Ideology, Power And Desire: Views From The Margins

Abstract

This survey paper discusses the intellectual history of power and desire in imagining the social and the political. To do so, the paper argues, it is essential to look at ideology first. Ideology is discussed in structuralist-Marxist and postmarxist terms, explicitly and implicitly affecting the discourses of gender and power in Western and transnational places. While discussing the latter two—gender and power—attention is given to the construction of colonial/ postcolonial conditions in the production and circulation of desire and sexualities. A range of authors are discussed in this context: Gayatri Spivak, Laura Ann Stoler, Anne McClintock, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence Cohen, Gayatri Reddy, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay and others. In conclusion, the importance of the survey lies in assessing the epistemological-theoretical, historical, and ethnographic premises of the postcolonial margins. The force-field of postcolonial margins, however, is far from unified, which makes a survey paper such as this rather challenging.