Page 89 - Introducing Cultural Studies
P. 89
he Non-Player and the Future
Dissent has been domesticated. All resistance to and dissent from
hegemonic impulses falls into two categories: violence or pacifism.
Nandy posits a third way - the dissenter as non-player. The non-
player plays another game altogether, a game of dissenting visions
and futures. The future itself is a state of awareness. And the main
aim of the game is to transform the future by changing human
awareness of the future. By defining what is "immutable" and
"universal", the West silences the visions of Other cultures to
ensure the continuity of its own linear projections of the past and the
present on to the future.
To break out of this structure, Nandy contends, non-Western
cultures must define their own future in terms of their own categories
and concepts, articulating their visions in language that is true to
their own Self, even if not comprehensible "on the other side of the
global fence of academic respectability".
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