The document discusses Indian postcolonial theorists, particularly focusing on Gayatri Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, and their contributions to understanding the cultural legacy of colonialism. Spivak's essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' critiques the Western academic perspective on non-Western subjects, while Bhabha introduces concepts like hybridity and mimicry in cultural interactions. Chakrabarty's work aims to 'provincialize' Europe by recognizing the limitations of Western narratives in explaining South Asian histories.

1. Paper: 11 Postcolonial Literature
Subject: Indian postcolonial theorists

2.  Post colonialism is an academic discipline that analyzes, explains and
responds to the cultural legacy of colonialism and imperialism.
 It speaks about the human consequences of external control and
economic exploitation of native people and their lands.
 The term post colonialism refers broadly to the ways in which race,
ethnicity, culture, and human identity itself are represented in the
modern era, after many colonized countries gained their independence.

3.  Gayatri Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist and feminist critic.
 She is university professor at Columbia university.
 Considered one of the most influential post colonial intellectuals.
 Best known for her essay ‘Can the subaltern speak?’
 In 2012, awarded the ‘Kyoto prize’ in arts and philosophy for being a critical
theorist and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism
in relation to the globalised world.
 In 2013, received the ‘Padma Bhushan’ award.

4.  It is an essay delivered in 1983.
 Relates to the manner in which western cultures investigate
other cultures.
 Uses examples of Sati practice.
 This essay critically deals with an array of western writers
starting from Marx to Foucoult, and Derrida.
 The opening statement is that western academic thinking is
produced in order to support western economical interests.
 Raises question- How can the third world subject be studied
without cooperation with the colonial project.
 Criticizes the intellectual West’s desire for subjectivity.

5.  Research or knowledge have served as a prime justification
for the conquest of other cultures and their enslavement, as
part of the European colonial project.
 Spivak points to the fact that the west is talking to itself and
in its own languages about the other.
 Spivak is opposed to the western attempt to situate itself as
investigating subject that is opposed to the investigated
non-western object.
 Spivak’s answer to can the subaltern speak? Is ‘No’, they
cannot, not when the western academic field is unable to
relate to the other with anything other than its own
paradigm.

6.  The term refers to a political tactic that minority groups,
nationalities, ethnic groups mobilize on the basis of shared
gendered, cultural or political identity to represent
themselves.
 This temporary essentialisation helps to create solidarity,
sense of belonging and identity to a group, race or ethnicity.
 It is also a temporary, strategic approach against the
appropriation of the idea of anti-essentialism upheld by
poststructuralist critics.
 Thus, strategic essentialism is about the need to accept
temporarily, an ‘essentialist’ position in order to be able to
act.

7.  Born in 1949
 Professor of English and American literature and language and the director of the
Mahindra humanities center at Harvard university.
 He is one of the most important figures in contemporary post colonial studies.
 His key concepts: Hybridity, mimicry, difference and ambivalence.
 In 2012, received the Padma Bhushan award.

8.  Describes the emergence of new cultural forms from
multiculturalism.
 Instead of seeing colonialism as something locked in the
past, he shows how its histories and cultures constantly
intrude in the present.
 All cultural statements and systems are constructed in a
space that he calls the third space of enunciation.

9.  The idea of ambivalence sees culture as consisting of opposing
perceptions and dimensions.
 This duality allows for beings who are hybrid of their own cultural identity
and the colonizer’s cultural identity.
Cultural difference, enunciation and stereotype:
 Presents cultural difference as an alternative to cultural diversity.
 Enunciation is the act of utterance or expression of a culture that takes
place in the third space.
 Cultural difference is a process of identification, while cultural diversity is
comparative and categorized.
Cultural difference, enunciation and stereotype:

10.  Imitation of culture of the colonizers.
 Colonial mimicry comes from colonist’s desire for a reformed,
recognizable other as a subject of a difference.
 Colonists desire to emerge as authentic, through mimicry – through
process of writing and repetition – through this partial representation.

11.  The third space acts as an ambiguous area that develops when two or
more individuals or cultures interact.
 It challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a
homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary past, kept
alive in the national tradition of the people.
 He claims that cultural statements and systems are constructed in this
contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation.

12.  Born in 1948
 Professor of history at the university of Chicago.
 Work: Provincializing Europe: Post colonial thought and historical
difference
 It is about recognizing the limitations of western social science in
explaining the historical experiences of political modernity in south Asia.
 The idea of provincialising Europe represents Chakrabarty’s attempt to
pluralize the history of global political modernity.

13.  Major work: Rethinking postcolonialism: colonialist discourse in modern
literatures and the legacy of classical writers.
 Debate on cross cultural encounters, the interconnections of language, culture
and race, the formation of ideologies of power and supremacy, relationship
between classical orientalism and the modern construction of otherness.
 Includes Aristotle, Plato, Kipling, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Conrad, Albert
Camus and explores western imperial intellectual history and show how the
classical writer’s ideas on race, culture, identity and otherness served as a
template for modern colonialist ideology.
 Discussion of modernist literature with a critique of European post enlightenment
philosophical concepts.

14.  Works Cited
 Borah, Abikal. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing of Europe. 5 November 2017
<http://notevenpast.org/dipesh-chakrabartys-provincializing-of-europe/>.
 encyclopedia.com. postcolonialism. 5 November 2017
<http://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/postcolonialism>.
 reader, Cultural. Gayatri Spivak Can the subaltern speak summary. 16 November 2011. 5
November 2017 <http://culturalstudiesnow.blogspot.in/2011/11/gayatri-spivak-can-
subaltern-speak.html>.
 Wikipedia. Dipesh Chakrabarty. 27 October 2017. 5 November 2017
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipesh_Chakrabarty>.
 wikipedia. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. 26 October 2017. 5 November 2017
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayatri_Chakravorty_Spivak>.
 Wikipedia. Homi K. Bhabha. 27 October 2017. 5 November 2017
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homi_K._Bhabha>.
 —. post colonialism. 23 October 2017. 5 November 2017
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postcolonialism>.