Australian and Canadian Policies towards Aboriginal Peoples

The social policies regarding the Aboriginal populations of Australia, Canada and New Zealand are similar in their objectives and the major policy periods.

Before the 1830s, relations with Aboriginal peoples were based on military and commercial interactions, and influenced by competition between European countries for colonial territory, with no regard to the actual socio-economic conditions of the peoples. By that time, military and civilian settlements, missions and trade had been established. In many ways, the 1837 British House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines was foundational in shaping subsequent policy in Australia and Canada. This was influenced by the patterns of institutionalized contact and domination, and in turn had a formative influence on paternalism and integration policies in these colonies. Such was the influence of the Committee that only in the present movement towards pluralism are the committee’s views finally being displaced. While the specific forms of this initial contact differed in Australia and Canada, the acquisitive, exploitative and proselytizing nature of the European invasion was visible in all the colonies.

In the early period, missionaries with their own ‘civilizing’ agenda traveled widely and translated between European and Aboriginal languages, and while many were ‘shocked’ at the ‘heathen’ ways of the peoples, they were often also shocked by the murder, rape and plunder carried out by their own countrymen. In the case of Australia, the European settlers had a genocidal intent towards Aboriginal peoples, and there were a number of ineffectual prescriptions made by British authorities for the protection of Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. In the case of Canada, there was an early history of commercial and military relationships between settlers and First Nations. Since, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the need for alliances with First Nations had passed, and early commercial relations (for example, the fur trade) had given way to large-scale European settlements, the focus shifted to social policy.

In each of the countries, there had been Aboriginal resistance to the waves of settlers inundating Aboriginal lands. In Australia, the ‘frontier’ contact between Aboriginal peoples and settlers was brutal, based on notions of the racial inferiority of the Aborigines. They were dispossessed of their lands, without recognition or compensation, and the individual settler was aided by the police in enforcing his ‘rights’ to the land. Land was granted by the Crown to settlers without recognizing prior ownership by Aboriginal peoples. Those Aboriginal people who were not killed or starved became refugees in their own land. In Canada, First Nations people were believed to require ‘careful management’, after the transition from earlier interactions that at least partly recognized the First Nations as trading partners or allies, to a dominance forcing First Nations to yield established rights for a European future. There was a silent partnership between Canada and the United States in this matter. Genocide was more frequent on the American side, and this served as a constant reminder to Canadian First Nations regarding the nature of European domination. Treaties were used to confine First Nations people to reserves, and to establish the infrastructure to dominate them. The Select Committee had not recommended the treaties, but in Eastern Canada they were already in place. Thus, through domination, single societies based on gross inequalities between Aboriginal and European populations were established. The effectiveness of the Select Committee’s recommendations was dependent on the British government’s will to impose rule on the settler societies, and this diminished with the establishments of relatively independent settler governments with their own forms of dominance over Aboriginal peoples.

However, while the Crown’s influence diminished, the dominance of settler governments enabled the continuation of paternalistic policies. In Australia, these policies were enshrined in the ‘Protection of Aborigines’ statutes that were passed in the period between 1869 and 1909; in Canada, they were introduced within the framework of the Indian Act, 1876 and its many successors. Settlers, entrenched in their notion of racial superiority introduced these policies in the ‘best interests’ of Aboriginal peoples.

The paternalistic period lasted for over a century, and can be said to have occurred in two phases. In the first phase, the ‘protection’ of Aboriginal peoples was the purported aim, and in the second phase, assimilation was the main objective. The social policy in the colonies that reflected this thought assumed that the Aboriginal peoples were a ‘dying race’. All Aboriginal communities experienced a sharp population decline after the European invasion, and settler governments assumed that these declines would continue. Racial and eugenic theory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was influenced by the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest. However, by the first two decades of the twentieth century, it was clear that the Aboriginal minorities were neither ‘dying out’ nor being absorbed, and in Australia and Canada, attention subsequently shifted from the idea of ‘protection’ and ‘smoothening the dying pillow’ to the idea of assimilation. It seemed to missionaries and administrators that a more rigorous application of the policy of assimilation was needed.

