Abstract
Kamalakar Bhat’s paper explores an alternative method to teach English literature by drawing from Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theoretical idea of ‘provincialising Europe’. It is argued that by adopting this approach, we can teach the text not as having universal significance but with reference to the reader’s immediate cultural context thus effecting displacement that undermines the ‘colonial’ power of the ‘English’ text as well as values the student’s cultural context. The paper elaborates the two techniques of this approach – the technique of displacement and the technique of reducing the subjectifying function of the ‘English’ literary text.
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Notes
- 1.
The analysis of the situation as ‘postcolonial’ establishes a west-and-the-rest dichotomy, which does not reflect the world as it exists today in its totality. To ignore this would be to negate the idea of polycoloniality as it has emerged in the twenty-first century and also the impacts of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism and globalisation on English literary studies in India today. But the paradigm discussed in this paper could be taken as an entry point to the diversities which characterise these realities today.
- 2.
Having accepted the differences in two cultures, the reliance on the postcolonial as a methodological approach lays it open to the fashioning of binaries of its own. Moreover, the notions of ‘ambivalence’, ‘hybridity’ and ‘third space’ can be factored in to further nuance the postcolonial dimensions being talked of and work towards more nuanced understandings of what such an approach entails.
References
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Bhat, K. (2019). Provincialising Europe Through English Literary Studies in India. In: Mahanta, B., Sharma, R. (eds) English Studies in India. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1525-1_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1525-1_8
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