1.Non-activist writing: (Young 4, 10)
Writing as political intervention without totalizing, patronizing, colonizing.

2. Installing the masculine subject status of the west as sovereign (Yeğenoğlu 1)
Deconstruct/displace masculine sovereign subject status of west.

3. Forgetting that the Other is constituted by the West (Yeğenoğlu 1)
Track the constitution of the sovereign subject by way of a detour through the Other.

4. Relegating sexual difference to subfield (Yeğenoğlu 1)
Take sexual difference at center of postcolonial work.

5. Re-introduce precisely what is in question (Derrida; Yeğenoğlu 3)
Reverse binaries and displace; find other at heart of self-same.

6. Thinking the subject as an essence.
Anti-essentialism; avoid reductionisms.

7. Assuming pregiven status of object of knowledge (Yeğenoğlu 4, 5)
Expose subject status as western white male.

8. Missing the moment when the universal is constituted (Yeğenoğlu)
Interrupt the Eurocentric presumption of universality.

9. Following the modern protocols of knowledge (Young 69)
Intervene in modern protocols of knowledge to decolonize knowledge.

10. Overlooking unconscious fantasies and desires (Yeğenoğlu, 3)
Interrogate historically specific constructions of collective fantasies and desires as discursive effects that attempt to constitute the subject.

11. Forgetting that the act of knowing/naming is the constitution of a power relation (Foucault, Ch. 1)
Intervene in knowledge/power relations that install docility and productivity.

12. Normalizing the dream of civility of the reformed, recognizable Other (Bhabha)
Produce another knowledge of the norm that rearticulates presence in terms of that which it disavows, shattering unity of the sovereign and allows mimicry to turn to menace, history to turn to farce, and essence turn to alienation.

13. Joining in simplistic praising of the authentic/native voice, e.g., as native informant ((Yeğenoğlu 60, 121)
Refuse totalizing and unidirectional theory of colonal power to recognize conflictual and ambivalent economy of desire and fantasy.

14. Lifting the veiled other to see the “reality” of the Orientalized woman (Yeğenoğlu 63, 65)
Allow the veiled other to destabilize the indentificatory process of the subject and displace surveillance of modern discursive sovereign subject to make room for unrecuperable or undomesticated difference.

15. Consolidate the third world woman into a coherent whole (Mohanty)
Track specific historical conditions of agency of third world women.

16. Turn towards biological fallacy of lived experience (Suleri)
Use historical specificity (e.g., linking experience with the law when raped woman convicted of fornication) rather than rehearsing the objectification of the “proper subject” or some sort of vague ontological marginality to refuse the incipient menace of rewriting alterity into the ambiguous shape of the exotic body (249-250)

17. Basing arguments about gender and race in the reality of social history (Suleri)
Regard black feminist or other woman of color feminist criticism (following Hazel Carby) as a problem to be interrogated (not a solution) or a locus of contradictions (motivated by bourgeois humanist academic legitimation) in order to provide alternatives to the realism that is the Eurocentric and patriarchal pattern of adjudicating between disparate cultural and ethnic realities (250)

18. Building postcolonial argument as if based in readily intelligible facts/history (Spivak 28, 51)
Learning to resist/be critical of every success at rendering something intelligible as part of effort to earn right to be heard/trusted by subaltern

19. Writing to intervene in power relationships (Spivak 26, 29)
Intervening in the grid of intelligibility under the modern power/knowledge regime to remember that power is not an institution or a structure nor a strength but a catachresis that must be effaced as it is disclosed.

20. Rendering postcolonial studies as political project of progressive social change (Spivak 44, 51)
Recognize social change as both medicine and poison, so that make it possible to (re)activate liberal individualism within/without full hope in teleological change, thereby making some hope possible.

21. Working for Enlightenment political goals (Spivak 44-5)
Displace via the subaltern space the reversal of liberal politics to show liberal (humanist/Enlightenment) politics as violating enablement that cannot not want to inhabit, e.g., constitutional rights for indigenous peoples/outcastes or decolonization

22. Reversing logic of colonization to fight for naïve decolonization (Spivak 48)
Seeing liberal humanist politics from space of decolonized as political claims coded in history of colonization that recognizes decolonized space as ancient utopia transformed into sites of terror under exploitation.

23. Producing knowledge about others as if they can be constituted outside of power relation (Spivak, Not Virgin Enough 176-77)
Desiring to open yourself up to an other’s ethic even as you must still assume the differantially contaminated other as the subject of an ethics that remains unthinkable.

