Riddles of Belonging: India in Translation and Other Tales of Possession

Notes

297 n o t e s can the subaltern joke? (to open) 1. While this is an oft-repeated exchange attributed to Gandhi and a British reporter, it is difficult to find evidence of it in available documents. What is more, “British civilization” (or its British spelling, “civilisation”) is cited on the Web nearly as often as “Western civilization.” 2. The list is long, but most noteworthy are the accusations the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar made at the time: that the very caste-based Gandhism gaining popularity amounted to “the doom of the Untouchables.” Ambedkar, “Gandhism : The Doom of the Untouchables,” in Essential Writings, 149; excerpted from Mr. Gandhi and the Emancipation of the Untouchables, 274. Madhu Kishwar argues that Gandhi’s treatment of women was similarly patronizing: he emphasized their “non-violent temperament” and capacity for self-sacrifice, which resulted in women being cast in roles almost entirely “auxiliary and supportive” in the nationalist movement; Kishwar, “Gandhi on Women,” 54. 3. See, e.g., Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory, 17–22; and Young, Postcolonialism , 337–59. 4. Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 118–21. Relevant here is Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s discussion of “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles ” in Between Men, 21–27. 5. Freud, Jokes, 118–19. 6. Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, 36. 7. Marcel O’Gorman, E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities , 22 and 23. 8. Ibid., 5 and 4. 9. Thanks go to Deirdre de la Cruz for her insights into Kittler’s work for my project, especially her whimsical, provocative suggestion that I think about what it might mean to “surf” the ocean of the streams of stories. 10. Tufte, Visual Explanations, 121. 11. For a helpful introduction on authorship, the creative commons, and the contradictions of current reinterpretations of intellectual property rights, 298 Notes to pages 7–9 see Nimus, “Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons.” More basically, see the Creative Commons Web site at http://creativecommons.org, as well as the post, “CC in Review: Lawrence Lessig on Compatibility,” at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5709. Lessig has also written a helpful post, “Commons Misunderstandings” on his own blog: http://lessig.org/ blog/2007/12/commons_misunderstandings_asca.html. To think about the creative commons as a dynamic, fluid network, see also Lessig, The Future of Ideas; as well as his own experiments with the creative commons, as seen in the wiki version, “Code v2” (http://www.socialtext.net/codev2/index.cgi), which in his Preface to the 2nd ed. he calls “a translation of an old book,” Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace. 12. Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, explores this inherent contradiction with particular elegance. 13. “Sly Civility,” in Bhabha, Location of Culture, 93–101. 14. Here I am drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent insistence that we include the sensuality of collective meaning-making in our understanding of “sense.” See “An Exempting from Sense,” in Nancy, Dis-enclosure, 121–28. Nancy writes of “sense as signifying, sense as in the five senses, and sense as direction”; ibid., 123. My thanks to Helen Tartar for pointing me to this reference. 15. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 93. Bhabha, following Jacques Derrida, describes such a colonial encounter as being waged between the forces of writing and the forces of speech; this example should persuade us to distinguish more particularly between performances that are fixed and those that are flexible . Mayaram, Against History, Against State, 4–6, makes a similar argument with regard to Rajasthani historical accounts. 16. See, e.g., Shaikh, “Interview with Amartya Sen”; and Guha, “Using and Abusing Gandhi.” 17. While the work of Lydia Liu and Gayatri Spivak has been particularly influential, Melas, All the Difference in the World, xii, offers a succinct and extremely relevant formulation that draws attention to the paradoxical advancement of the figure of common ground: “comparison, under these conditions, involves a very particular form of incommensurability: space offers a ground of comparison, but no basis of equivalence.” 18. Liu, Translingual Practice, 20. 19. For the connection between Freud’s own critical practice and institutions of colonialism, I work from the argument of Khanna, Dark Continents. She does not, however, address the question of humor. I should add that while Freud does not mention race, nationality, or ethnicity in his discussion of the joking triangle, besides gender, his analysis does include distinctions based on class. 20. The figure of “Mother India” becomes the site first...