Indocentrism - sulbaltern, indigenous, multicultural

Several invaluable nodes pointed to in the debate opened by R. Ghosh's (In)fusion Theory:
. the issue of indigenous theories. Raised, and criticised, by Spivak - as structurally, institutionally, Eurocentric. Lovely sharpness of critical puncture in her: "So-called indigenous theories are so marketable in the Euro-US under a sort of liberal multiculturalism of sanctioned ignorance that it is possible for people trained in English literature in other so-called peripheral countries - I do not quite know how to describe those countries without being politically insulting - but, anyway, people trained in English in those areas can produce a kind of patter about indigenous theories without any particular fear of being judged from the other side. [...] probably the greatest pitfall [because of superficiality: ] because the training has not been in the long tradition of these other kinds of ethnophilosophical studies [...] A little learning sells well when the powerful are ignorant in a sanctioned way." (26)
. the issue of Eurocentrism, and the identification of "the Euro-US", as (majoritarian, even arch-dominant) agent in the field of debate; its entrenched identitarian establishment.

. the project of the book takes sharper relief with Spivak's contribution: it is indeed an "approach" that is at stake - more interestingly, more pertinently, than a "theory". The "theory" debate, and "theory" as key term for the debate, locks the discussion in a conceptual scenario that is well-rehearsed - and emphatically located - in the deconstructive skein of the US poststructuralist inheritance ("theory", "text", "reading"; Paul de Man, Derrida, and the anonymity, eventually, of the natural look that is the usual face of ideology. Including, for instance, the needless agonizing about the "supplementing" or other modes of impossible discursive homogeneity of "humanities and social sciences", 27). When you look into the debate from this neighbouring but decentred stance, "approach" - which I want to listen to as a mode of point of view; that is, therefore, a possible discipline, or conceptual plane in Deleuze's terms - you enter the dimension of historicity, and free up critical energy. "Theory" is definitely the obstruction in the project. The way to dissolve it is naturally to historicize it: and situate it as the institution - cultural and political - that it is.
Once you are on this foot, you can indeed start taking on the power play at stake in the possibility of a theoretical Indocentrism.

. considering Indocentrism: Spivak slips into an easy (almost pat and theoretically correct) stance against all centrisms, but the issue is nicely complicated by the introduction of the institutional factor - and that's where her specific outlook indeed centres (see Outside the Teaching Machine and the work on comparative disciplinarity). Her important contribution of an "approach" to the complexification of the domination paradigm [the toy debate of "master theory" and theory "terrorism"] in the thinking about the geopolitics of knowledge. Institutional, as complexification of both cultural [ethnic and national and postcolonial] and (geo)political [class and power and the international scale of it].
R. Ghosh's inquiry offers Indocentrism to consideration, and the collective volume format does show its usual fruitfulness (argument in favour of the proposal of "in/fusion" as polyphonic, mutually-critical project) in throwing up a variation of scenarios for the question. The underlying direction remains an testing of, and experimenting with, Indocentrism. The displacement from the "Euro-US" perspective. Spivak's pleasingly critical take: to caution against the facile claims of "indigenous theories" and of subaltern discursive spaces [viz. "phantasmatic subaltern theories of reading", 28]- and specify one keener direction for the inquiry: the anticipation of resistance to the theoretical mappings in place (which means not a cartographic but a historical activity of otherness. Means also that Hillis Miller's contribution is not so deadened by the deconstructive ontological tropes: otherness as activity is indeed at stake, I can only hear it properly now), and the identification of the institutional level as crux.

Indocentrism will be interesting as displacement; when not a national (or: postcolonial as identitarian) project but a project of dépeuplement. Historical. Look at the history of education and cultural institutions; look at the history (pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial) of discourses on culture and language.