Alexander Feminist

7/29/2019 Alexander Feminist

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Iii: FeministPostcolonialStudiesandCultural Studies CompositionCLAIRE L. ALEXANDER

Let her weave her story within their stories, her life amidst their lives.Trinh T. Minh-haUltimately alone with only the hum ofthe computer, accompanied by all myfaces (and often yours aswell), the monitor's screen reflects back the dialogamong "us." I talk to myself. That's what writers do, we carry on a constantdialogue between language and hands and images, one or another of ouridentities trying desperately to get in a word, an image, a sound.Gloria Anzaldua

Cultural studiespedagogy isone way to introduce students to the interaction ofnarratives within themselves and between themselves and their contexts. Formany practitioners, its goal isthat students critique our world, not as an end initself, but as a means to change it. The destabilizing of the twin concepts of"normal" and "natural" and the resulting decentering of the self,critiques basicto this project, paradoxically, seemboth to enable and to limit change. Addressing this decentering frequently, JamesBerlin has explored the overlaps amongpostmodernism, socio-epistemic rhetoric, culture studies and compositionstudies ("Composition and," "Composition Studies," "Poststructuralism," andRhetarics).eepika Bahri, though raising political issuesabout the connections,has shown intersections between postcolonial studies and composition studies.Building on these interconnections, I will explore reflections on multiplesubjectivity from postcolonial feminist theorists-primarily Gloria Anzaldua,Rey Chow, Marla Lugones,Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,andTrinh T. Minh-ha.From the intersection of feminist postcolonial studies and cultural studiescomposition practice, Iwill explore the complexity ofthe weaving we seekbothto unravel and to reweave and the models these women provide for resistance.

Berlin's version of Birmingham Center Cultural Studies focuses on thestudents in their own culture and includes assigning an experience paper withadifference. Asheexplains, "Our effort isto make students aware ofthe culturalcodes-the various competing discourses-that attempt to influence who theyare" ("Composition and" 50). Moving variously from the concrete to theabstract, the selectedpostcolonial feminist writers theorize through, with, andabout narrative. They do an analysis of their own positions in culture that are


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270 JACprofessional versions of the process Berlin would invite composition studentsto enter into in the cultural studies composition classroom. In the postcolonialsubject, the multiple conflicted subject positions seemmore obvious than in theapparently monocultural subject-though of course, by the time the analysis iscompleted, the student (evenwith subcultures yielding lessdramatic complexities than nationalities) realizesslhe isnot somonocultural after all.Both studentand professional analyze a selfin relation to ahegemonic culture, the student inrelation to a dominant culture and the postcolonial in relation to the residuefrom the culture of the colonizer.Berlin describes the postmodern version of subject formation that cultural

studies composition works with: "each of us is heterogeneously made up ofvarious competing discourses, conflicted and contradictory scripts, that makeour consciousness anything but unified, coherent, and autonomous" (Rhetorics62). It is much easier to consider this in the abstract than in the concrete worldof experienced consciousness with its illusion ofcontinuity. Postcolonial writerscan help the move to the concrete. Susan C. Jarratt, for example, notes thedistance between postmodernism's abstract privileging of multiplicity andSpivak's continuing multiplication of her own and other Indian identities (6162). Similarly, Nelly Richard speaks of Latin Americans having lived themultiplicity before postmoderns theorized it.When, asa cultural studies starter, we ask students to identify their various

affiliations, we can listen to postcolonial cautions. Listing their various identitiesis important for our writing students, but not enough. Chow cautions againstthe multiplying list that would merely stabilize categories (Wniing108),and onecan also seehow listing could contribute to seeingthe "self"aspowerless withinfixed categories, as wholly determined by outside forces. Nor does listingpromote change. Norma Alarcon, in her analysis of uses of the collection, ThisBridgeCalledMy Back,notes too many citations and classroom uses of theanthology that acknowledge the listingsof race and nationality and social class,yet carry on discussions about the old agenda of tuman as a unified category.Listing without reflection is the barest hint of a beginning, barely better thanbeing oblivious, only useful if a transitional step toward change.The conflict of subject positions that Berlin's cultural studies pedagogy

urges students to explore is apparent in the postcolonial feminists' writings.Analyzing difference and power among the "identities" shows varying levelsofpain or danger. Gloria Anzaldua vividly describes the depth of pain in imagesof injury and war. In her poem opening,furderlands,shespeaksof the Rio Grandeasa "1,950mile-long open woundl ...1running down the length of my body" (2).Further along, she speaks of the confusion caused by the "cultural collision" ofinner "habitually incompatible frames ofreference"; she elaborates, "Cradled inone culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures andtheir value systems, lamestizaundergoes astruggle of flesh, a struggle of borders,an inner war" (furderlands8).How incompatible the systems was made clearwith her example ofexperiencing different attitudes toward ambition: rewarded,


