This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is about Dr. Namita Goswami. She is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Indiana State University. Her work combines continental philosophy and postcolonial, critical race, and feminist theory. She is the author of Subjects That Matter: Philosophy, Feminism, and Postcolonial Theory (SUNY 2019). She is also co-editor (with Maeve O’Donovan and Lisa Yount) of Why Race and Gender Still Matter: An Intersectional Approach (Pickering & Chatto, 2014). She is currently working on a book on Gayatri Spivak.
What is your work about?
Drawing on continental philosophy, postcolonial criticism, critical race theory, and African-American and postcolonial feminisms, Subjects That Matter offers postcoloniality as a model for philosophical practice when postcoloniality is understood as the pursuit of heterogeneity, that is, of a non-antagonistic understanding of difference.
Postcolonialism draws from a variety of traditions (phenomenology, hermeneutics, structuralism, genealogy, deconstruction, etc.) that conceive of heterogeneity in a plurality of ways (e.g. otherness, alterity, the to-come, the negative dialectic). How does your work fit in with these traditions and conceptions of otherness?
Yes, like all traditions, postcolonialism builds on and collaborates with different bodies of knowledge. In terms of how postcolonialism is received, Eurocentrism renders postcolonial theory either entirely derivative or asks postcolonial theory to concoct the “new” whole cloth—a demand that ignores how west and non-west are irreducibly co-implicated. My project, however, attempts to understand postcoloniality as a historically hard won distinct conceptual accomplishment. If the particular concentration of understanding known as the concept is at the core of a Eurocentric sense of exceptionalism, then I take the conceptual turn to provide an understanding of the philosophical in different terms. I define postcoloniality as the striving for a non-antagonistic understanding of difference, a simple definition which, with all its utopic implications, clashes with the violent history of colonialism and neocolonialism and creates a sort of ironic and melancholic stage for the readings the book conducts. When postcoloniality is understood in this way, it is Adorno’s negative dialectics that become a postcolonial movement of thought as negative dialectics convey and uphold the heterogeneous as inimical to the inexorable machinery of identity and difference.
Who has influenced this work the most?
Since I have always been an interdisciplinary scholar, this is a very difficult question. In this particular book, I think Gayatri Spivak, Theodor Adorno, Barbara Christian, and Hortense Spillers have had a considerable impact. There is so much to be said about each of them, but one way they have influenced my work involves the sincerity with which they proceed in their endeavors. They take for granted that what we are doing is not about careerism and playing the Great Game for what seem to non-academics to be very low stakes. Their love of their subject matter comes through, which, in turn, enables a form of truth-telling that reminds us of how small our worlds actually are even as we would like to think of ourselves as social justice warriors who are progressive, liberal, woke, etc. This is not to say that the battles we wage are insignificant. One makes a difference where one finds oneself, and the resistance we face demonstrates how our struggles are not trivial. These writers’ genuine love for their vocations (in my encounter with their work) allows them to avoid the kind of cloying, entitled, judgmental over-reach that comes from taking oneself too seriously.
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
Being an interdisciplinary scholar from the start, and having had the privilege of learning from groundbreaking scholars in my various fields (what I call my excellent brilliant woman karma) such as Chandra Mohanty, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Deepika Bahri, and Cynthia Willett, I often have wondered why Eurocentrism’s practitioners spend so much time and energy on categorizing (and thereby hierarchizing) where a perspective comes from when we should be focused on what the perspective can teach us about the subject matter at issue. The fact is that if one is interested in understanding power, then one can read Foucault, Nietzsche, Derrida (among others), but one can also read Patricia Hill Collins, Marcus Garvey, Kumkum Sangari, etc. To do so does not sully the philosophical enterprise but enables it in ways one cannot predict. This is not to say that everyone should become an interdisciplinary scholar, but perhaps we can resist politicizing the philosophical task at hand by unthinkingly dismissing other conceptual frameworks or domesticating them in order to maintain a hegemonic identitarian stance (such as not recognizing African-American or postcolonial feminism as a conceptual framework at all). One need not be always talking about the rich tradition of European thought to be doing philosophy.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
In this book, I draw on continental philosophy, postcolonial criticism, critical race theory, and African American and postcolonial feminisms to offer postcoloniality as a model for philosophical practice. I understand postcoloniality as the pursuit of heterogeneity, that is, of a non-antagonistic understanding of difference. Recognizing that philosophy, feminism, and postcolonial theory share a common concern with the concept of heterogeneity, I demonstrate how postcoloniality empowers us to engage more productively the relationships between these disciplines. This focus on heterogeneity is then set against climate change, as frame for the ongoing and devastating loss of heterogeneity in the living world, in order to allow the nonidentitarian value of these disciplines to emerge. A force multiplier, climate change puts the lie to Eurocentrism as heterogeneity is the very basis upon which terrestrial life, human civilization, and human thought depend. Instead of a comparative analysis of climate change discourse in these disciplines, I hope to reinvigorate heterogeneity as a tenet and tool by philosophically investigating how certain strands of postcolonial criticism, critical race theory, and African-American and postcolonial feminisms operate under the same nature and culture dualism as the philosophical paradigms they critique. With climate change challenging the standing, roles, and meanings of all disciplines, especially in the humanities, philosophy, feminism, and postcolonial theory must accompany each other for the sake of the very heterogeneity that makes them subjects that matter.
