Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Chakrabarty's project in this book is not so much to subvert the rational-secular view of history, inherited by postcolonial societies from the European enlightenment, as to see around the limitations of that view. In order to do so, one has to give up historicism, the idea of development in history, and of stages in history. Instead, one holds on to the idea of the heterogeneous present, when different world-views are not judged as pre-modern, modern, or even, post-modern (all stageist concepts) but as all life-possibilities. Only when we see the present as irreducibly plural, can we give an accurate account of the past of post-colonial societies. That is the challenge posed by subaltern studies to the dominant European paradigm. The book lays out its theoretical argument in its first part, and illustrates its argument in the second part with specific case studies about Indian widowhood, Indian nationalism, a form of Bengali sociality called  adda , and salaried labor. The author ...

TLS August 2 2013 from Marci Shore's Commentary piece "Out of the desert: A Heidegger for Poland": [Krzysztof] Michalski's childhood had coincided with Stalinism in Poland; his adolescence with attempts to purify the Communist system of its Stalinist deviation without abandoning Marxism. At the core of Marxism remained Hegel's claim that "the truth is the whole". "Does the understanding of something suppose finding a unity in that which one wants to understand? Is it only then--when we are able in each fragment see a part of some whole--that we can discover some meaningin the multifariousness of the experienced world?" These questions, Michalski said in an interview, had kept him awake at night since his first years of university. They were at the heart of his book on Heidegger, published in 1978, and at the heart of his book on Nietzsche, published some thirty years later. Coud there be meaning--the kind of meaning that imbues life with v...

HS made me a copy of the revised text of the Distinguished Guest Lecture delivered at the Larkin Society AGM on 13 June 2009. In the lecture, Marion Shaw discussed Larkin's ambivalence towards Tennyson, how he at once excoriated the Laureate's silliness and envied the poet's, and his period's, "range, the colour, the self-confidence of it all" ( Required Writing , p. 182). Using Bloomian theory in The Anxiety of Influence (1973), a book Shaw describes as "slightly mad," she reads three poems by Larkin as  "corrections" of his poetic predecessor. "Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album" directly quotes "sweet girl-graduate" from Tennyson's The Princess . The "heavy-headed rose/ Beneath a trellis" also works within a field of Tennysonian reference, in particular that of his early English Idylls, perhaps "The Gardener's Daughter." The narrator of Tennyson's poem is a portrait painter...