Defense of Truth

Image from: http://www.theatricalcombat.com/Image%20Files/gallery/stickysituation/sticky3.jpg Intellectuals often feel a certain affiliation to cosmopolitanism. They are by and large concentrated in cities (and even there within universities), and are products of the modern refinement and departmentalization of knowledge and inquiry. Their thoughts, concerns and communications span the globe, but are generally so focused at an elite audience that between their cloistered mental departments and the smallness of their community they must formulate and nourish defensive attitudes and stances against the various localisms they must participate in but see beyond. In a quintessentially postmodern way (which is still quite modern nevertheless), they often choose to defend against localisms by celebrating the rootlessness of their modern condition--by celebrating ALL localisms. This is the elite sort of cosmopolitanism Friedman describes in his insightful article which I referenced weeks ago. ...

In a brilliant critique of the postcolonial concept of "hybridity" as a cosmopolitan goal for the mixing of humanity, Jonathan Friedman defines racism and essentialism in a surprisingly clear way before explaining how the implications of these concepts ensure that hybridity is a self-defeating philosophy. First, there are two separate arguments that are made in conjunction with racism: "All X are bearers of a set of traits, physical or cultural" Cultural traits are reducible to physical ones Point 1 above is racism proper (eg. all blacks have small brains but athletic physiques, or all blacks are naturally animist), and point 2 is merely essentialism--the idea that beings have an essence from which their traits and practices can be derived (eg. Blacks are naturally animist because their brains are too small to understand reason and empirical evidence) Which seems the more insidious to you: racism or essentialism? My reflexive answer would be essentialism of course, ...

More literary theory today from a paper I'm proud of. I may comment on Thiong'o's equation of culture with language later, but for now you need an intro… How humans determine what is self is a topic of much theoretical debate. However many of these theories of self-identification highlight the twin fundamental notions of culture and language as unavoidably instrumental in the construction of identity. The most germane of these to our discussion derives from the French neo-Freudian psychologist Jacques Lacan's extrapolations on Ferdinand de Saussure's principles of semiotics. Mainstream linguistic thought from its inception as a separate discipline in Saussure's time, has pointed out the arbitrary nature of the link between the signification of any given (linguistic) symbol and its associated signifying form (whether graphic or phonic). Dividing a sign into signifiant and signifié is a powerful way to theorize language, since it emphasizes its social nature. I...

My advisor recommended a book to me by a comparative lit theorist by the name of Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan, called Theory in an Uneven World . Like the bulk of literary theorists, he is an unashamed Marxist, but I've been reading that type since I arrived here at grad school. It's proved to be an enlightening intellectual exercise to try to read this kind of theorist, holding their false premises in suspension in my mind and thinking through only their internally justified and internally logical merits until it becomes appropriate to remember the false premises and sweep away the entire theory. It's a sort of coping strategy I've developed that I think actually helps me engage with theories I'll have to deal with as an academic, while maintaining my core conservative values and principles. In a way, it's a bit of a Sun Tzu "know your enemy" kind of way of studying, but I find it fruitful. Anyway, Radhakrishnan is concerned with making Marxist theory wo...

I didn't want to become one of those grad students who takes forever to find out what he wants to study, so I entered the Masters program at PITT with an idea what I wanted to do as a dissertation: national identity in the Ivory Coast. It sounds like a straightforward enough concept, but I encountered an article while I was taking a history course which looked at several case studies of the construction of racial, ethnic, and gender identities over a variety of geographical locations and historical periods that made me radically re-think the entire concept of identity . It's a concept that makes intuitive sense to most people, I would imagine. It means who you are, right? The layperson could also probably understand quite readily that there seem to be many different levels at which our "identity" can be determined or constrained. A black person may feel more of a racial component to identity than a white person, for example. My religious identity takes primacy over my...