FRONT LINES/ BORDER POSTS

Spring 1997
Volume 23, Number 3

In the contemporary crises of intellectual production it seems that we are called upon to attempt a rethinking of the geographies of intellectual labor, as several recent discussions of postcolonial theory make apparent. As a way of entering into the concerns indicated by my title(s), I propose to set up an exchange among texts and "names." Generically different texts--the novel, the academic essay, the critical interview--will be invoked to this end, and there will be a mix of species names and proper names in the assembled cast of characters. Out of this colloquy will emerge, it is my hope, certain preoccupations of and equally significant repressions within the discourse. It will be my contention that it is not only the large events and overarching conditions--ethnic conflict, center-periphery hierarchies, migrancy, global capital--but also the lesser but more immediate issues--professional rewards and penalties, institutional sites of pressures and permissions, the disciplinary aspects of "theory"--that govern intellectual labor. To identify discriminations among the various practices within postcolonial work, I turn to some of the conditions operative in the academy (to name only the most attenuated site of "theory") in India as an exemplary instance. And, finally, since a critique of this kind demands a forfeit or stake by way of the affirmative gesture, I attempt a conclusion, in effect, by suggesting how our contemporary moral dilemmas may feed into a new intellectual discipline.

Rajeswari Sunder Rajan is a fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and visiting professor at George Washington University. She is the author of Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, and Postcolonialism (1993) and the editor of The Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India (1992).