From: Zona Sur <ZonaSur-AT-aol.com> Date: Mon, 6 Apr 1998 09:56:19 EDT Subject: Is US poco? Lisa-- thanks for the cautious words. Though I take it personally as well as 'publically', for lack of a more graceful way of stating it, I think the freeforall debate can prove interesting and give a bit more gravity to our sometimes arid scholasticism (or at least, that's what, somewhat rightly, scholars have been accused of being.) In the era of a global economy--domination of the many by the few--it seems to me that it serves us well to know WHO these few are and where they came from, even HOW they got here. La historia oficial does not tell us that, so that leaves literature, orature, many arts--all the things deemed useless by the globally hungry. (I believe it also includes scholars--I know of at least one country where the sleek, psuedo hipsters of globalization and privatization have demanded that an entire country change its educational system to 'fit' the outsiders assessment of what is relenvant to them economically. That includes getting rid of humanities courses wholesale and teaching things like how to be a tour guide...) Way back in the dark ages of femininism, I seem to remember the slogan, 'the personal is political'--of course, it got very distorted and became an instrument of enforcing some political correctness in the lefty sense of the word, but it also pointed out the very real dilemma in espousing beautiful theories but practicing that same old BS. Seems to me we must muddle on, and not crucify each other even in our spats, but try to figure this out. There is--old-fashioned word again--a paradigm in all this, I'm sure. Or at least a conference. Best, B. Mills --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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