Date: Sat, 19 Aug 1995 16:41:24 -0400 (EDT)
From: Radhika Gajjala <rxgst6+-AT-pitt.edu>
Subject: Re: your mail


Peter,
You have given me some more to chew on... I will try and get back to you soon
with references on "authenticity" - meanwhile i'm sure others will have 
suggestions too. 

I too am struggling with issues of "representation" in a slightly 
different context. Finding that, hard as I try not to "represent", what 
i say will be read as "representation" - and perhaps it is....
so what is an "authentic" representation - what *i* see? *My* story or 
"theirs"? How do i explain to my "subjects" some of whom are steeped in 
Enlightenment notions of the possibility "authentic and correct 
representation" (perhaps - again this 
is only my guess...) - that just because my "story" is partial, it is not 
at least partially true? I have been re-reading Clifford andMarcus "Writing 
Culture" and 
this time it begins to make sense to me a little more than the last time i
read parts of it - to present a quick instant opinion in some graduate 
seminar for participation points.

 > So when I read
> 
> Your quote:
>  "That moment when I saw myself reflected in the
> panopticon..." (Visweswaran) is a moment i very recently had:-)
> 
> leads me to consider how amongst the many discursive elements the intrusion
> of the pan otpicon is resurgent and  a highly aggressive dominant discourse
> being reasserted I suppose in response to resistance.  The theme of the
> colonial anglophile narrative being constructed or which would seem is in
> the process of  being constructed by the "Royal Commission", a narrative
> that asserts there is no culture (and producing the evidence of the
> effectiveness of the  violence against Aboriginal people as evidence of
> inauthentic voices.)
>  The narrative of the other is an indictment of colonial action but there
> is more.

I agree. There is definitely more - and that is why, although i recognise my 
own "angloclone" (Spivak's word, not mine) reflection in a panopticon which 
is still that of the colonial powers who supposedly left us years ago ...
i will not be silenced - nor should any researcher (white, black, 
brown, yellow or blue...) be. I think we need to 
find our own way through the maze and figure out what feels right to us
and how we can make the gaps and silences "speak" - to see and feel at 
the *affective* level and find a way to suggest that somethng that mere 
word s and available discourses cannot allow us to produce....

perhaps?

i don't know if i'm making sense:-)


> 
> Was it you or Wisweswaran that experienced such a moment? > > > > > ---

Maybe both - but maybe differently.

Radhika

p.s.
To the person who asked what a panopticon is - My "Foucault for Beginners"
by Lydia A.Fillingham (beats reading "primary" sources;-))
says

	"The innovations of disciplinary power are all brought together
in a single architectural innovation.
		THE PANOPTICON

........

The idea is that every person is isolated in a small room, where they all 
may be observed at all times by a single person in the center tower. The bldg
would be lit around the perimeter, so that each person could be clearly 
seen by the central observer , but each inmate would see neither the 
observer nor any other inmate.[Jeremy] Bentham envisioned the same basic 
concept for factories,schools, barracks, hospitals, madhouses,
	and especially prisons."




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