The connection between climate change and identity is not much explored, but it’s certainly worthy of study. Can you elaborate on the effects climate change has on identity? Are there new identities it fosters or old ones that it reestablishes (for the latter, I’m wondering if the danger of climate change may be reenergizing various nationalisms)?
In the second part of the book, I am less concerned with identity as an epistemological strategy of particularization than I am with rejuvenating heterogeneity as ideal and instrument from within the catastrophic frame/arena of anthropogenic climate change. As such, the book’s aspirational trajectory seeks to confound and limit our habitual disciplinary lexicons by remaining “grounded in the subject matter” (Adorno’s phrase). Because there is so much excellent work available on climate change and its ramifications for nationalism, its racially disparate consequences, etc. I focused my contribution elsewhere, which is to demonstrate how postcoloniality [enmeshed with the forces that have led to the climate crisis let alone the ongoing catastrophe itself] is intrinsic to a philosophical understanding of difference. At issue is whether our understanding of postcoloniality as the striving for a non-antagonistic understanding of difference is adequate for a historical moment defined by 1) a staggering loss of biological heterogeneity amidst the ongoing and further anticipated devastation of species-life with the physical environment and 2) an existential threat to human civilization writ-large. By bringing these disparate conceptual frameworks together within the present reality of climate change, I suggest that the nature/culture dualism—that is, the exegetically encountered moment in the text when heterogeneous life is domesticated by a concept meant to understand living—cannot enable the self-reflection and proportional footstep necessary (of course, at this moment, too little, too late) to grasp the possible impossibility of our self-preservation as a species.
What effect do you hope your work will have?
I believe that Subjects That Matter attempts to shift the burden of proof. Eurocentrism relegates minority traditions to a diagnostic and/or corrective standpoint to prevent their general implications from playing a critical and transformative role in how we understand subjectivity and agency. The texts that one could claim constitute the continental European tradition are not the issue, for they continue to provide ample opportunities for rational and humane exegesis. Instead of a diagnostic and/or corrective standpoint, which de facto renders minority traditions as marginal and belated, a systemic change is crucial for philosophy to be a vibrant discipline going forward. This entails our recognizing these traditions’ claims to the constructive frame rather than consolidating ourselves via allegedly countenancing minority critique.
For example, I remember reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved in one of Cynthia Willett’s graduate seminars at Emory. A fellow graduate student commended the book for teaching her about black women. I asked her what the text taught her about herself and the human condition. After all, if we can see ourselves in continental philosophy’s sacred texts, regardless of the personal, cultural, historical differences, then, as texts, minority works simply must facilitate similar glimpses, and so merit similar close reading. To offer another example, I had a colleague once who fancied himself as examining death philosophically. He came to observe my introductory philosophy class close to the end of the semester. I happened to be teaching Beloved, which he dismissed as not philosophy. Ostensibly, if your subject matter is death, and you are visiting an introductory philosophy course centered on death, then perhaps the scholarly approach would be to privilege the subject matter and learn what Beloved (and US slavery) can teach us about death. In that context, that is, per one’s own claimed project, saying Beloved is not philosophy (and that students must learn the European tradition “first” before “critiques” of that tradition) is the worst form of identity politics. In the 21st century, such a categorical dismissal of Morrison’s relevance is simply astounding.
Thus, my hope is that my work might remind Eurocentrism’s practitioners that it is incumbent upon them to explain how their work is philosophical when they do not have the cultural competency necessary to have an adequate understanding of difference. Like many of the scholars I read in this book, I marvel at how certain hegemonic strands of continental philosophy exclude most of the world yet presume to be the standard-bearers of what counts as the philosophical.
