Post-Colonial Studies, Materiality, and Radical Absence: An Essay on Subaltern Objects

Document Type : Research Paper

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Abstract

Positioned at the wave-crest of material disappearances and the foreclosure of corresponding modes of thought, this essay develops the notion of subaltern objects at the intersection of materiality and absence. In doing so, the essay illustrates how two projects of epistemic overhaul working as dislocated and unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine within Europe and on the colonial frontier subalternized facets of that bio-habitat that did not retain a mark of their past, impeding them from acting as agents of temporalization within our modern linear temporal structures. The essay argues that such linear structures are partly centered on the succession of technological objects and their “development,” one out of another, in a chronological order (e.g., from print to electronic to digital mediums). That is, a movement from few simple to increasingly more complex technological objects that establishes progress-as-history. The essay concludes by considering what a politics of radical absences might mean and how it could be linked to an alternative schema to progress/development.

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References

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Sociology of Art and Literature
Volume 14, Issue 1
October 2022
Pages 41-57

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