Approaching Global Unity of Voice: The Postcolonial Paradox!
❤️Smile and Dance Happy at the Borderless Rainbow World of Writers!❤️
Is the Silent Majority Forever Quiet?
Is starts with mindfulness. . .
❤️Buy me some coffee or a book,❤️
❤️ For I am a cancer survivor twice, but now am broke, my hospital bills and other bills are so high: THANK YOU!❤️
❤️AKA > > > Dr. Wayne Stein, retired disabled professor, Ted Talk Speaker!
Clap 50 times, stay at least 35 seconds, highlight some, sing some, smile some, and comment some: Thank you so much, for you are the greatest reader of all time!
Notes from a Retired Professor, Dancing in the Sunlight. . . Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash
Voices of the Subaltern in Literature!
I grew up outside of America, for I lived in Asia and Europe as a kid, strangely I ended up a literature teacher at a university after getting bored with math and computer science.
When I first started to teach World Literature some 30 years ago, the books were just European, American, and Biblical stories, and I thought:
That Isn’t the Entire World ? . . .
. . . so I quickly required that they read additional readings from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and I started to find out what scholars from places like Harvard and Oxford had to tell me about how we are brainwashed and how we overlook the world.
We Are the World: Are We?
Antonio Gramsci’s (1891–1937) used the term “subaltern” to represent the oppressed, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” questions the claims of the Ranajit Guhas’ Subaltern Studies in the 1980’s and how it “speaks” for the Indian voices once silenced; however, what I discovered was an academic . . .
War of Worlds: A Battle of Words
Instead, some thought that the anti-imperialistic voices were merely fake and false voices, so some critics attacked those ethnic writers as being Western and not able to write about the Other.
Even in our own country, ethnic writers like . . .
Alice Walker (African American),
N. Scott Momaday (Native Indian),
Amy Tan (Asian American) . . .
have been attacked as being non-authentic, false, and not representing the true voices of their ethnicities.
TOO WHITE or Sold Out
Critics complained and ranted that they win awards because they write what the critics and public want to hear about ethnicity, and they have sold out.
That hurt because I heard that all my life
about myself, for I am a mixture of Han-Chinese and European.
Therefre, for some, those who are submerged in the Subaltern, those of the third world (the majority of the earth’s population), are forever silen.
Those who have the chance to write and publish, often trained in the Western perspective, replicate Western values, Western literary forms and Western traditions.
Are we reading about the values of the ethnic majority?
You judge, or are we just listening to the voice of the master narratives?
When I went to university, I found that we seemed to be trapped in a time warp and that many of the important authors from different nations had yet to be translated.
Let us read an excerpt from Rudyard Kipling’s powerful poem:
White Man’s Burden (1899)
Take up the White Man’s burden
Send forth the best ye breed
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild
Your new-caught sullen peoples
Half devil and half child.
Thank you for reading. . . .
I had the chance to meet Amy Tan in person, and it was an honor, for I was impressed with her books.
Share what you feel. Are these famous ethnic voices who become famous authentic?
Smile more to be more> > Photo by Michael Mims on Unsplash
