Subjects That Matter by Namita Goswami;

Author:Namita Goswami;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2019-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

VII. Culture Talk: Or Else

This reading brings the intricate nexus of nature, culture, and history to bear on Paul Gilroy’s rendition of a living postcoloniality. Our elementally enmeshed life manifests how the world as it is disallows the entrenchment of rigid categories: nature refuses our historic demand for planetary exceptionalism, and is coming back for us. A continuation of the reified consumption of an increasingly inhospitable planet serves as a historical alibi for the “virtual realities” (32) of postcolonial anti-racist progress. As colonialism and slavery were justified by desecrating the vanquished as indistinguishable from nature, we are the memory of how culture appears as an impregnable constraint, which boxes “in” and cuts nature “off”; we the other of nature left out/side of history must go back to an/other time frame—where it all began, “in the beginning,” to dismantle our genesis machine for an apocryphal genealogy of our cultural relationship to nature. In a globalized world, therefore, using nature to signify irreducible human difference is perhaps one tradition we all have in ourselves, and we can all hate it properly (Adorno, Minima 52).15

E.O. Wilson warns, “Overall, humanity has altered this planet as profoundly as our considerable powers permit” (The Creation 17). Existing as though it were a force of nature, culture’s cloying, self-same ipseity may be disturbed by the mass extinction event currently taking place. Culture talk for the sake of a species obligation demands that we find it within ourselves to think the threshold of our historical era, the “historical extreme,” “the ultimate, the absolutely unthinkable” (Adorno, Metaphysics 98, 115).16 To carry out this responsibility, a planetary postcoloniality asks how we can respect somebody else’s life when we deprive ourselves of all yearning for it (in order to live).17 But, functionality’s nothingness can be crossed (out) by self-preservation’s beingness; and so, I end with a respectful note to Professor Gilroy that the elephant in the room is an animal.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.