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What Use Is the Imagination?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jenny Sharpe
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In death of a discipline, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak attributes the emergence of postcolonial studies to an increase in Asian immigration to the United States following Lyndon Johnson's 1965 reform of the Immigration Act (3). I would like to resituate her genealogy of the field in order to consider the “ab-use,” or “use from below,” of the European Enlightenment she asks us to cultivate in her most recent book, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. To perform this move, I will suggest that postcolonial studies began more than one hundred years before the legislation Spivak names in what has become a founding document for the field. I am referring to Thomas Babington Macaulay's well-known 1835 minute on Indian education, which proposed the creation of “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect” (729). The class of Western-educated natives who would serve as liaisons between European colonizers and the millions of people they ruled came to be known in postcolonial studies as colonial subjects.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 129 , Issue 3 , May 2014 , pp. 512 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2014

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