I think we all realise the futility of the discussion at hand. Are there any foundations? Are categories real? We can obviously never find any satisfactory answers to these questions because they are clearly not lines of historical enquiry. Instead, they are philosophical questions. So they have no straight answers and possibly no direct relevance to the study of history either.
That said, I am leaning heavily to O'Hanlon and Washbrook's side. They make some of the points we made in our last class. Any set of ideas -- even Gyan Prakash's -- is built on some foundations. These might not be the same foundations which prop up the hegemonic discourse but they are still a consistent and internally coherent amalgam of knowledge from which attacks on hegemony can be launched. As O'Hanlon and Washbrook implicitly point out, perhaps the best way out would be to acknowledge the contingent nature of our foundations, recognise their specificity in time and space, and then continue to use them regardless.
If we have time in class, could we go over how Foucault's ideas feed into Said (and therefore Prakash)? I didn't understand this fully.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.