File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1998/postcolonial.9804, message 37


Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 13:04:08 -0500
From: Keith Alan Sprouse <kas3f-AT-virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: the enemy and they is us


At 08:11 PM 4/3/98 +1200, liz deloughrey wrote:
[snip . . . snip]
>I think the converse danger of teaching poco without attention to north
>america is that (as the recent job listings which concentrate on the
>caribbean or africa only, for instance) . . . 

I think there is a misuderstanding here: those who do poco in the Caribbean
and Latin America are, in fact, quite aware of North American imperialism.
One simply cannot study Puerto Rico, to give an easy example, without
dealing with US imperialism and I think that you'd be hard put to find
writers dealing with Puerto Rican culture that ignore this. 

>it detracts attention from current neoimperialist policies, particularly of
the US. >ie, it's more palatable for many departments to teach 19th/early
20th british
>imperialism in the Caribbean than Reagan and Clinton's policies towards
>Haitian refugees in the 1980's and 90's. 

Once again I would question your understanding of what "poco" (or
poco-inspired) Caribbeanist do -- certainly there exists a ton of work
written in Spanish that is exactly devoted to examining US imperialism in
the Caribbean, looking at both Caribbean critiques (work from Jose Marti to
Roberto Scwarz would be good examples here) to US acadmics writing on the US
in the Caribbean (Neil Larsen's _Reading North by South_  is a good example
of this stuff). 

The fact that a postcolonialist could be so unaware of this large body of
work is exactly the thing that I've been talking about. This isn't meant as
an attack on those who don't know about the Caribbean or Latin America, but
it is meant to point to the fact that one can be a well-trained
postcolonialist and be completely ignorant of huge parts of the postcolonial
world. And I think this is a problem. I sincerely doubt that it's possible
for one to achieve any sense of competence in a discipline that claims such
huge parts of the world as its subject. It's taken me a lot of work to be
competent as a multidisciplinary Caribbeanist and somewhat competent as a
Latin Americanist (with some reservations) and I'm not a bad student. I
can't imagine how long it would take to achieve a similar (read responsible)
degree of competence in Caribbean, Latin American, African, Indian,
Australian, Canadian . . . (I could just keep listing them, but you probably
get the point). What this suggest is that either people are willing to teach
poco without being particularly competent, or they do in fact limit
themselves to area studies, in which poco stops being the meaningful term. I
hope, for our students' sake, that it's the second option. 

>Finally, what Chris Connery's work has pointed out is that regional
>studies emerged in the 70's in the US due more to global capitalism (ie
>a sudden concern with Asian countries at moment of their heightened
>capitalism, which continues the US 'manifest destiny' to  incorporate
>Japan and Korean markets) than that discipline's concern with
>'subaltern' studies. This is a worthwhile argument which hasnt, as far
>as i know, been applied to poco studies but surely has some resonance.

The relationship between the global capitalism and poco has been examined by
Dirlik, for one, in his book _The Postcolonial Aura_ (although you mentioned
before that you had no love of his work, so you might have read it already).
Others have looked at this too, of course.

Keith

____________________________________________________

Keith Alan Sprouse		e-mail:  kas3f-AT-virginia.edu
New World Studies		office: 804.924.4626 
Department of French	fax:  804.924.7157
University of Virginia		home:  804.243.4306
Charlottesville, VA 22903	http://www.people.virginia.edu/~kas3f



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