Response and responsibility (before and after the ‘facts’). Postcolonial thoughts on ethical writing

Abstract

Let me begin by expressing my heartfelt thanks to Sarah Croucher, Audrey Horning, Tim Insoll and Peter van Dommelen for their thoughtful comments. It is not uncommon for academic critique to be seduced by the facility ofcriticism, to draw its impulse from what, with Freud, we might call the ‘narcissism of small differences’, and proceed with the obstinacy of the hatchet headed for the jugular . . . More artful, and far more difficult, is a form of engagement that gives more than it takes, that disputes but in the spirit of generous exchange. I feel that the respondents have accomplished precisely that. They have crafted a space of ‘hospitable’ discussion (cf. Derrida 2000), which rests on a double movement of ‘interruption’ (Westmoreland 2008): of their plane of thoughts, by bringing my article within the ambit of their conversations; and of my ideas, by making them a little less self-evident, a little less ‘at home’. This act of ‘making strange’ – when one's viewpoints acquire a different face as they are presented anew through the minds of others – is the cloth of which constructive dialogue is made.