Programme
Francis Cody
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow
Society for the Humanities
Cornell University
E/ fpc22@cornell.edu
Arivoli’s Humanism: Literacy Activism and the Making of Self-Making Subjects
This paper examines efforts to induce social change through literacy activism in the Arivoli Iyakkam, the "Light of Knowledge Movement," in Tamil India. The Arivoli Iyakkam is a mass-literacy movement founded in the early 1990's as a partnership between the state and non-governmental actors. The paper's findings are based on ethnographic and historical research conducted in Pudukkottai district. The Arivoli Iyakkam has focused primarily on women learners among the district’s rural poor, in an effort to use literacy education to change their lives for the better by giving them the tools to represent themselves and to engage with the world around them.
The goal of the Arivoli Iyakkam’s enlightened literacy project has been to produce human subjects that form themselves through the written word in Tamil. Activism in the literacy movement is premised on a Tamil humanism that the movement's volunteers discuss in terms of "manithaneyam" (Love of Humanity or Humanism). Activists strategically incorporate aspects of Tamil cultural tradition in their efforts to develop grassroots cosmopolitanism. But literacy activism, as an exercise in manithaneyam, has paradoxically sought to remake the very people that it aims to empower. Socialization to written language in literacy activism is also socialization to modernist perceptions of sociality and progressive time, stigmatizing what it portrays as anachronistic. In seeking to give the rural poor a voice, Arivoli’s activists have thus been made to confront social difference as semiotic and temporal problems, and are grappling with the resulting paradoxes.
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Dr. Cody is currently preparing a new research project on Tamilnadu’s rapidly
expanding daily newspaper production. His research brings an ethnographic lens to
bear on theoretical questions raised by social activism in a development
context, political economies of language, and postcolonial statecraft in
Tamilnadu. This project will extend his interests in written culture by focusing
more squarely on the development of linguistic marketplaces as politicized
spheres of communicative circulation. He has recently finished his dissertation,
entitled “Literacy as Enlightenment: Written Language, Activist Mediation, and
the State in rural Tamilnadu, India,” in which he undertook an ethnohistorical
analysis of the Arivoli Iyakkam adult literacy movement in Pudukkottai District.