Welcome to the interactive blog of the optional course on Subaltern Literatures at the Department of English Jadavpur University. This course challenges you to consider your own cultural conditioning and re-think your own subject position with respect to new literature and orature emerging out of marginalized communities in your own country and across the world. We are dealing with the Fourth World, as it were, communities that are severely disempowered in a range of contexts, from the First World to the Third.
Read the blogs carefully. Are there terms or concepts that seem new to you? Do you want to interject or comment or reflect on a blog post, or a class lecture? Please use the 'comments' section at the bottom of each post to express your thoughts., or report on new writing relevant to the course that you have read. Since this is an official course blog, you will be expected to avoid slang, and use appropriate language that you would employ in an actual class discussion.Please try to phrase what you are saying in a fashion that is not offensive,racist, violent, or objectionable. This course stands for healthy debate, for examining our own inbuilt biases, and a willingness to hear, accept and understand those different from us in a respectful but not condescending way.
One of the first things I would ask you to consider as you embark on this course is your own location - most of us are implicated in structures of power though we would not like to think about it - we often get influenced by the predominant attitudes of our class, caste, gender, regional and other positions even as we read new writing; hence our readings of new texts are often 'blighted' or biased by these ingrown attitudes. I would like each of you to honestly locate yourself in the context of what you read, and be self-critical and self-aware when you read.
Please post comments on the following questions after you've given them some thought:
1. In what way does your prior training in English literature affect the ways in which you read new writing, ie, your sense of what is 'good literature' or a work of 'aesthetic merit'?
2. How does the fact that the book you are reading is a translation from an Indian language affect your appreciation (or not) of it? If the book is originally in broken English or 'pidgin English', or not a good translation into English, what is your reaction?
3. What are the biases about tribal peoples/Adivasis/Aboriginal people/minorities/Dalits that commonly affect people's minds because of discussions that are heard in the home/family, comments by elders and peers, or seen in movies, on TV (news reportage of events etc.)?
4. What were the reasons you decided to try this optional course?Have you read any writing by people of historically underprivileged communities, for example, Afro-American writing?
