Nationalism and Otherness

This essay examines the motives and fallout, both overt and tactical, that surround the materiality of postcolonial novels and critical texts in specific institutional and pedagogical contexts. At stake is both the ontology and materiality of the other—more specifically their representation at the hands of a self as center of political power that legitimates its own systems of knowledge and meaning. The specific institutional context and point of departure is the recent revision of the postgraduate English syllabus at Guahati University in northeast India. The essay examines this academic exercise for a larger ideological meaning by drawing to a logical conclusion the assumption that a so-called muffassil (provincial) Indian university that is implicated in the life of the people of its region stands committed to the human resource development of that region. The institutional assumption is that the university’s students of English studies in the socioeconomically challenged state of Assam should be sensitized to the complex issues of the nation and its otherness; it is also assumed that they should be able to construct a politically engaged reading of such texts, one informed by the problems of discontent of being on the nation’s margins literally and metaphorically. The texts, however, instead tend to generate anxieties and discomfiture as Assamese students—already the nation’s other—encounter postcolonial celebrations of the borderless nation, dissemination, porous borders, liminality, etc., which fail to empathize with the miseries of the Assamese people and the deplorable conditions of the region—the product of years of neglect by the metropolitan center, heavy immigration from Bangladesh and the resultant strain on the land and regional economy, and subnationalist aspirations being perceived as secessionism and terrorism. [End Page 71]

Aesthetics · Assamese · Epistemology · Ideology · Liminality · Linguistics · Materiality (auditing · Media studies · Nation state · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · South Asian Studies and Conflicts · South Asian Studies and Diaspora

• Between the Two Mother Indias

  Open Access•J Daniel Luther•Queering Normativity and South…•2023

  Incluir item

• Reflections on exile and other essays

  Edward W Said, Rosa Gallego Blanco•Reflections on exile and other…•2000

  Incluir item

• Nationalism without a nation in India

  G Aloysius•Nationalism without a nation in…•1997

  Incluir item

• Metahistory

  Hayden White•Metahistory•1973

  Incluir item

• Masks of Conquest

  Gauri Viswanathan•Masks of Conquest•2014

  Incluir item

• The Nation and Its Fragments

  Partha Chatterjee•Nation and Its Fragments•1994

  Incluir item

• Separation Anxiety

  Open Access•Kaul, Suvir Kaul•Oxford Literary Review•1994

  Incluir item

• The Future of Criticism

  Edward W Said•Modern Language Notes•1984

  Incluir item