What Languages Do the Subalterns Speak? Comparing Coloniality’s Unexpected Sites and Sights

Dr. Michael Horswell engages in conversation with Dr. Bogdan Ștefănescu, a professor of English, a literary translator, a journalist, and a cultural diplomat.  He has taught at the University of Bucharest since the fall of communism in Romania, in 1990. 

Ștefănescu is a professor of English, which for him has always meant a language of freedom, as opposed to the wooden lingo of political dogma and of captive minds. For him, the key to understanding human culture and history is discourse. He loves the idea that humans are discursive animals and he feels that our lives span two interrelated universes: one is a space-time-motion continuum, the other is a speech-thought-action continuum.   

He teaches literature and cultural studies from a comparative perspective. For him, true knowledge is always comparative, which means not so much comparing different things from a single perspective, as comparing different perspectives on the same thing. His recent research is concerned with the rhetoric of national identification, and with the similar way in which cultures strive to reconstruct their self-images that were traumatized by the competing Western and Soviet colonial systems.