Last night in class I bitchily compared poststructural historical writing to John Searle's chinese room, then had to explain to the professor what I meant by that. It was intended as a jab at the incomprehensibility of Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ann Stoler (among others), though I'm pretty sure I managed to imply that I just didn't understand any of the readings and that I was embarrassingly okay with this fact. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. I am not a stupid person, nor do I have trouble understanding theoretical frameworks, but these authors have confused me greatly, and I'm as willing to blame them as myself.