Assimilationist policies remained in effect until long after the Second World War. In Canada and Australia, there was a major policy shift from paternalism to the idea of integration in the 1950s and 1960s, nearly a hundred years since the inauguration of the assimilationist policy and nearly three decades after the start of a rigorous effort to achieve assimilation through social engineering. By the 1960s, general social services were full-fledged public services. These services provided each country with the opportunity to integrate Aboriginal social policy with mainstream social policy. Although the phrase that now had currency was ‘integration’ the main agenda remained the assimilation of Aboriginal peoples into the mainstream. In Australia the change was evident in the repeal of the various state Aboriginal protection statutes that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. Aboriginal peoples were given citizenship rights in 1967 and incorporated into the census of Australia. In Canada, the Indian Act of 1951 provided the legal base for the extension of provincial social services to First Nations, and the services were expanded as funding agreements were reached between federal and provincial governments. First Nations peoples were also given the federal vote in 1967 without having to lose their status and rights as Indians through the process of enfranchisement.

The services that were extended to Aboriginal peoples did not recognize either their distinct cultures or the fact that Aboriginal peoples had endured over a century of paternalistic rule. The assumption of settler superiority was as much present in the policy of integration and the extension of common services to Aboriginal communities as it had been in the assimilationist period of separate services. In the 1960s, mainstream politicians and administrators assumed that Aboriginal peoples would welcome being ‘liberated’ from separate status. It was thought that Aboriginal peoples would soon become indistinguishable from settlers with regard to their use of public services, and that they would soon become one more piece in the general multicultural mosaic that comprised the dominant Anglo-Celtic majority and many ethnic/immigrant groups. Thus, assimilation would be achieved, and Aboriginal cultures would become invisible as far as public policy was concerned. These ideas of assimilation were never fulfilled.

The Aboriginal peoples resisted the policy of assimilation because it offered no solution to the issue of land rights and territory. Common services were designed to remove all recognition of special status within the state, including territorial recognition. There would be no need for special land tenure, social policy or institutions – racial origin and cultural difference would be ‘private’ matter. Thus, the Canadian First Nations rejected outright the 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy. In Canada, Aboriginal peoples began to reverse the historical process of the loss of land to settlers as new claims were made based on either Aboriginal title or treaties negotiated during the first stages of the process of European encroachment and settlement. In Australia, opposition to the loss of Aboriginal land manifested itself in the Commonwealth government preventing Queensland from varying Aboriginal land boundaries in order to facilitate mining and in establishing Aboriginal Land Councils in the Northern Territory.

At the same time as actions were underway to maintain land under Aboriginal control, movements were also growing to establish separate social rights for Aboriginal peoples based on a separate legal status. The establishment of new rights for Aboriginal peoples marked the decline of assimilation and integration policies – whereas for over a century the objective of social policy had been to end Aboriginal status, it is now being directed at strengthening that status. Whereas for a century or more ‘progress’ was measured by the proportion of Aboriginal peoples who abandoned their traditions, progress is now measured by the proportion of Aboriginal peoples who are strengthening those traditions and governments acknowledging rights and obligations that had been set aside in earlier periods. Although a movement towards the acceptance of difference by the state has begun (pluralism as distinct from multiculturalism that places Aboriginal peoples on the same platform as other ethnic groups), the longstanding presence within government infrastructures of the policies of assimilation and integration constantly conflict with the move towards pluralism and relative autonomy.

While we look at the literature of two Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Canada as a continuity within which the colonial disruption is a phase, rather than a defining moment, the post-contact literature/orature often reflects the effects on the communities of these policies and their adaptations to these changes. The emphasis on cultural continuity and change both before and after contact is also important as it enables me to look at the cultural specificity of Nyoongar and Ojibwe cultural production, rather than only looking, in a very narrow focus, at how the pattern of colonization is mirrored in the two cultures - a trend of ‘fixing’ the Aboriginal communities in perpetual victimhood, with colonization as their distinctive trait, that I find repeated in most readings of Fourth World writing at most Indian seminars on Australian and Canadian writing. At the same time, it is necessary to engage with the strongly political nature of much of post-contact writing because it helps us to see the agency of the Nyoongar and Ojibwe communities in defining the nature of their own modernity.

