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The toxic postcolonial diva



I will begin this blog post with a story. 

This is the story of a Brown woman, Shilpa, who had migrated to the U.S. on a spousal visa, married to a newly minted Assistant Professor, Sanjeev, who had just started his job as an Assistant Professor at a Research Intensive University. Shilpa, an artist, who worked in a non-profit organization, making puppets and putting together puppetry exhibitions on themes such as caste violence and dowry and social change, gave up that identity as an art worker and a change worker to travel to a new land and make home. In over two decades, she reared her three children, who were now all gone to College. Pushpa decided that she wanted to turn to her art work. 

With her three children away most of the time, this was the time for Shilpa to return to an identity and passion that anchored her journey the first twenty-three years of life. 

She decided to look up for opportunities at the University where Sanjeev worked. 

Browsing through the University website, she came across many interesting talks organized by the Center for Postcolonial Studies. Diaspora, distance, alienation, hybridity, borders, concepts discussed in the talks made her come alive. These conversations made her connect with the many conversations she had left behind over two decades ago. These talks offered registers for imagining and engaging questions of identity, questions she could deeply relate to as an uprooted migrant.

One such talk really drew her attention. Offered by the celebrated postcolonial academic Reema Rajan, the talk promised to cover marginality, gender and digital technology. Shilpa was very excited to attend this talk as Professor Reema is the celebrated icon of digital postcolonial studies. Her widely read books offer profound insights into digital negotiations in the desi diaspora.

The talk Shilpa attended though seemed disjointed and she could not understand most of the topics covered in it. So she decided to raise her hand to ask a question, looking at Professor Reema to explain some of the concepts that were being thrown around.

In response, Professor Reema seemed to get angry. She looked with much condescension at Shilpa, and asked her, "So what is it that you study really?"

Shilpa hesitated. Her eyes to the floor in the brave attempt to hold back tears, she replied "I don't really study anything. Actually. I am not a student here."

Reema Rajan, the expert of gender and postcolonial theory, responded, "This is why we have actual classrooms where these basic concepts are taught. Nowadays, anybody thinks they can walk into a serious conversation and ask these basic questions."

Rajan turned her gaze elsewhere, "Next question."

Shilpa stood there for a few seconds, composed herself, her eyes stuck to the floor, and sat down.

Postcolonial divadom, much like its master White toxic masculinity, thrives on its incessant attacks on the soul. 

Trained by the White colonial masters (mostly British in the anglicized schools of training in postcolonies), the toxicity of postcolonial divadom thrives on the belittling of the soul. It uses its pedantic access to the White text to offer high theory, entrenched by its upper caste, upper class privilege. 

Postcolonial divadom thrives on the production of insecurity in Brownness through its claims to high theory. It knows it must make tall claims through the throwing together of big words and high theory so it can secure its position in the White academe. It must be even better than its White masters in the placing together of muti-syllables. Its vacuous a-theoretical claims can be dressed to look high theory, and work at the same time to put down Brown/Black scholars who don't have access to the structures of language training in the Anglicized academe. And of course, postcolonial divadom will find some vacuous word salad to dismiss this claim as a-theoretical, as mediocre, as unable to comprehend postcolonial theory or have done my proper postcolonial readings.

Postcolonial divadom often takes the ugliness of Whiteness and produces it to perfection, working to create new casteist classist walls around itself so it could sustain its production as the new "in" lexicon.


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