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 --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005