Since we deliberately do not begin with any particular theoretical premise within which we try and ‘fit’ Ojibwe or Nyoongar literature, it is through focusing text-by-text on particular and local contexts that we can critique established theoretical frameworks for reading ‘new literatures,’ and move towards an understanding of the tensions between separatist and universalist, insider and outsider boundaries in the reading of Aboriginal narratives.

As long as an egalitarian situation in the academy is not realized, and until the imposition of dominant theoretical frameworks by mainstream academia does not give way to more people- or culture-specific readings, thematic readings of Aboriginal texts, informed by a clear socio-political understanding, remain my personal choice. My readings follow this pattern, and revolve around the theme of land and the relationships of the peoples to the land. There is a tendency to analyze work published by minority writers from the perspective of authenticity. Thus, readers see only the exotic nature of ‘otherness’ and the writer is reduced to the role of the informant providing a necessary degree of ethnographic accuracy. In this context, perhaps, thematic readings may be a less appropriative way of reading culturally ‘different’ texts.

Thoughts on Comparative Aboriginal Studies

…It is vital to consider the need for material presence of the ‘local’: so the research and training we carry out in the field of post-colonialism, whatever else it does, must always find ways to address the local, if only on the order of material applications. If we overlook the local, and the political implications of the research we produce, we risk turning the work of our field into the playful operations of an academic glass-bead game, whose project will remain at best a description of global relations, and not a script for their change...at the level of the local, at the level of material applications, post-colonialism must address the material exigencies of colonialism and neocolonialism, including the neocolonialism of Western academic institutions themselves.
- Stephen Slemon


Research itself has been termed a colonizing construct by Aboriginal writers, a formation that the Maori scholar Linda Smith summarized as ‘they came, they saw, they named, they claimed.’ Smith states that ‘from the vantage point of the colonized, a position from which I write and choose to privilege, the term ‘research’ is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary’. Literary studies has not escaped its share of blame in this regard. Though the discipline deals mainly with written and performance texts, and not human subjects as in the social sciences, critical imperialism pervades the reading of texts from minority cultures such as Aboriginal cultures. The burgeoning industry of post-colonial studies, in particular, absorbs ‘new’ and ‘emergent’ literatures within its particular discourse. My research engages with this phenomenon, and questions if alternative or syncretic reading frameworks might instead be developed for these literatures. There have been numerous critical histories of Indian writing in English, or Canadian or Australian literature, where the idea of the ‘nation’ is paradigmatic. There have also been histories of minority literature, such as Penny Petrone’s Native Literature in Canada: From the Oral Tradition to the Present or Adam Shoemaker’s Black Words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929 – 1988. These have generally adopted a pan-Aboriginal approach. The critical approaches have ranged from the teleological and historical (as in Petrone’s study) to the thematic and political (as in Shoemaker’s work). My aim in this work is to engage with the possibility of more culture-specific and location-specific histories of Aboriginal literatures in English, and explore theoretical frameworks that are not appropriative or homogenising, for the reading of these literatures.

On the surface of things, there are many reasons why Aboriginal literatures are too easily assumed to be part of the assortment of literatures termed ‘post-colonial.’ There are many aspects of cultural resistance and survival that are similar to patterns seen in former colonies such as India or various African states, and these parallels need to be scrutinized before moving on to the need for a separate aesthetics for Aboriginal peoples.

The preservation or revival of the mother tongue as a form of cultural self-assertiveness and an expression of a community’s nationalist ideology is a phenomenon common to most former colonies. It is also is seen in many Aboriginal communities today. In addition, postcolonial theory sees the appropriation of the colonizer’s language to make it bear the burden of one’s cultural experience as a manifestation the experience of hybridity in the wake of contact between the colonizer and the colonized. A characteristic of most formerly colonized societies is the development of hybrid or new englishes, where native grammar and vocabulary modifies the intruding language. Thus, a socially acceptable form of bilingualism develops within the (post)colonial community in which both the mother tongue and the colonizer’s tongue (if not one and the same) have an important function for the community. In Aboriginal cultures as in many African ones, the movement between orality and literacy in Aboriginal literatures is a crucial factor in the development of narratives, both fictional and ‘factual’, about the past and present of the people.

