though another patch of examination papers are yet to come next week), it is high time to bring them back to life again, and vacant the desk and bookshelves for other latest works to come.

One of the journals that I browsed intensively was New Literary History, which I found very stimulating and illuminating. I skimmed some of them just today.

Sanjay Krishnan's "The place of India in Postcolonial Studies: Chatterjee, Chakrabarty, Spivak," New Literary History, Vol. 40, 2009, pp. 265-280. Partha Chatterjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. "Anticolonial though refers to forms of ideology critique that expose as false the colonizer's claim that colonial values are properly enlightened or universal. Postcolonial though is a reflection on the categories and reflexes through which anticolonial resistance takes place. Postcolonial thought asserts that anticolonial resistance tacitly reproduces the culture and values of imperialism." (p. 265) "anticolonial thought is the ideology critique of colonialism, whereas postcolonial thought signals a critique of the anticolonial conformism to the culture of imperialism. Postcolonial though therefore scrutinizes the dominant rules of representation set in motion by knowledge production in academia and beyond." (p. 266)

R. S. Khare's "Changing India-West Cultural Dialectics," New Literary History, Vol. 37, 2007, pp. 223-245. Louis Dumont, Wilhelm Halbfass, Octavio Paz, and Amartya Sen, whose The Argumentative Indian (London: Allen Lane, 2005) has been on my to-read list.