24. Assuming that foundational disciplinary categories (religion for religious studies, literature for English, history for historians) have universal definitions (Assad 29)
Track ways that constitutive elements of academic fields are historically specific to modern discursive processes.

25. Assuming that foundational binaries (private/public, theory/practice, Church/State) have conceptual integrity (McCutcheon 256-9)
Recognize the many inevitable violences of discursive regime and historicize them in effort to establish criteria to judge these may violences.

26. Treating the voices of colonized/postcolonial women as the views of the oppressed (Yeğenoğlu 122, 130, 137)
Critically examining the conditions which make women’s speech possible as both enabling this speech and making it impossible in producing the question of woman as doubly effaced by the projection onto the veiled body of the fears, desires, and policies of the battle between patriarchal nationalism and colonialism/imperialism.

27. Operating as if there is a clear-cut division of East and West ((Yeğenoğlu 133, 140)
Recognizing the epistemological structure of Orientalist hegemony in the constitution of those who seem representative of the East, such as Kemal Attatürk or Ibn Badis.

28. Teaching the sacred practices of the indigenous (Gunn Allen)
Refuse to speak of things that are not your place and resist being subjected to telling stories that are not your community’s as a way of respecting the ontology and epistemology of indigenous groups.

29. Presenting politics, economics, history, and culture/religion from a Western perspective (Deloria 101, 105)
Reject everything we have been taught to work with visions, not ideas/inductive-deductive logic to seek a synthesis of multiple cultures and periods.

30. Writing as an Indian informant (Treat/Deloria 13)
Keep an informed public available to assist indigenous tribes in not being overrun by the ignorance and mistaken, misdirected efforts of those who would help them.

31. Misrecognizing the United States as postcolonal (Deloria).
Acknowledge the U.S. as colonial project.

32. Limiting the object of knowledge to textual (narrow sense) (Almond, Schopen)

Intervene in constructions of the object of knowledge in ways that a) locate the authentic Other in the Western academy (libraries, classrooms) or b) install Protestant presuppositions and other Eurocentric assumptions and knowledge protocols.

Sources:

Vine Deloria, Jr., For This Land: Writings on Religion in America, ed. James Treat, Routledge, 1999.

Laura Donaldson and Kwok Pui-lan, Eds..  Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse.              Routledge, 2002.

Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man. Univ. Chicago, 1987.

Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, Cambridge Univ.Pr., 1998.

Robert Young, Postcolonialism, Blackwell, 2001.

Philip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism, Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1988.

Diamond, Irene and Lee Quinby.  “Introduction.”  Feminism and Foucault:  Reflections on Resistance.  Ed. Diamond and Quinby.  Boston:  Northeastern University Press, 1988. ix-xx.

Foucault, “The Body of the Condemned,”  Discipline and Punish, p. 22-31.

Foucault, “The Means of Correct Training,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow.  New York:  Pantheon Books, 1984, 188-205; also pub. in Discipline and Punish.

Bhabha, Homi.  “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,”  October, 28 (1984): 125-33.

Mohanty, Chandra. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Paul Chrisman and Linda Williams, eds., Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A          Reader, Columbia Univ. Pr., p., 196-220.

Suleri, Sara.  “Woman Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition,” in Paul Chrisman and Linda Williams, eds., Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader,           Columbia Univ. Pr. p., 244-56.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. “More on Power/Knowledge.” Outside in the Teaching
            Machine. Routledge, 1993.  25-52.

Spivak, “Not Virgin Enough To Say that [S]he Occupies the Place of the Other,*” Outside in the Teaching Machine. Routledge, 1993.  173-9.

Asad, Talal.  “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category.” Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam.  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.  27-54.

Smith, Jonathan Z.  “Religion, Religions, Religious.“ Critical Terms for Religious Studies.  Ed. Mark C. Taylor.  The University of Chicago Press, 1997.  269-84.

McCutcheon, “Religion and the Governable Self,” in The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric, Routledge, 2003, 252-290.

Allen, Paula Gunn, “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,” in
            Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians, ed.
            Devon A. Mihesuah, University of Nebraska Press, 1998, p. 55-63

Thornton, Russell, “Who Owns the Past? The Repatriation of Native American Human
            Remains and Cultural Objects,”  in Studying Native America:  Problems and
            Prospects, ed. Russell Thornton, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, 385-
            415.

Schopen, Gregory.  “Archaeology and Protestant Presuppostions in the Study of Indian
            Buddhism,” History of Religions 31.1 (Aug., 1991):  1-23.