The colonial discourse entailed a clash of weltanschauungen or world views, and in all cases of colonization, linguistic imperialism involving the manipulation and dissemination of the written word was a major characteristic. The Europeans’ ‘litteral advantage’, to use the phrase of the 17th century travel writer Samuel Purchas, has been memorably analysed by Tzvetan Todorov in his book The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. The clash of oral and literate culture is seen in the actual loss of land and territory suffered by many Aboriginal peoples, through the signing of treaties and other forms of negotiation that equated written text and territory. Among Aboriginal peoples in North America, for instance, diplomatic agreements were traditionally concluded verbally and usually in the presence of those concerned and promises thus made in public became part of the collective memory of the community.

The disruptive potential of literacy is also evident in another common feature of colonialism, the drive to alter native religious beliefs. European missionaries were quick to identify the associations that colonized peoples made between technological advances and religious prowess, and contrasted the permanence of the printed biblical word with the supposed impermanence of oral narratives. However, many Aboriginal belief systems persisted, in whole or part, developing forms of syncretism and compartmentalization that preserved their faiths or allowed the subterranean persistence of Aboriginal practices within Christianity.

One factor that distinguishes settler societies from other former colonies is the minority status of the colonized, as opposed to colonies such as India where the colonized were numerically a majority. As a result, the perceived minority status of the community within the colonial state leads to two strands within the collective consciousness of the community. There are keepers of the community’s cultural heritage, for example elders, who emphasize tradition as a barrier against uncontrolled imitation. ‘Progressive’ elements on the other hand attempt to introduce changes that might be useful for the community to adapt to new situations. In the later stages of the colonial encounter traditionalists cannot completely isolate the traditions of their community from outside influences, and so the role of individuals who cross cultures, as well as cultural production that addresses or bridges opposed ‘worlds’, becomes crucial. This pattern can be seen to have similarities with developments in the national movements of other former colonies as well.

Thus, contemporary Fourth World cultures have many features that can allow them to be too easily subsumed within the rubric of post-colonial studies. One of the ways in which Euro-American cultural imperialism is exercised in the colonial context is by the creating of separate aesthetic standards for the reading of mainstream and ‘marginal’ literatures. On one hand, literature that adheres to Western standards is seen as classical or universal, while literature that deviates from this norm is sidelined as primitive, political, or regional. While the empowerment of the marginal voice as a function of post-colonial studies has become a given, the gradual ‘colonization’ of Aboriginal literature by post-colonial theory in the last decade or so demands that the notion of decolonization be stressed. Problematizing post-colonial theory can be useful for decolonizing research on Aboriginal writing. It is also necessary to engage theoretically with my own bias as a cultural outsider and an academic located in the ‘Third World’ and specializing in ‘post-colonial’ literature. It is too easy, with this bias, to seek similarities, using familiar theoretical vocabulary, between Aboriginal literature and the nebulous amalgamation called ‘postcolonial’ literature. Post-colonial literary studies has developed certain normative features that ‘assimilate’ Aboriginal writing into a set vocabulary of analysis, thus continuing the legacy of cultural imperialism even as it aspires to the status of an ideologically emancipatory set of reading frameworks. Thus, the first chapter engages with the problems of looking at Aboriginal writing through the lenses of post-colonial theory, and with the trend in post-colonial studies of ignoring the material and politico-legal contexts of narratives. These problems, I argue, must be understood and overcome.

Much of my discussion is motivated by the need to actively de-enter the Western academy as the exclusive locus of authorizing power and to emphasize the power of the so-called ‘margins.’ Given the fact that different cultures cognitively organize experiences in different ways, different frameworks are required to understand them, and the chapter attempts to highlight Aboriginal points of view in developing aesthetic and analytical frameworks for the reading of texts.

