Affiliation:
1. Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218;
Abstract
Taking my cue from two novels, Mohammad Hanif's A Case of Exploding Mangos and Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know, I posit that their respective senses of living in Pakistan or being from Bangladesh capture a shared intuition of not knowing enough to know oneself or one's place in the world. In this review, I ask, Can we speak of an inheritance of the colonial imperative to know when the need is not to know and rule others, but to know and rule oneself? Can we speak of an overturning or transfiguring of the colonial imperative to revise the central question for new nation-states to be, “Who are we, who have done all this”? Or, is that question too quickly dispossessed of agency and made to serve development goals and utilitarian ends? And if so, how are claims to self-knowledge asserted in the face of a constant arrogation of agency?
Subject
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Anthropology,Cultural Studies
Cited by
9 articles.
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