From: SDAYAL-AT-bentley.edu
Date: Tue, 07 May 1996 09:09:47 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: "Post-Colonial"


Shauna:
Of course in a sense you're right, and lot's of people have made the argument,
>from Fanon through Nandy, and I agree wholly with them and have cited the 
argument in my own work. What I was trying to do is to situate for myself
anyway what goes by the name of archival research.  foucault notwithstanding,
I don't know if I want to dismiss even the most plodding kind of research
which tries to understand one damn thing after another in a "real" time and
space.  The most exemplary kind of contemporary scholarship which does not
take the line that decolonization if largely a psychological factum is the
Subaltern group, and I take that for myself as a caution.

I am now struggling with gandhian discourse for instance, and since I don't
have time or archival resources at hand, I am trying to justify for myself
a procedure that is not founded on traditional sifting through 90 vols of the
collected works of gandhi!

Do you see the stumbling block I am pointing to?  It's fairly easy to discount
it in the age of De Certeau, Foucault, Lefebvre et al, but I guess I feel 
some kind of trepidation that only the ignorant person can feel as he
psychologizes "history" away as construction, figment or whatever.  Of course
I am more comfortable regarding decolonization as PARTLY a matter of breaking
free of the psychical trauma of colonization, but I FEAR taking the easy road.

Better stop.
Samir


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