I am not sure how easy it will be to get another copy of T’s important article on Spivak but I am recycling it because I simply must get a clearer desk, and clearer shelves.
She says that it is not so much that Spivak puts French feminism in an international frame but that she finds an international frame for French feminism. Spivak’s article is to read in France among the French but does not really speak to an international audience.
Said spoke of a conspiracy of theory, theorists all affirm each other and come up with a kind of orthodoxy. Is it ever possible to ensure the nonimperialist use and application of seemingly “politically correct” theoretical frameworks?
The Said article is in Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic. Said, in almost his exact words: In systems evidence gets homogenized very easily. Criticism as such is crowded out and disallowed from the start; hence, it is impossible. In the end one learns to manipulate bits of the system like so many parts of a machine. The universal system does not in fact take in a great deal: it screens out what it cannot directly absorb and repetitively churns out the same answers.
I think this is what happens to Anzaldúa and work on her. She says she is radical and of color and a fluctuating subject and then everyone else says so are they, and so are their objects of study, and a certain theoretical model of the subject is affirmed. It seems not to matter that the way she formulates this is by the same strategies elite Latin American subjects form themselves as allegedly oppositional to Europe–appropriating certain indigenous cultural material to do so.
coldhearted scientist وداد 