Secularism beyond the East/West divide: Literary reading, ethics, and<i>The Moor's Last Sigh</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The rise of Hindu majoritarianism in India's political and cultural life has led to questions about the viability of secularism in the postcolonial context. Despite the colonial power relations that inform secular discourse, it is assumed the state should maintain a critical distance from religious culture in the face of the increasing marginalization of minority groups in Indian society. At the same time, concerns have been raised that secular rhetoric around syncretism, the preservation of diversity, and religious tolerance often ends up laundering the cultural norms of the majority as national or universal. This paper seeks to displace the East/West divide that informs liberal commentary on secularism - a divide characterized by an opposition between tradition and modernity, faith and rationality. Rather than reject secular discourse on the basis of its colonial genealogy, it is possible to see it as 'an enabling violation' of Enlightenment thought that must be renegotiated through one's ethical relationship to the other. Gayatri Spivak's understanding of ethics as 'a problem of relation before they are a task of knowledge' necessarily shifts our understanding of ethics from a 'self driven political calculus as "doing the right thing" ' to 'ethics as openness toward the imagined agency of the other'. My paper considers how Spivak's concepts of ethical alterity and literary reading link ethics with praxis in thinking about secularism in the postcolonial context. I argue that while Rushdie's media statements, recently republished in Step Across this Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002, seem complicit with liberal views of secularism, his novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, works to displace secular discourse's Enlightenment assumptions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".