Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
Mukoma Wa Ngugi
I do not know if anyone outside of academia cares to know what Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is all about, or what Derrida meant by hospitality. But assuming three or four of us can agree that Spivak’s essay is about who speaks for whom, that in fact she is taking a swipe at the deconstructionists who in their eagerness to understand the world claimed agency for the oppressed where there was none, then she is raising an important question – who speaks for whom? The same goes for Derrida’s questions around Hospitality, especially in an age when the United States’ debate surrounding immigration rages on, and countries like Kenya boast internally displaced refugees and refugees proper. Is a hospitality that does not differentiate in terms of nationality, ethnicity or race, or indeed along familial lines, possible? These are important questions – as important as those raised by Stephen Hawking about the nature of our universe in the A Brief History of Time – written for people like me, people outside his field. We do have important and useful things to say about the world. But we need to find two languages: ‘specialist speak’ to use in the privacy of our conferences and the other, ‘worldspeak,’ when we are out in the world. Having demolished the bridges between the ivory tower and those outside the fort, we must rebuild them. Take the divide between the campus and the town it inhabits; think about the tension and the amount of energy and money it takes to keep the ‘philistine townies’ out. Think of what it means when we teach our students about service in the community and in the same breath remind them to close the gates behind them. It is not just a question of “trickle-out-and-in” economics of knowledge; we need engagement that sees the community as one of the many but equal partners in the production of knowledge. It is not enough to reserve a few seats for the community when we invite Angela Davis, Toni Morrison or Sonia Sanchez to campus. The reason we keep inviting them to our campuses in the first place is because of their service to the community – to ask them what it is they have learned from that interaction. The events and conferences that bring together today’s great living thinkers and writers should be held, at least in part, out in the community centers. Why not? If we do that, the next time the state thinks about gutting area studies for political capital, those same members of the community can say, we know the work of these literary scholars, even though it does not put food on my table last night. Now I do feel that I can go out into the world and be in the words of Firdaus in Woman Below Point Zero, “be harder than life.” Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 |
Essays in this Forum
Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
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