Gayatri Spivak, "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Culture Studi...

Spivak begins her essay “scattered speculations on the question of cultural studies” by discussing the appropriation of ecology by dominant discourse on environmental issues, in the First World. She argues that the existing paradigm favors the North and the elites of the South, leading to rural ecological problems being perceived as peripheral and precapitalist. The author also discusses the expansion of the subjectship of Capital, which can lead to self-perpetuating discourse at the mercy of forces of reaction.

Spivak shares stories from Bangladesh, where the rehabilitation of disenfranchized migrants would help forge links with the bottom layers of society in postcolonial countries. However, she disagrees with this view, arguing that the trajectories of the Eurocentric migrant poor and the postcolonial rural poor are discontinuous and may be opposed through the chain-linkage that we are encouraged to ignore.

Spivak emphasizes the importance of examining the appropriation of ecology by the dominant discourse on environmental issues. By critiquing development ideology and the marginalization of the rural subaltern, we can better understand the complex relationship between the migrant poor and the postcolonial rural poor. By acknowledging the risks associated with these narratives, we can work towards a more inclusive and critical understanding of the complexities of globalization and the struggles of the marginalized.

The text explores the concept of the Constitution as an instrument of higher lawmaking through Popular Mandate, arguing that constitutional victory operates within a calculus that does not correspond to the possibility or guarantee of justice in the name of any personalized picture of a collection of subjects called "We the People." A constitution can only operate when the person has been coded into rational abstractions manipulable according to the principle of reason. The narrative guarantee of justice in the name of a collection of subjects is perennially offered as legitimation to the people who will secure the "Popular Mandate." The authority behind this narrative legitimation is secured with reference to an origin-story: the original documents left by the Founding Federalists, Reconstruction Republicans, and New Deal Democrats.

The author suggests that an innovative and flexible text for use such as the US Constitution can only be given what Jean-François Lyotard has called a paralogical legitimation, which provides occasion for morphogenetic innovation. However, the more accurate guarantee, not of justice as the expression of a general will of We the People but of a persistent critique of originary legitimations, by the very people who supply the Popular Mandate for the electoral machinery, can be precariously fabricated if the paralogical is kept in mind.

Transnational Culture Studies aims to understand the complex relationship between Europe and America in the context of national discourse. By examining the Ottoman Empire, one can see parallel but highly differentiated formations developing in Mediterranean and Western Europe, and the Ottoman Empire on the other hand. Contemporary scholars argue that the economic formations of late eighteenth-century Western Europe began to shift the balance within the Ottoman Empire, leading to religious nationalism and a "failed originary moment" in the United States and India.

The author discusses the rise of nationalism in the West, focusing on secularism without moralistic fervor and the impact of world trade on the region's discursive formation. They argue that the contingency in the narrativeization of history should not be interpreted as the Laws of Motion of History, but rather as a contrast between the circumstances contingent upon two great monotheisms – Christianity and Islam – in the possibility of their reinscription as secularism.

The Khilafat movement in India (1918-25) was an anti-imperialist nationalist attempt at consolidating the minority rights of Islam in India. In the sphere of decolonization, European-style nationalism was on the agenda. The Khilafat movement supported the rise of Mustafa Kemal, the creator of'modern Turkey', but it was abolished by Kemal's Constitution in early 1924. For the Indians, after a negotiated Independence in 1947, Western European codes and English Common Law offered models of origin.

In the Turkish case, a simulated alien origin or source appears politically and philosophically cognizable, facing a terrain reterritorialized in response to the global release of industrial capital. The ideological vision of a Turkish 'nation' now effaces the incessantly negotiated multinationality that was the Ottoman Empire because that can no longer be recognized as multi-nationality.
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Spivak focuses on the 'free Turk', arguing that the good people of these Colonies in whose name the representatives sign the American Declaration of Independence do not strictly speaking exist. However, they are required to produce the authority for a Declaration which gives them being. This undecidability between a performative structure and a constative structure is required to produce the sought-after effect.

The distinction between the US and Turkish cases lies in the area of the origin from which the new nation separates itself. The Turkish Constitution separates itself from its own past, or rather it secures a separation already inaugurated by the Ottoman Constitution of 1876.

Culture studies must constantly risk (though not flaunt) a loss of specialism, as the idea that the founding of agency is seen as the birth of a new man or woman, celebrating political independence, comes to be seen as an end in itself.

The debate over the teaching of the canon is crucial as there cannot be a general theory of canons. Canons are the condition of institutions and the effect of institutions, and they secure institutions as institutions secure canons. The canon, such as the Bible, provides a clear-cut example of this. To canonize new entries into the canon, single-author courses must be removed from the English major curriculum and make room for the co-ordinated teaching of the new entries.

The matter of the literary canon is actually a political matter: securing authority. In order to secure authority, we sometimes have to engage in scrupulous versions of 'doctrinaire gesture polities'. However, in the double-take that the daily administration of that authority entails, there can be no 'knowledge' in political practice. Political practice involves the calculation of effect, possibilities, and results of political action, which rests on political relations within the institutional network of United States tertiary education.

The text explores the literature of gender, sexuality, and homosexuality in the context of the American literary canon, highlighting the importance of understanding the diverse range of writers, including women, women of color, gays, lesbians, Afro-America, immigrants, ethnicity, working-class literature, workingclass women, non-Western literature, and theory. The author argues that there is no shortage of material for studying the literature of gender-differentiated homosexuality in the canon, as it continues to complicate and supplement the network of literary production.

The restoration and insertion of the white-majority feminist canon is a matter of correcting and altering the established image-structure line of representation, as if it restrained the garment of the body politic. The literature of slavery, struggle, freedom, and social production is different from the narratives of migrant ethnicity inscribed on the body of something called "America."

The author warns against the undergraduate teaching of post-structuralism, arguing that it breeds recuperative analogies or preprogrammed hostility toward post-structuralism within the institutional calculus. Instead, the text suggests returning to the English major, excited about learning to read the diversity of the new canon: women's literature, black women's literature, Afro-America, gendered homosexuality, migrant ethnicity, and the exploited in struggle.

The author argues that the old canon has sometimes unintentionally made the straight white Christian man of property the ethical universal. To challenge this, the author suggests that doctoral students should be educated in theory and the use of theory in educating educators. The goal is not only to expand the canon with a counter-canon but also to dethrone canonical methods in literary criticism and social production.

The author suggests that a general acquaintance with world literature outside of Europe should be part of the general undergraduate requirement, and a one-semester senior seminar should be shared with the terminal MA to share the difficulties and triumphs of translation in Asian, Latin American, Pacific, and African studies. This would fill out an English major better by understanding the limits of the language.

The author warns that the institutional imperatives for breaching the imperium of English cannot be fully developed within English departments. Institutes and curricula for a historically sophisticated transnational study of culture have become an item on the agenda, helping to undo disciplinary boundaries and clear a space for study in a constructive way.

Cultural studies focuses on the negotiation between national, global, historical, and contemporary diasporic aspects. It is essential to anthropologize the West and study the various cultural systems of Africa, Asia, Asia Pacific, and the Americas as if peopled by historical agents.

To teach culture studies, it is crucial to move from high tech to humanism and learn and teach how to distinguish between "internal colonization" and the various different heritages or operations of colonization in the rest of the world. The new culture studies must displace this opposition by keeping nation and globe distinct and taking a moratorium on cultural supremacy as an unquestioned springboard.

Educators must educate themselves in effective interdisciplinary teaching, asking questions about how models of reasoning can be taken as culture-free, help and explanation can be both culture-specific and objective, and how these questions can remain relevant across disciplines.