Do you see any connections between your professional work and personal life?
While I have concerns about the framing of this question, the question is also incredibly useful because it allows me to make what I consider to be a critical philosophical point. Sometimes I feel as though the book tells my own story of experiencing vile and pernicious forms of racism, sexism, xenophobia (I am Indian and do not have a British accent, which apparently ameliorates one’s third-worldliness), and classism (the aspirational civilizational loyalties to Europe I have witnessed among some American continental philosophers) in the academy. But, the book also has nothing to do with my own experience. It is a culmination of things I have been thinking about for a long time now. In a sense, it registers real sorrow at the gratuitous cruelties inflicted by those who confuse the stellar strut of an identitarian performance (What is philosophy? What counts as thinking? What qualifies as a conceptual framework?, etc.) amongst an extremely limited coterie with substantive insight.
I also think that we as academics must be disabused of the belief that we behave rationally, objectively, and fairly in our professional lives. When the stakes go beyond tokenism, and women of color fail to be convinced that we are minor, but operate instead with the presumption that we have a claim to the constructive frame, and so deserve to train upcoming generations of scholars, it is unbelievable what people are willing to say and do. I guess I am amazed at how rank hypocrisies can be used as bludgeons. For example, if one truly regards someone as an equal, then certain judgements, it seems, would be unthinkable—as they are when it comes to one’s white male and female colleagues. I once had a white female colleague liken me to a college freshman on “move-in day” when I, an immigrant, briefly showed my new office to my mother, who lives in India, upon picking up my keys. This was the first time we met! Another proclaimed my publications to be “gifts and favors” or actually written by my “husband” (also known as “white boy husband”). A senior white male colleague stated in writing in an official document that I have a “thinking problem”—not that he does not think my fields are philosophy or that he personally does not like or understand my published work and its style.
The point is that such stories are legion when it comes to women of color and constitute their still everyday experience; as such, these stories do not constitute something “personal” that is extra, as in coming from outside and informing the work. They are philosophical experiences, that is, they are intrinsic to being a philosopher for all parties involved. What do reason, evidence, standards, and criteria mean in this reality, especially when these are the ways that reason, evidence, standards, and criteria are made irrelevant for women of color thereby leaving them with the impossible task of having to prove negatives? How is one supposed to demonstrate achievement when all the metrics that have hitherto been used without issue are suddenly determined to be unsuitable, problematic, and unable to provide evidence of value—but just for this person? (And, of course, there is a lot to say about the screening curve for white men.)
And so, as Hortense Spillers states, we really are still struggling to define our object, as the rabid revulsion, cruelty, derangement, and malice we encounter can only be called racism on a lazy day. (Spillers begins Black, White, and in Color with her own experience in the academy when she started out.)
So often, there is a real divide between the values we speak about in our work and the academic ground game. I believe we need to be honest about what goes on mostly unabated in academic philosophy: how we play along to get our goodies but condemn someone else for caring enough about their career, their work and its values, to not let an injustice stand; how easily we are able to lie; how a white notion of collegiality and status are more important than calling out racism, etc.; how there is always another goodie to get, even when we are in secure positions; how we abide as an academic norm the phenomenon of predominantly white people telling other white people that they are (obviously) not racist and that claims of racism against them hurt those experiencing “real” racism (we might ask how we can know “real” racism—whatever that is—if we cannot even begin to fathom how we are being racist in the first place); how a modicum of institutional success by minority disciplines is often used against minorities because people know exactly what not to say when being racist, etc., precisely to get away with it under the auspices of the professional game. I think we need to reconsider what we understand as advocacy and alliance-building.
What’s next for you?
I’m currently writing a book on Gayatri Spivak, which is about two-thirds complete. It is rather remarkable that there are only three or four books that are devoted to her oeuvre. In the project, I resist providing an encyclopedic view or belaboring her influences such as Derrida, Kant, Marx, Freud, etc. Instead, in each chapter, I use one conceptual contribution made by Spivak to examine short stories, films, novels, etc. For example, some of the concepts I set to work are “originary queerness,” “planetarity,” “transnational literacy,” and “symbolic clitoridectomy” to show what they can do and what they mean. Unfortunately, despite Spivak’s considerable impact in multiple disciplines, I believe she is terribly under-read. I hope we conduct the generational work necessary to ensure that she continues to be studied, understood, and appreciated.
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The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
