Session 12

While reading Aijaz Ahmad and Arif Dilrik I understand how they claim the discourse should be framed and how it is already framed. It seems to me that Dilrik does a great job of redefining the term the post colonial in a broader fashion than simply what is considered to be 'not Eurocentric'. Aijaz Ahmed seems to understand the positionality of Edward Said as a Palestinian man who is trying to own his identity in a credible fashion and writing what he would consider an opposition to the literature produced by the Occident and alaso autonomous from it. However, Dilrik place sthe location of Eurocentricism not just at the center of Europe as he says,

"Eurocentrism is crucial to understanding the spatialities and temporalities of modernity, not just in EuroAmerica but globally, from at least the late nineteenth century." 

My question while reading Dilrik’s description of the abovementioned was how it applies to the context of the subaltern. He does claim in his article “Post Colonialism Aura” that the Subaltern school informs the major themes in Postcolonial discourse but it does not exhaust them. He does so while mentioning a question that Gyan Prakash frames “How does the Third World write "its own history?" which to his mind is the point of departure for Postcolonial discourse.

This is very interesting considering it raises further questions of where we locate the Subaltern in a world where globalism and Post-colonialism are busy fighting a war of their own. Is the subaltern a completely postcolonial phenomenon? Does it stand to oppose the Eurocentric histories written so far? The latter is debatable according to Dilrik because his claim goes so far that the break between Europe and the rest of the world has not completely blurred the identities in the non-European context and the fact that the divide is not that powerful.

I think the main idea is to try to understand what we plan to achieve from the dialectic in history whether it is between the Orient and the Ooccident, Europe and the rest of the world or West and East, globalism and postcolonialism because to my mind, once we understand the purpose of the historical process we can use it to inform our efforts to uncover identities that may be lost or stories that haven’t been heard.