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FeministPostcolonialStudies 271even demanded, by Anglos, it was rejected by Mexicans for causing one to riseabove and be envied, hence in danger of being a recipient of witchcraft(&rderlands8).Pat Mora's poem, "LegalAlien" givesanother example: "American, but hyphenated,/ .../an American to Mexicans/a Mexican to Americans."Each group, focusingmore on difference than similarity leavesher "masking thediscomfort/of being pre-judged/Bi-Iaterally" (376).

Masking, one imagefor the negotiations ofthe decentered self,carries manynuances. For Mora it hides feelings; for Anzaldua artificiality is emphasizedwhen she speaks of becoming nothing but our various roles in accommodatingto the majority and the home cultures (Introduction xv). For Frantz Fanon theissue is betrayal; his analysis of students traveling between Martinique andFrance, who are acceptedby neither (Ch. 1),shows masking to be aproblem notonly for women. Alarcon and Trinh relate the mimicry to women using "theMaster's Tools" as well as to Third World people moving into First Worldpatterns. Students can learn to critique the goalsthey strive for and question whogains ifthey mimic; they can alsolearn to critique what they call"natural." NellyRichard extends the ideaofmask beyond individuals to cultures and history andtheory, Latin America parodying Europe, but it becomes individual also aspeople follow an irrelevant "imported image."Fanon's discussion of the colonialabsorbing the parody of Europe revealsnot only aconstructed identity, but alsoasubsequent betrayal. He makes the point quite vividly, describing the educationin France that left Rene Maran's character, Jean Veneuse, feeling as French asthe French until he wanted to marry awhite French woman. Encounter makeswhat seemed natural now become artificial, an internalized mask that feels likehimself yet doesn't fit (Ch 3).Trinh alsoaddressesmisfit and betrayal. Speakingof Third World "natives" (whom First World anthropologists are "makingequal") as "entrapped in a circular dance where they always find themselves apace behind the white saviors"(Woman59),she emphasizes the impossibility ofever succeeding when the terms are set elsewhere.

Chow, Trinh, and Anzaldua sometimes reverse the mask images, shiftingfrom wearing the dominant culture of the colonized to wearing the colonizer'sversion of the authentic native that has been imposed. Trinh notes the "authentic" asmask, asa creation of the colonizer/European anthropologist, aconcernwhich diverts "natives" to the "Master's" concerns asthe "Masters" impose theirdefinition ofauthenticn the "native" who now "paints her/himself thick withauthenticity" (Wanan 88).Trinh reports an effect on individuals, but Anzalduapresents a group effect, noting that the colonized begin to demand of each otherthat they liveup to the colonizer's version of authenticity, ademand that fostersinternal divisions ("Enrapport"143).

The reversed mask that now reflects an imposed authentic isdangerous forboth the migrant and the local. The risk of not playing by the "Master's" rulesis illustrated by the story Chow tells of awoman from the Peoples' Republic ofChina who was passed over for a faculty position because her reading of TheDream0/theRedChamberounded capitalist to some of the search committee.


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272 lACChow frames the anecdote in terms ofstereotyping; then she links that stereotypingto "the politics of identifying 'authentic' natives" (Writing28)wherein the nonChinese determined that an authentic Chinese person had to be from the mainlandand had to be Communist. There are other dangers. Trinh notes that whenwesternization signals impurity and when feminism isassociatedwith westernization, being authentic could mean aretum to being traditional and reemphasizing oldpatriarchal ways (Woman106). The imposed mask of authenticity is hazardous.

