Teaching of Balaji Rangannathan - Postcolonial Studies

On 19 August  to 21 August we had guest lectures on Postcolonial studies by Balaji Ranganathan. Dilip Barad sir also gave some pre lectures on Post colonial studies before the lectures of Balaji sir.

We have 4 units in Postcolonial Studies:

1. Black skin white mask
2. Imaginary Homeland
3. Orientalism
4. A Tempest

Sir started the first lecture with the first unit Black skin White mask by Frantz Fanon. This unit is divided in 7 chepters:

1. The Negro and Language
2. The woman of Colour and White man
3. The man of colour and White woman
4. The so-called dependency complex of the colonized
5. The lived experience of the Black man
6. The black man and psychology
7. The black man and Recognition

In first chapter talked about I ascribed a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. That is why I find it necessary to begin with this subject, which should provide us with one of the elements in the colored man’s comprehension of the dimension of the others. For it is implicate to speak is to exist absolutely for the other. The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. The middle class in the Antilles never speak Creole except to their servants. In school the children of Martini que are taught to scorn the dialect. One avoids Creolisms some families completely forbid the use of Creole, and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it. Historically, it must be understood that the Negro wants to speak French because it is the key that can open doors which were still barred to him fifty years ago.

In the second chapter: The woman of color  and the white man devoted to the relations between the woman of color and the European it is our problem to ascertain to what extent authentic love will remain unattainable before one has purged oneself of that feeling of inferiority or that Aldarian exaltation, that overcome pensation, which seem to be the indices of the black weltanschauung. For after all we have a right to be perturbed when we read in je Suis Martiniquaiser. “I should have liked to be married, but to a white man. But a woman of color is never altogether respectable in a white man’s eyes. Even when he loves her. I knew that. This passage which serves in a way as the conclusion of a vast delusion, prods one’s brain. Mayotte loves to a white man to whom she submits in everything. I am white; that is to say that I possess beauty and virtue, which have never been black. I am the color of the daylight. From the first this is how the problem appears to Mayotte-at the fifth year of her age and the third page of her book. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated , to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate. The first has only wants not only to turn white but also to avoid slipping back.

 In chapter seven : The Negro and Recognition, man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. 

On second day sir talked about Orientalism. Orientalism means which countries colonized by other colony or the countries of the East and specially East Asia. Then sir talked about “A tempest” by  Amie Cesaire. And also explained the difference between A Tempest and The Tempest.

On third day sir talked about Imaginary Homeland by Salman Rushdie. Essays: 

1. Attenborough’s Gandhi 
2. Commonwealth literature Does not Exist
3. New Empire within British
4. On Palestine

Salman Rushdie is the diaspora writer. Rushdie is not talking about past but he talked about vivid imagination.