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Title: In Another Country by Priya Joshi ISBN: 0-231-12585-2 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 May, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $23.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 2 (2 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: isolationism vs. globalism: can one argue for both at once?
Comment: Priya Joshi's work can at times be disconcerting to the reader -- which would normally be considered by me to be a good thing. After all, in a book on postcolonialism the question of displacing the reader would itself constitute an achievement. However, the disconcerting feature is not even intended in this book. One need only look to the number of people who have bought Priya Joshi's book and who are now trying to sell it back again through the Amazon (the numbers are, to be blunt, the highest that this reviewer has ever seen for a 1 1/2 year-old book that was so highly prized when it first appeared). Like a new car, it seems as though as soon as you drive it off the lot this book loses a great deal of its value. Here's part of the trouble: the reader often feels like she or he has been displaced not between local and global (or world) politics and culture, but rather that the book displaces, or more aptly misplaces, the discernible limits of the cultural and the political. Once again, one could argue that this will itself be a good thing; however, as one read further and begins to look closer, certain broad (or global?) assertions lose their credibility, pertinence, and focus. The assumptions that underlie this book show through here in an alarmingly glaring fashion. Above all, the cogency of a thinker like Edward Said, to name an important inspiration for this book, is reduced here to a mere color swatch of ideas. Instead of Jameson's famous Prison-House of Language, one has here a prison house of stripped ideas that do not lead the reader any further into the very, very important relationships of a multi-inflected post-colonialism that desperately needs to be understood better and rightfully stands at the center of the world's current attention.
Homi K. Bhaba can of course hold his own regarding an understanding of the complexity of these permeable states of continental flux together with a very informed theoretical platform that formalizes the issues -- but does not isolate them. The charge most often made against Bhaba, for example, that he is too well versed in his ability to formalize the slipperiness (first identified by E. Glissant in his studies of Caribbean literature) and porousness of cultures, can be made in its opposite form with regards to Priya Joshi's book, which suffers precisely from a malady that can perhaps best be described as a lack of formalization of any sophisticated ideas, a fact that leaves the reader of the book stranded, as the title suggests, In Another Country. Bhaba's book The Location of Culture certainly never meant to locate it in one single place. Clearly Bhaba has the upper hand here, as he can explain himself in an eloquent (if perhaps overly English mannered) way, his thoughts, and his actions both in private conversation or - a few hours later - to a large lecture hall, as many of his students know very well. It is one of the benefits of working with him as a colleague or as a student, in reading his work, or hearing him give a talk: he knows what he is talking about, even if some people have trouble understanding him due to the high degree of sophistication.
In contrast, this book by Priya Joshi comes across as somewhat crass. This is no doubt due to its desire to make a statement, and the book therefore comes across more as a social climber than as a book of endurance. Wanting to make a point certainly does not entail that one needs to be trapped by one's own rhetoric, or rhetorical way of thinking. Again, Jameson noted the affinity of this style with imprisonment, and imprisonment with ideology. Foucault had even harsher words on these topics. To find such isolationism present in a book written in a postcolonial age and on that postcolonial age is very disconcerting indeed, to say the very least. But I'll leave the matter there, as Amazon does not permit quoting.
Nothing like this can of course be said regarding the intelligent eloquence of the late Edward Said, or even Bhaba when he repeats himself (as he often does, not unlike Zizek's Lacanian stutter). There is a clear difference in tone between Priya Joshi's book and others treating similar problems of globallatinization, and some readers may think that it is their own fault while reading this book that it falls flat. However, in the opinion of this reviewer, if there is a certain tone deafness to this book (in marked contrast to Said), namely rhetoric for the sake of argument (and certainly vice versa), it is not the reader who is to be held accountable for it. On the whole, knowing Priya Joshi, one wonders where the intelligence went -- as one searches in vain for it even in the footnotes. But that is the fate of all books that are so highly prized so early on in their careers: they become footnotes, a citation in someone else's work that inherently means "move on."
Rating: 2
Summary: Superb application of postcolonial theory
Comment: The present reviewer was fortunate enough to have taken a class from Ms. Joshi at UC Berkeley, in which she claimed that Richard Wagner invented counterpoint. Yes, you can see the type of intellectual breadth and knowledge that Ms. Joshi brings to the present project. I am proud of her for her rote application of Said redux and Homi Bhabha blather to these great novels. Ms. Joshi is a true academic and well deserves the MLA first prize.
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Title: Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (Oxford India Paperbacks) by Gauri Viswanathan ISBN: 0195646401 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel : From Richardson to George Eliot by Leah Price ISBN: 0521539390 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 17 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Death of a Discipline (The Wellek Library Lectures) by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ISBN: 0231129440 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 June, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
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Title: Provincializing Europe by Dipesh Chakrabarty ISBN: 0691049092 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 15 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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