None of this problematizing of authenticity is to deny a real need for roots.The imposed authenticity and the search for roots, however, are not to beconflated; they are part of the contradictions that the previously and presentlycolonized live with. Marfa Lugones, in her discussion of different selves fordifferent worlds, has phrasing that hints at the difference between the two"authenticities"; she distinguishes being "simply latin" among Latinos frombeing "stereotypically latin" among Anglos (396).

As composition teachers, we can heed further cautions the selected writersprovide about authenticity. Even without danger, imposed authenticity isproblematic. As Chow says, colonizers/anthropologists demand awholly Other"pure" Chinese, in spite of '''Westernization' ... [being] the materiality of dailylife for modern Asian peoples" ("Violence" 89). Here she addresses "authenticity" imposed by the dominant group (whether imposed from outside or frominside through expectations internalized by the subordinated) in contrast to an"authenticity" of lived experience. Similarly, Anzaldua indicates the difficultyof the choice "between cultural ethnicity and the continuing survival of thatculture" ("Enrapport"145).Chow resists an imposed authenticity that overlooksher very different migrant lived experience, an experience that she wants to beseen asequally (perhaps even asmore) authentic. National identity, like personal,she presents as multiple. WritingDiasporaontains an intricate analysis whereChow, who is from Hong Kong, shows the need to decenter the notion ofChinese identity in away that parallels the decentering of the self.Discussing thedifference between imperialism in China-which is internal-and externalimperialisms elsewhere, she notes resulting complexities. Chow contrasts thesingledemythificationneededin the West with the double "demythifi[cation] ofthe official demythifying agenda of Chinese communism itself" (78).The firstdemythification is merely a perpetuation of oppression. Once consciousnessraising became official, the new official myth took hold and became aninstrument of oppression (84-86).She claims that to counter officialized andstatic identity necessitates "perpetual modifying of 'being Chinese'" (92)whichincludes the diasporic Chinese intellectual aswell asthose (silenced) intellectualsremaining at the mainland center. Shewould also have the Chinese colonized bythe British in Hong Kong seen as Chinese. She would have the geographicallydistant Chinese seen asmore authentic than those at the geographical center whoare oppressed by the first mythification.

Spivak and Chow differ concerning the migrant's relation to local culture.Chow is not rejecting the idea of authentic itself as Spivak, like Trinh, does, but


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FeministPostcolonialStudies 273rather she is rejecting the dominant as definer. She wants to be a definer ofauthentic herself, and to do so she redefines Cbmee,arguing for a decenteredconcept (both geographically and politically). Chow's political intervention isadecentral holding pattern, Hong Kong and migrant Chinese holding ontoChineseness till it is safe for mainland intellectuals to speak, until the subduedinhabitants at the geographical center are freed from the political center. Spivak,on the other hand, resistsany claim for authenticity or authority for the migrant,resisting both the authority of the margin in the US situation and the authorityto represent the local culture. She guards against a definition of Indiathat doesnot include the subaltern or adefinition ofUlm:ln that doesnot include subalternwomen. Both Chow and Spivak, like Trinh, resist a static definition of authenticity, one example beingSpivak's critique ofmigrant communities for becoming"more real than the 'original' cultures" as they hold on to traditional ways(Outside2), elsewhere expressed as"addiction" to traditions ("Reflections" 73).The freezing of that imposed authenticity into a mask, a static image, aninhibiting rather than freeing image, is part of a kind of cultural studies thatChow and Spivak object to throughout. Its distance from the Berlin version,which continually explores cultural codes, analyzing who benefits from variouscontradictions, isgreat.Objections to mere transmission ofstatic categories thatcould be taken for "authentic" interpretations appear in this adviceto teachers:"Students cannot learn alxJutultural studies: they can only learn to dJculturalstudies" (Berlin and Vivion xiv).

Considering the postcolonial experience of masking in its various nuancesand the postcolonial feminists' resistance to authentic can lead students awayfrom their perceptions that a unitary self is natural. Richard relates theperception of oneself as masked to modernism's search for coherence andauthenticity, thus implying that amore postmodern understanding ofsubjectivity could lessen(not remove) the discomfort. As one letsgo ofthe unitary "self,"authenticity dissipates and maskcould lose some of its tyranny.

