Between Identity And Location: The Cultural Politics Of Theory

What is thinking and what is theory? What is theoretical thinking and how does such a thought find its balance between specialist erudition and commonsensical intention? How is the relationship of theory to itself mediated by its practical commitment to instrumental Reason? What is the connection between theory and the proliferating discourses of "postality"? Is academic-institutional theory capable of recognizing the reality of a world structured in dominance: between the West and the Reast, between the so called first and third worlds? How do the politics of location and subject positionality complicate and problematize the valence between representation? How do intellectual and pedagogical paradigms function in a global world that is simultaneously expanding and shrinking; between homes and locations, nationalisms and diasporas, ways of being and modes of knowing?
About Author :
R. Radhakrishnan is Professor of English, Comparative Literature and Asian American Studies at the University of California-Irvine. He is the author of Theory is an Uneven World (2003), History, the Human, and the World Between (2007). He is the editor of Theory as Variatian (2006) and co-editor with Susan Koshy of Desi Diasporas (forthcoming). He is also the author of a volume of poems in Tamil. He translates contemporary Tamil fiction into English-his translation of Jayakantan's novel Sila Neranal, Sila Manithargal ( Some People, Some Situations) will be published by Orient Longman.
Contents :
Acknowledgments Introduction The Changing Subject and the Politics of Theory Toward an Effective Intellectual: Foucault or Gramsci? Ethnic Identity and Poststructuralist Difference Culture as Common Ground: Ethnicity and Beyond Canonicity and Theory: Toward a Poststructuralist Pedagogy Neogtiating Subject Positions in an Uneven World Cultural Theory and the Politics of Location Postcoloniality and the Boundaries of Identity Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity Is the Ethnic "Authentic" in the Diaspora? Conjunctural Identities, Academic Adjacencies Diaspora, Hybridity, Pedagogy Index