a piece of my mind

I just have to share with you this passage from a textbook for my class next week:

"We have seen that postcoloninal criticism is often impaled on the horns of the following dilemma: whether to align itself with humanist notions of an autonomous, sovereign subject and so run the risk of subsuming heterogeneous identities and histories in to an abstract essentialism, or of embracing a post-structuralist antihumanism and so denying any universal moral platform from which to contest the material and epistemic violence of the colonial encounter. Gayatri Spivak has suggested a ‘strategic essentialism’ as a way of resolving this dilemma: that while theory recognizes only the dispersal of ‘subject-effects,’ emancipatory practice requires us to adopt and essentialist stance toward the colonized self. "

It is just me, or the lateness of the hour, or my punchiness due to caffeine and late-night study – but is this not just hilarious? Have a look at those words, and say them with a straight face and serious tone … do I hear you giggle?

The strange fact is that if you read enough of this, you actually begin to understand it. The book is called Subverting Global Myths and it is actually quite remarkable. But this paragraph left me grinning and just begged to be shared.