This is the first background lecture. I have deliberately inserted terms that you may find unfamiliar or difficult. The purpose is to make you familiar with new terms, and I will be very happy if you ask me questions about them, or look them up.That is how learning happens, not by spoonfeeding.You might want to come back to this lecture again after you've made sense of some of the new words/ideas you're picking up. Remember, asking questions about things you don't understand in class is not a sign of ignorance, but of intelligence!

It has been difficult for the classical Western disciplines to accept the idea that values varied from culture to culture and were relative, that developed as a result of critiques of Enlightenment philosophy, most notably by French philosophers such as Michel Foucault. Foucault emphasizes that dominant discourses in society establish a normative code of values that leads to the suppression or ‘burial’ of the marginal or non-dominant discourses of communities and individuals who are not in a position of power. These become subjugated knowledges,that Foucault defines as a whole set of knowledges that are either hidden behind more dominant knowledges but can be revealed by critique or have been explicitly disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated.

Think, for example,of the special knowledges that indigenous communities possess about herbs and plants, or women's knowledges about healing foods or birthing, etc.Think of the difference between Western ways of writing 'factual' history and non-Western systems (devalued by the West) of history as 'myth' and storytelling.

Foucault’s description of the insurrection of subjugated knowledges as the immediate emergence of historical contents that have been buried and disguised highlights the role of the scholar, particularly the historian, in drawing out from the archives historical narratives that have been buried beneath dominant discursive formations. Foucault sees this re-emergence as emancipatory: this is clear from his notion that what emerges out of excavating these knowledges is a ‘genealogy’ that allows us ‘to establish a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of this knowledge tactically today.’

An example of this kind of tactical usage is seen in Kancha Ilaiah's book, where he is tracing parallel genealogies of Brahminical and Dalitbahujan world-views. It is tactical usage, and he is not being anti-caste; rather, his work might be seen as reverse-casteist, where he inverts the values attached to the two world views, to denigrate Brahminical views and lionize Dalit ones. This strategy is similar to what the early Black writers of the Negritude movement did: in order to fight centuries of white discourses on the inferiority of Black peoples, they wrote literature that devalued White cultures and celebrated Black ones. This was rightly called anti-racist racism by Sartre. The similarity between Afro-American and Dalit strategies is something we shall have reason to come back to later in the course.

As a result of the critiques of Enlightenment thought by scholars such as Foucault, the 'evolutionary scale' concept that held that non-Western or non-literate or non-whatever people were not sufficiently evolved has been demolished, and replaced by the ‘reformist’ (from the dominant standpoint) concept of plural world views in which different cultures are seen to cognitively arrange experience and knowledge in ways quite different from persons of dominant-group heritage. However, the geopolitical reality in most countries which faced colonization, or among peoples who continue to confront internal colonization or opppression, is that the master narratives perpetuating the neo-Western ‘scientific’ world view continue to be firmly in place in the working of ideological and coercive apparatuses. Groups that wish to avoid being assimilated into these master narratives are often forced into a counter-discursive stance, as is the case with many Dalit and Aboriginal writers, which is ultimately a function of the power structures that encompass them. Often, even the rhetoric and conditions of struggle are predetermined by the power structures they contest. For example, historically, colonialism has demonstrated an ability to absorb and contain conflicting accounts, to the extent that many attempts at opposing master narratives, over time, come to represent the same hegemonic position they initially sought to oppose, or are co-opted, as it were into a liberal dominant-group agenda.

Take the use of the term 'subaltern' by Gramsci, for example.The idea of the subaltern, meaning of ‘inferior rank’, was adopted by Antonio Gramsci as a concept referring to groups in society subjected to the hegemony of the dominant ruling classes. More concretely, Gramsci first used the term as a euphemism or original covert usage for the proletariat in his “Notes on Italian History”, a six point project that appears in his Prison Notebooks (1973). He also claimed that the subaltern classes had just as complex a history as the dominant classes - something that was to inspire the Subaltern Studies project in India. However, this “unofficial” history was necessarily fragmented and episodic since even when they rebel, the subaltern are always subject to the activity of the ruling classes. In Gramsci’s theory, the term ‘subaltern’ linked up with the subordinated consciousness of non-elite groups that still had no clear conception of the state.

