“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, March 31, 2015

OOO and Postcolonial Theory

“They talk to me about civilization, I talk about proletarianization and mystification.” --Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (in Postcolonial Criticism, ed. Gilbert, Stanton and Maley, Routledge, 1997, page 82)
By mystification Césaire means something good on his terms, the discovery of ontological depth below the “thingification” of the colonized person.
People who pit postcolonial theory against OOO had better take note of this.
Discuss.

PS: two of my awesome Ph.D. students, Diana Leong and Nikki Moore, are working on this.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Pramod K. Nayar's chapter "The Imperial Sublime, 1750-1820,” from his book English Writing and India, 1600-1920, inadvertently does some OOO too, though in the guise of some basic deconstructive maneuvers. A big part of my Master's thesis culminated in a rereading of Nayar through OOO.

Anonymous said...

It's interesting too how we can think about postcolonial theory's link to psychoanalysis--& the subject/ object dualism it explores. The object can be cast through OOO in such fascinating ways.

Unknown said...

Also Fred Moten. Just read "Preface for a Solo by Miles Davis" for a class here. All about how the "objectified" object sounds and moves, and thus rebels. So glorious.