Rather than read Aboriginal writing in the context of other postcolonial writing, I choose to deconstruct the colonial category of ‘Aboriginal’ by focusing specifically on the cultural production of two First Peoples, the Nyoongar in Australia, and the Anishnaabe in Canada. Aboriginal experiences have been significantly different from those experiences of peoples loosely described as the Third World, and postcolonial studies have focused mainly on the latter. Fourth World literary studies is not an appendage of Third World studies. Aboriginal literatures, despite obvious cultural, geographical, political and linguistic differences, share certain distinctive features. Approaches that seek to establish lateral connections among the various Aboriginal literatures can be useful academically, culturally and politically. Admittedly this assumption is similar to the one that informs the field of postcolonial studies, which places literatures from vastly different countries together under the same umbrella. However, James Clifford observes in “Indigenous Articulations,” that to see chains of equivalence, such as pan-Indigenous, Indigenous Arctic or Fourth World coalitions, which necessarily and strategically emphasize commonality as opposed to difference as articulated phenomena, is not necessarily to see them as inauthentic, or merely political, invented or opportunistic. Linda Smith, James Youngblood Henderson and other Aboriginal scholars speak of a commonality of experience that allows for the framing of decolonization theory for the Fourth World. While Aboriginal literatures have gained considerable critical attention and respect in the last decade, critics have in the main been concerned with the pan-continental traditions rather than the very specific one-to-one approach that I adopt.

I chose to focus on Nyoongar and Ojibwe writing specifically in my course, just as earlier we have focused on Marathi Dalit literature in translation, as I feel that learning in depth about one community can help develop the reading and interpretive skills necessary for exploring the diversity of work that is available under the rubric of Subaltern Literatures. Nyoongar literature has a well-defined body of writing in English, and there have already been attempts to read that literature as a collective entity, for example, Robyn McCarron’s theorizing of a Nyoongar literature in English. As many of the Nyoongar writers that I spoke with informally opined, it would be possible to see Nyoongar writing as a distinct body of writing with a territorial and people-specific focus, as opposed to Koori or Murri writing, which do not refer to a single ethnic group. Ojibwe writing, too, could be similarly seen as a body of writing in English that had strong roots in a single land-based culture, however internally diverse it was. As Gerald Vizenor has commented, ‘Anishinaabe writers have been quite distinguished in the history of published material. I think among all tribal groups in America the Anishinaabe have probably the largest number of writers, going back to George Copway and William Warren, the first historian.’ The availability of material that would allow me to go beyond the fuzzy notions of ‘Aboriginal Literature’ prevalent in Indian academia today, and enable the exploration of the idea of literary studies based on culture-specific and people-centric readings encouraged me to choose Nyoongar and Ojibwe writing in English. Of course, these literatures have a vast body of orature and literature that is not in English, and ours is only a very partial study on account of our inability to engage with this part of their literatures.

Clueless in Calcutta?

I seem to be speaking only to a group of three students via this blog - 9 people had enrolled for my course. I must commend Sunrita, Prayag and Doel for their responses and reading journals, and we shall have some solid discussions over lebu cha regarding what you've expressed. Do I have your permission to allow others in your course to read your comments/responses? However, before I proceed beyond introductory stuff, I want to know where the other six people in the course are. Is this online teaching idea not working, or do they not know about it, or do they not have easy access to the internet? If the answer is any of these, then I suggest we put the online teaching on hold, and wait till I get back to begin face-to-face classes, because six people out of nine seem to be totally in the dark about what is going on. Can someone in Cal tell me what's up with the others? Can you get in touch with them? It would be absurd for 3 people in the class to go far ahead of the others, and then wait for the others to tune in...What's going on?

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.

Apologies!

I have not been able to access the internet as I have been in the process of shifting from one residence to another, and the place where I stay across the Thames at Southwark neither has wireless internet nor a cybercafe anywhere nearby. Give me Calcutta's overabundance of cheap cybercafes at every street corner any day! End result: I have not been able to post the lecture notes for this week as scheduled on Thursday and Friday. I will be posting a longish lecture on Saturday instead, when I will be working at the (mercifully, totally wired) British Library.