Another example: in many versions of modernism the function of the ‘margins’ that exist in relation to the ‘centre’ is seen as essentially, and often usefully, oppositional. The centre-margins binary requires the allocation of values to its components – the centre is seen as oppressive, decadent, while the margins represent a call for justice and the articulation of a certain kind of truth. Thus, the marginal serves the purpose of the larger discourse of modernism. Romantic versions of this type of modernism can lead to global narratives wherein the privileged scholar ‘takes up the cause’ of theorising on behalf of oppressed peoples, as it were.

More Ideas to Mull Over: Minor Literatures within Major Languages

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, for instance, develop a framework for reading literature that is produced by minority communities, but in a manner that does not apply or formulate theory in specific cultural and historical contexts.In their celebrated essay “What is a Minor Literature?” Deleuze and Guattari define a ‘minor literature’ as writing ‘which a minority constructs within a major language’. Its three salient features are ‘the deterritorialisation of language’, the relation of the individual to a ‘political immediacy’ and the ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’. The term ‘minor’ with its connotations of the subordinate makes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming minor’ along with its revolutionary potential and moral purpose attractive to many post-colonial scholars’ discussion of emerging lieratures in English produced by marginalized communities. Deleuze and Guattari are vague as to the application of their idea: ‘We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature’. However, their notion of linguistic deterritorialisation is a valid and relevant one. They ask, ‘How many people live today in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the language that they are forced to serve?’ A minority literature that is initially seen as an impoverished ‘product of damage’ can, by Deleuze and Guattari’s definition, become the harbinger of change and literary innovation, as in the case of Dalit literature. In fact postcolonial theorists have found this to be fertile ground for the interpretation of emergent writing by disempowered groups through an aesthetics of transgression or resistance. The globalising tendency within much of western theory, which develops emancipatory rhetoric that is often not linked to actual socio-political and culturally specific situations, can often lock minority groups perpetually into ‘victim’ positions without acknowledging or examining their agency in the complex historical process of the evolution of their collective identities and forms of self-expression.

As readers, we have to be careful not to do this either.

Although much Dalit and Aboriginal writing is the result of the double displacement or deterritorialisation (that is, urbanization or migration, and the loss of a territorializing native language) that is an important characteristic of a ‘minor literature’ , Deleuze and Guattari’s concept has little connection to the everyday reality out of which this writing stems. Their notion of a ‘minor literature’ is based on a Eurocentric and elitist understanding of James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, all canonical authors in European literature. In the case of Dalit Aboriginal writing, the notion of geographical, cultural, and personal dislocation or deterritorialisation as a space for creative resistance needs to be supplemented by a culture- specific understanding of the intersection of multiple traditions and realities. The Eurocentrism of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature makes it open to (ab)use as a tool to undertake stereotypical readings of new and emergent literatures based on the existing models of interpretation. As Native American scholar Louis Owens has observed, ‘The basic problem here seems to be that the center, even when it begins to define itself as something ambiguously called “multicultural,” still does not always hear more than the echo of its own voice or see very far beyond its own reflection.’ Moreover, D&G's claim that ‘there is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor’ , in other words only a deterritorialised, ex-centric literature can subvert the major and thereby innovate literature is problematic, given the fact that within minority communities there are many authors who work with ‘mainstream’ methods and language. The usage of colonialist language, aesthetics, and standards of literary achievement can be employed by 'subaltern' authors themselves.

Note: The picture at the top of the post is of a Native American healer performing healing rites at the former concentration camp site of Auschwitz.