South Asian Studies, Vol 31, No 1 (2016)

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Pedagogy of Alienation: Epistemic Hegemony of the Mental Space and Fatal Fault Lines in the National Space

Shahzeb Khan

Abstract


This paper delves into pedagogic practices that privilege the remote over the proximate, the unfamiliar over the familiar, and the far-off over the intimate. It delineates how this pedagogy of alienation entails embedding of ‘the west’ in cognitive spaces of the subjects and conditions ways in which they negotiate their familiar terrain: the national space. Spatial dynamics of the humanistic functions attached with the teaching of E. literature: “the shaping of character, the development of aesthetics and the disciplines of ethical thinking” will also be identified. The paper investigates how English literary texts in an institutionalized space win assent for their judgments in a “clandestine” manner. An attempt has been made to equate these acts of assent, on part of the subjects, as steps of spatial alienation ensuring successive approximation to a desired behavior or a reconfiguration of the cognitive space, ultimately “transforming the way in which objects of knowledge are constructed.” The resulting epistemes have then been mapped onto the fatal fault lines of the proximal, national space to test their political efficacy

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