Desi Consciousness: A Way of Thinking and Acting in the Writing of Gayatri Spivak

• In Event: 67.025 - Contested Liminalities, Erasures, Invisibility, and Hypervisibility: Global South Perspectives on De/Colonizing Social Context of Education

Abstract

Objectives
This paper explores the “Desi” elements of Gayatri Spivak’s scholarship as it emerges in her engagements, negotiations and confrontations with Western thought. I discuss the difficulties South Asian scholars face in naming themselves given that many express dis-ease with the colonial name, “South Asian,” assigned to them in the wake of a genocidal era of colonial partition (Sen, 2007). Vijay Prasad’s (2000) academic turn to the name Desi to sociologically and culturally qualify the situation of the diaspora represents a new scholarly generation’s efforts to inhabit a name that embodies Indian consciousness and attachments to parochial homelands or desh that precedes colonial rule and endures across the sub-continent. I argue that Spivak’s affective apprehension of Desi consciousness provides a model of postcolonial theorizing untethered to a politics of identity but rooted in a way of thinking that works at the borders of incommensurate histories, and a broken world that lies between self and other.

Perspectives
The postcolonial contributions of South Asian scholars have yet to find cohesion in educational studies. Part of the difficulty stems from these scholars’ difficulty with the nationalism of the name “South Asian,” as many find national, racial, ethnic and religious is unnecessary, unproductive, and impossible (Sen, 2007). Desi is an imperfect name, referring to one’s intimate situation of attachment, relation and existence to one’s place and people embodied in one’s way of thinking and acting in the world with others, and as such, the name Desi is lovingly called upon (dak nom) by South Asians, and turned to by scholars (Prasad, 2000).

Methods
This theoretical paper engages Desi consciousness in two identifiable instances of Spivak’s work known for staging confrontations between Western thought and its others. The first instance is in Spivak’s insertion of “precolonial Indic material” in her groundbreaking decolonizing/postcolonial essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The second is in her engagement of the goddess Devi in a museum exhibition in her essay “Moving Devi”. Spivak’s Desi posture supports her to conduct incisive acts and engagements of border thinking that brings other epistemologies into play in her relentless exposure of the fault lines, and limits of Western thought that continues to reproduce colonial structures of thinking, being, and acting in the world.

Conclusion/Significance
Along with bringing conceptual debates in South Asian scholarship to curriculum and educational studies, I will situate Spivak’s Desi consciousness or a way of thinking as critical to decolonizing social context of education. In Spivak’s capacity to work at the borders of Western and South Asian thought, she offers an agonistic model for generating new knowledge that comes from the productive space of incommensurability with a view of bringing recognition and reparation to epistemologies wounded by colonial imposition. Spivak (2013) shows that a Desi way of thinking is deeply connected to ways of life and that there is a pressing, planetary need to consider the ways in which epistemological traditions overlap, converse, repel and engage each other in the long histories of human interaction and endeavor in and outside education.

Author

• Aparna Rita Mishra Tarc, York University