Back to the Basics

Week 1
Some issues to mull over and look up as you read the texts for week 1. The list is not meant to be prescriptive, simply a checklist to guide you through the basic concepts. Try to weave in some responses to these questions into your reading journals, but as I said, that is not compulsory.

1. What is the meaning of 'subaltern'? How did the term originate? What was the need for subaltern studies?
2. What is the difference between a 'minority' and a 'subaltern'? Who would be subaltern in the following categories - gender, sexuality, class, race? Can one be 'subaltern' in one category and 'elite' in another at the same time?
3. Does the fact that a university educated scholar like Sekhar-da or Dipesh-da is writing a publishable book/article about a subaltern community, using academic language, help in getting the story of that community across to a wider readership that would otherwise not have known the story? What are the issues you think are highlighted by this?
4. In colonial/postcolonial states, why is the writing of history such a contentious matter?
5. When writing the (his)tory of any community (including the 'imaginary community' of the nation) does it matter from whose perspective the story is being told? Why?
6. Can a 'majority' community be subaltern?
7. Do you think that if a person from 'within' a community writes the (his)tory of his/her community, it will be a more 'authentic' narrative than one by an 'outsider'?
8. When the subaltern is a person or community from the past, and can no longer speak, and has left no written records, can the voice of the subaltern be retrieved? How can literature help in this matter?
9. Think about the epics that you have read - Ramayana and Mahabharata. Are certain figures being deliberately rendered marginal? Are there certain dominant attitudes and values in these texts that exclude/marginalise some people on the grounds of gender/caste/race/class? What figures might you term 'subaltern' in these epics?
10. Assuming that you have grown up in Bengal, what has been your experience of prejudices held by people around you, eg. in matters of intercaste marriage, or the persistence of caste differences in various religious ceremonies, etc? Do you think that Bengal is a 'peaceful' place where caste tensions are non-existent compared to Maharashtra, UP, Tamil Nadu etc. and why/not? Do you think 'caste' has been overshadowed by 'class' as the arena of struggle in Bengal?

Readings and Assignments, July 5-23

We begin in a rather freewheeling fashion, with some theory, poetry and non-fiction.
Attendance was sparse on day 1, but we're just getting started with the semester, and I'm sure that everyone will be tuned in by Monday the 5th of July (BANDH?!).
Since I will be at King's College, London for the next 3 weeks, we're going to do distance education. Do note that the time difference between Kolkata and London is 5.5 hours, meaning you're 5.5 hours ahead of me.

I. Classes
Format: Each week, starting from Monday the 5th till Friday the 23rd, I will be posting the class lectures on this blog on Thursdays and Fridays. You get 1 attendance point by posting your detailed comments at the end of each blog post - in other words, responding to two lectures gets you two attendance points.

II. Home Assignments - Reading Journals
Format: On Saturdays, beginning from the 3rd of July, and then on the 10th and 17th of July, I will put up on the blog some questions that might help you to get thinking about the readings that you have been assigned for the coming week. Of course, they are simply to start you off, to get you thinking. Please maintain lively reading journals that record your responses, doubts, questions, etc. with regard to the readings assigned for the week, also record any related reading that you have done that week. You will email the reading journal at the end of that week to me, on Sunday the 11th, 18th and 25th of July. For your week-wise journal submissions on these dates, you get 2 attendance points for that particular week.

Your reading for the week of 5th July includes:
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography (essay)
Kancha Ilaiah, Why I am Not a Hindu (book)
Sekhar Bandopadhyay, The Namasudras Of Bengal (essay)
The readings for the week of 12th July include:
The poetry of Namdeo Dhasal (feel free to respond to poems that you particularly enjoyed)
S. Anand, Touchable Tales: Publishing and Reading Dalit Literature
Your reading for the week of 19th July is:
Sharan Kumar Limbale, Towards An Aesthetic Of Dalit Literature: History, Controversies And Considerations (translated by Alok Mukherjee)

The master copies of the texts for the next three weeks are with the three troopers who turned up for class on day 1 : Sunrita Chakravarti, Doel Bose and Oindrila Mondal.
Get cracking, then. Any questions or clarifications?