ABSTRACT
Bakhtin, Gramsci, and Foucault (not to mention Nietzsche and Heidegger) are dead white European men now enshrined in the Western intellectual tradition. By itself, this fact should not relegate them to contemporary obscurity, particularly within a critically humanist perspective that foregrounds the ability of an engaged intellectual to understand across difference. Given the intellectual power of figures such as Bakhtin, Gramsci, Foucault and others—not to mention Marx, Weber, and Durkheim—the goal should not be to debunk modernist authorship but to critically learn from it and complement it with voices of alternative insight and value. It is in this latter regard that famous traditional ancestries—and the longer male genealogies that invariably precede them—need not be accepted as hegemonic in a field such as cultural anthropology. There are many important but historically underplayed insights by women, diasporic writers, subalterns, and others whose writings are now increasingly being brought to light from disempowered crevices. Their creativity has often been undervalued but now provides personal experience and antitheory to lever open or explode received wisdoms. These views provide insights on disempowerment that often escaped understanding in the work of more classical writers. In the rejection of modernism, an anticanonical canon of champions from the outside creates new paragons at the same time that it avoids old ones. This discovery and praise of alternative authorships neither escapes tropes of heroic modernism nor is condemned to insignificance because of this lack of escape.