Although we easestudents away from quests for their authentic selves, thestrategies used for finding the authentic voice can be modified to find innermultiplicity, silenced voices. Instead of reading for the vivid metaphors thatsupposedly signal the authentic voice, students can read their journals andfreewriting and the drafts shared in peer groups for conflicting metaphors. Theycan also read their own works using Berlin's heuristics for reading their coursepack essays-finding key words, binary oppositions used and implied, andidentifying the implied narrative ("Composition and," "Poststructuralism," andRhetorics).hese heuristics can help students find their inner complexity anddissonance, can help them listen for silenced inner voices without attributing"authentic" core status to any single voice. The students-and the instructorstoo, for Berlinwould remind usthat we too needto have our assumptions probed{"Poststructuralism" 32}-can listen in what Anzaldua calls "the mestizaway,"no longer "disown[ing] the white parts, the male parts, the pathological parts,the queer parts, the vulnerable parts" (Borderlands8).Her own mestizaway


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274 lACsometimes seems partial to her Nahua culture, yet she alsoemphasizes gathering"selves" and shifting positions, in her poetry, where she" continually walk[ s]outof one culture/ and into another" while being "in all cultures at the same time"(Borderlands7)and in her prose where she speaks of seeing through "a criticallens with variable focus" ("Enrapport"145).

We can hear silenced voices better when we do not disown. That Anzalduawould model the way fits well with Richard's observation that Latin Americansexperienced the postmodern subject before theorists invented it. The differencebetween "mask" and the identity shift that Lugones calls"world travelling" is nota difference of data or experience somuch asadifference of interpretation. To lookfor multiple conflicting discourseswillbeseento bea postmodem way out offeelingmasked; when no one discourse isallowed to become central, none is a mask.

Berlin's version of cultural studies composition is not only interested inmultiplicity but also in interactions of power. In addition to teaching aboutdealing with painful differences among subjectivities, these postcolonial feminist theorists can teach much about power and its layers ofcomplexity inmultiplesubject positions. It isone thing to realize one isformed by dominant discourses.It is another to find oneself dominant. One of the more unsettling conflicts ofsubject positions isthat which reveals amix of power positions, that reveals thatthe member of a minority culture is not always powerless. Barbara Christiansounded anearly alert to adifference that has since become commonplace amongfeminists, how feminist theory excludes when it overgeneralizes, how it misses"the complexity of life-that women are of many races and ethnic backgroundswith different histories and cultures and that asa rule, women belong to differentclasses that have different concerns" (342).Although it is a commonplace,mention must be made because it is not yet commonly heeded. White heterosexual middle-class Anglo women, subordinated vis-a-vis patriarchy, oftencontinue to dominate the discussion among (or continue to exclude) women ofcolor, lesbians, working-class, Asian-American, Native-American, Hispanic,and Third World women. Trinh, drawing our attention to differences within aswell as between (WomanChapter 3),keeps us aware that taman is no more amonolithic category than the selfisunitary. Trinh, Chow, and Spivak, asmigrantpostcolonial feminists, add that first world women's discussions miss or distortthird world concerns.

This experience of power imbalance as one shifts from gender positions toracial or other ones leads Trinh to note problems with "the perception of sex asa secondary attribute ... that one can add or subtract" (Woman104)-and wecould add other inseparable identities-race and age, for instance. Elsewhereshe noted that "difference ... is not opposed to sameness, nor synonymous withseparateness" ("Not you" 372) to describe the complexity of our multipleconflicted subject positions, a complexity that Anzaldua and Spivak convey withimages of network and weaving. When oblivious to this complexity, we act "asif oppression only comes in separate, monolithic forms" (Woman104). Now,although this remains problematic, separating monolithic categories isa strate-


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Feminist Postcolonial Studies 275gic improvement over the singular monolithic colonizer,r patriarchy,r "the"thrninantculture.This first step from large to smaller abstraction enables acultural studies classroom to lessen some of the resistance experienced by theelite white maleswhen they perceive allblame placed on them, a resistance thatmakes them much lessteachable. As Alarcon reminds us, women are oppressedby male and by female (359),and we have already seen Anzaldua's analysis ofChicanas oppressing Chicanas ("Enrapport").We could substitute most anycategory into that statement. LeslieMarmon Silko, in Cen:mony,as Tayo learnthat it isdangerous to Native Americans to seeall evil asexisting inwhites alone.Tayo has experienced and seen Native American oppress Native American.While these examples emphasize acknowledging evil among one's own, theconcept could also be applied to seeing good.

