Clearing a Space: Essays on Literature, India, and Modernity (review)

Abstract

Chaudhuri, Amit. Clearing Space: Essays on Literature, India, and Modernity. 2008. Oxford: Peter Lang. $19.99sc. 330 pp.Over last thirty years or so, phenomenon known as has palpably recast character and comportment of research in humanities across Anglophone world. Amit Chaudhuri's Clearing Space is sustained offensive against terms of engagement that have proliferated under aegis of this disciplinary makeover, and which in his view has practically excluded any debate that does not draw from new intellectual dispensation. Chaudhuri is especially exercised by discursive elisions effected in academy's embrace of this trend through early 1990s.The way Chaudhuri tells it, studies in India today operates either on faux or foreign premises, although he is at pains to clarify that under scrutiny here are ideological and not geographical moorings. If one tries to locate where turn occurred in Anglo-American academy location that crucially underwrites rationale for turn - then very clearly, Chaudhuri asserts, took place in, and challenged, old centers and discourses of liberal and humanities. It represented... decisive reclamation and privileging of 'popular culture,' both as source of value and an area of study, over mainly 'high' preoccupations of humanities till that time (15). When it comes to India, however, no comparable dialectical site is as readily identifiable because turn occurred elsewhere. Or, to quote Chaudhuri, too largely occurred in academy: Indian 'cultural studies' developed as a rewriting and extension of British and American studies by defining its relationship to humanities through specific lens and angle- that Indianness, post-coloniality, and popular culture were, under its rubric, conflated into single entity or engine recuperated against humanist assumptions of liberal arts (15). This running together of disparate constituencies, agendas, and interests not only narrows range of scholarship in studies by effacing the post-colonial 'high' cultural (16) but, more tremblingly for Chaudhuri, warps same by erasing between 'high' and 'low' that is not, at once, narrative of tension between post-colonial and imperial, or for that matter, between and Western (16). It is in such reductive, and by now prescribed, scene of engagement that Clearing Space seeks to secure some room for an alternative problematic to vet course and credentials of modern literary-cultural production.In terms of content, book offers twenty-five essays (plus an introduction), which have all, with couple of exceptions, been published previously in different venues over last few years. They are organized in two parts: part one, Towards Poetics of Modern, has writings that are largely theoretical and generic in treatment, while second part, Traditions, Alternative Readings, assembles pieces more singularly focused on various authors and their works. Together, essays advance convincing argument against shibboleths of postcolonial theory, nationalism, and globalization, which currently monopolize discussions on contemporary literature.That's 'negative,' evacuative function articulated in Chaudhuri's title. The more 'positive' intervention consists in rousing pitch writings make for modernity as key for shifting focus, [for] remapping history (12) of literary-cultural praxis in, and on, India.Clearing Space presents modernity as powerful creator of myths, fictions, and artistic practice, a phase in our history, a site under threat, a mutating sign all rolled into one, and then some (12). This conception of modernity is variously explored through: national Gothic; political vs. …