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Marxism and Nationalism: Ideology and Class Struggle in Premchand's Godan

1989; Duke University Press; Issue: 23 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/466421

1527-1951

Michael Sprinker,

Cuban History and Society

Why study the cultures of the non-Western world? And how, as products of the advanced capitalist metropole, conditioned by the cultural and political heritage of European imperialism, can we investigate these distinctive cultures and the historical societies that sustained them? If such an undertaking is currently necessary indeed, I believe, it is imperative for progressive intellectuals in the West, it is by no means certain that such inquirers as ourselves are well-positioned to carry out the requisite research. Putting aside the simple fact of our general and shameful ignorance of the native languages themselves not to mention the cultural, social, and political histories attendant upon specific texts for with sufficient diligence this can always be remedied, there remains the more fundamental difficulty of, as it were, shedding our own social skins and confronting the objects of our study, if not exactly with Rankean agnosticism, then at least with a measure of objectivity that could yield valid, nontrivial empirical scientific results. It has often enough been objected by non-Western intellectuals that we in the West have no right to speak for them, and that at a minimum we are obliged to allow them to speak for themselves first, to listen and learn, before we undertake to study and in some sense appropriate these cultures for our own scientific inquiries. Some such lesson is at least one legacy of the recent work of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Abdul Jan Mohamed, and Ariel Dorfman, as more distantly of Fanon, Cesaire, Biko, and Neruda. It would be foolish at this juncture to deny the force and utility of cultural nationalism, the more so since we see its political value in some of the most dynamic revolutionary movements of recent years, in Sandinista Nicaragua, in Cuba, and in the legacy of Black Consciousness within the African National Congress.