Identifying separate monolithic areas of dominance/subordination allowseach student to variously stand with the oppressor and the oppressed. 1Spivakand Chow have pointed out that the one looking seeshis/her own multiplicity,but sees the one looked at as unitary. It was said of colonizer/anthropologists,but could it work in reverse as well? When the marginalized forget this, couldthey also see their own multiplicity and the oppressors' singularity? Asked thisin an interview, Trinh processed the question before answering, No. She rejectedthe simplified version that asks ifthe marginalized thus fix the West asthey havebeen fixed, rejecting it because when offered by the dominant, it could amountto denial, could provide away to avoid dealing with the issue. She points to thedifference between a strategic use of categories by the subordinated and thedisempowering that results from the historic fixing of categories in this binary:native = simple; civilized = multiple. Since "the West [strategic use] has beenresponsible for the reactive, monolithic naming of the West" the reversal is notfully parallel, and since power is unequal, it is not really "'the Other of theOther'" that we aredealing with" ("Undone" 15-16)Nor isthe reactive namingso tied up in projection of unwanted parts onto the Other; it ismore a responseto the prior projection by the dominant, a reclaiming of the power of naming.With this qualification, then, it remains important to note the multiplicity ofeach, though occasionally, strategically, to use generalizations, even whiledisengaging from them. There is a clear strategic value in looking at themultiplicity of the dominant in a composition classwhere many of the studentsrepresent the dominant. In my cultural studies classes,discussions have movedfrom using a singular dominant culture to usingacomposite version, seeingwhite,middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, urban, able-bodied, prime aged males. Inseveralcomposition classes,when the students and I tallied the various categories,there ended up no student who fell 1000/ 0 into that dominant culture mix. Thatbit of space made the students lessresistant to the overall cultural studies project.

Postcolonial feminist writers can remind us that we have yet to note thateven this composite version of the dominant culture sometimes missesthe groupexperienced as dominant. Anzaldua spoke of needing to stop disowning queerparts aswell aswhite and male parts (Borderlands8),naming both subordinate


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276 lACand dominant. We can note that sometimes our students-and we the instructors-experience a subculture as dominant. Not without reason do we speak ofpeer pressure. William Labov has identified some social groups' linguisticpreferences for a nonstandard dialect and called it covertprestigectd,by Trudgill89);it would seem a similar mechanism would be at work in experiencing otherthan linguistic signs of a subculture as dominant. While we as teachers lookingfrom the outside might claim to see agroup asawhole reacting to "the" dominantculture, some students gain their covert prestige by reproducing the"nondominant" that they experience as dominant. Whenever I have tried,through class discussions, to inductively arrive at definitions of dominantculture, this mix of dominants has produced confusion until the students and1have recognized the difference between their experienced subordination andthe abstraction, however multiple the abstraction has been described. Thus,dominant culture is not a singular monolith (nor a composite of separatemonoliths), but a complex web of interacting people who each are made up ofthe warp of script and woof of discourse. Perhaps we can isolate these foranalysis, but for experience, they arevery much intertwined. The influence evengoes both ways: the scripts and expectations of the dominant modify theindividual while the individual's negotiation modifies the scripts (Berlin "Composition and" 103; Rhetorics1). I can't say that I ever heard Berlin speak ofexperiencing the subordinate as dominant, but his discussions of plural discourses constructing and being constructed clearly allow for the possibility, apossibility made more clear in reading feminist postcolonial theorizing ofidentity. As Trinh puts it, "I write to show myself showing people who show memy own showing" (Woman22).

With the help of the postcolonial feminists, I will explore yet one moredeeply complex manifestation of power in the decentered self. Anzalduadistinguishes "between inner, outer and peripheral 'L's within aperson" {Introduction xxv), noting multiplicity within and difference between.Trinh, discussing her use of Is, is,and Iii s, and gets at the intricacy: "'I' readsas the voice of a white male dominant member"; she further explains choosing"1"instead of "they" because "the oppressor ... is also well and alive within eachself" ("Undone" 8-9).Anzaldua and Trinh could mean internalized oppressionor they could mean a complex power like the following.

