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109 tri Spivak, the preeminent founder of the field of postcolonial studies, challenged the contemporary postcolonial academy to rethink strategy.1 Tracking how the postcolonial critique had come to establish itself as academic truth—and at what costs—Spivak traced the philosophical, anthropological, and historical underpinnings of postcolonial thought to its uneasy alliance with Cold War area studies and the emergence of transnational cultural studies in the present-day academy. The central aim of her book was to show that the postcolonial critic had become liable to reproducing the same imperialist legacy of inequality and violence between first and third worlds that she ostensibly sought to undo, indeed that certain reflexive and retrograde proofs and platitudes of imperialism had persisted in postcolonial criticism, even as the postcolonial project proposed to challenge those very postulates. Likening postcolonial practice to the same operative “information-retrieval approach” of imperialist discourse, Spivak underscored a particularly persistent Cold War motif, in which first-world literary agents repeat a foundational, imperialist trope of discovery, uncovering third-world documents in complicity with a native informant, and data-mining and decoding those documents in order to render them legible to the imperialist subjects of the first-world academy. Spivak’s complaint was that the postcolonial ratification of the emergent South by way of the ubiquitous category of “Third World literature ” had in fact failed to realize anything like intimate knowledge of the other.2 Rather, postcolonial studies, still imprinted with Cold War area studies, repeated the same uneven exchanges and failed intimacies between the first world and the third world that it sought to replace. As Spivak depicted it, the academic method that was in vogue operated somewhat like a Cold War spy mission, an informant’s project conceived in order to “deliver the emergence of a ‘South’ to provide proof of transnational cultural exchange,” but where little exchange took place save that Cold wAr intimACies Joan didion and the Critique of PostColonial reason kAren steiGmAn In her A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), Gaya5 110 Kare n s te iGm an self-congratulatory proof. Not a little unsettled to find her own work imbricated in this neocolonial, neo–Cold War method of literary espionage, Spivak noted that “it seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism,” and she noted a particular irony when her own words appeared to inform and secure that feminism’s “facts with a certain narcissism” (113–14). A Critique of Postcolonial Reason is thus part of Spivak’s ongoing effort to rethink the forms of intimacy and exchange at postcolonialism’s base; the book reanimates her recurrent question, how does the postcolonial feminist negotiate with the metropolitan feminist? It also renews her call for a strategic practice of intimacy. Rereading imperialism’s foundational texts with “critical intimacy,” as Spivak has suggested, offers the “challenge of deconstruction”: it is “not to excuse, but to suspend accusation . . . to examine if the protocols of [a] text can produce something that will generate a new and useful reading” of it (98). She continues, “Such a reading, as I have pointed out, is a ‘mistake,’ inappropriate to the text. Yet deconstructive approaches have suggested that every reading may be an upheaval parasitical to the text. Here I use the resources of deconstruction ‘in the service of reading’ to develop a strategy (rather than a theory) of reading matching the situation of reading that might lead to a literary critique of imperialism . . . a reading that, in a certain way, falls prey to its own critique, perhaps” (153). In other words, intimacy for Spivak produces upheaval, if not deliberate error; we might say that reading with critical intimacy produces a reading estranged from itself. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, for example, Spivak subjects her own foundational essays in postcolonial criticism to critical intimacy’s disfiguring and estranging practice: each chapter of that book rereads an earlier piece, re-elaborating and reframing it in order to resist the false intimacy that is the “condition and effect of received ideas,” even—or especially—if they are her own. Indeed , Spivak’s impatience with the calcified logic of postwar truths, what she calls the “done deal forever” of Cold War critique (113), instigated her strategy of intimacy as estrangement in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason; in Death of a Discipline, she extended the concept of reading with critical intimacy to produce a series of retakes on the originary imperialist reason of Cold War area studies...

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