It isdifficult enough when one is aware of the mix of power in shifting roles,as in the earlier example with power in terms of race and powerlessness in termsof gender; it is even more unsettling to find oneself powerful/-less in the sameidentity category as it gets rearticulated. Such, however, is a frequently reportedpostcolonial experience. Trinh distinguishes between "we, the natives" whichfocuses attention on "belonging to a particular place by birth" and "they, thenatives" which foregrounds "born inferior and non-Europeans" (Woman52). Inthis power shift within the same naiceconsciousness, covert prestige couldbelongto "we, the natives" while "they, the natives" would be without. Similarly,Chow shows Chinese as both "we" and "they" in her discussion of "Chinese


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Feminist Postcolonial Studies 277women intellectuals" and "'Third world' intellectuals in diaspora" (Writing0Japter5)where the discourse of 01ineser ThirdWorldemains throughout butshifts power. Subordinate in the metropolis, these intellectuals exert powernow a constituting verbal power- over those "back home." Chow calls uponthem to be conscious of "straddl[ing] the elite and subaltern" and to resist thesentimentality of circulating anoutdated version ofauthentic in the "cosmopolitan diasporic space [that] will be exported 'back home'" (Writing 117-18).Similarly, Spivak calls on diasporic intellectuals to remember how they differfrom the subaltern (Otkr 135). In another context in WritingDtaspora,hownotes Chinese intellectuals "speak[ing] with power but identify[ing] with powerlessness"(14)and callson them not to remain "blind to their own exploitativenessas they make "the East" theircareer" (15).She notes they "struggle against ahegemony that already includes them" (16),a very intricate weave of power inconflicting subject positions.

This weave resembles the complexity composition teachers experiencewhen we teach students to critique their culture, a culture that many studentswant to enter, while we earn our living by teaching standard English andacademicwriting, thus perpetuating acultural imperialism even asit iscritiqued.James Sledd cautions that "two coercions do not make one freedom" andcautions that we will merely teach our students to continue to follow (671-72).Yet learning standard English is a necessary, though not sufficient, ingredientfor power in our times-learning it, then, is a "change that isboth medicine andpoison" Spivak might say, as she has said of development in another context("More" 166). Though we work to change the system, though we rename"standard English" as"edited American English," though we try to mitigate thecomplicity by teaching standard English in the context of cultural studies,explaining standard grammar as one among many codes of dominant white,middle-class culture instead of astruth from on high, still we note our positionin a "struggle against a hegemony that includes [us]."

Beforemoving to modifications in cultural studiescomposition pedagogyforexploringthe powerconfigurationsdiscussedabove,weneedto hearthe postcolonialfeminists' understanding of the complexities of agency since the Berlin model ofcultural studiescomposition pedagogyisabout change,andchangerequiresagency.

While analyzing subject positions prior to a speaking engagement, Spivakillustrates resisting dominant constructions that are not in her interest, anelement also important to Berlin's model of cultural studies compositionpedagogy. Her analysis of competing scripts assessesthe expectations projectedtowards her and plans her resistance to that projection. Spivak describesthinking about her cultural identities in view of expectations of an audience inLondon. In view of language, Bengali; in Britain, Asian; in the United States,Indian; in both, Third World. Noting that these token positions place her in themargins, she "'chose' the institutional appellation 'teacher" (Outside4-56),sidestepping the margin. Bydirectly mentioning the possibilities, she forces theaudience to notice the naming it is probably already doing even as she redirects


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278 lACit by asserting her own name for herself. Thus she illustrates resisting andnegotiating codes, options as possible as accommodating in cultural studiespedagogy. In addition, by puttingrzose in quotation marks, she notes limitationsand problematizes the agent of choosing.

It is much easier to reflect on our multiple conflicting subject positions inabstract theory than in the concrete situation. As a teacher, I need balancebetween abstract and concrete in presenting so complex a concept as clearly aspossible. Looking for my own example, I remembered an occasion when mydaughter came home from school with some anecdote about a scolding. As amother, I was proud of the independent thinking she had shown, but shiftingdiscourses, I could also see how a rather insecure second-grade teacher mightfocus more on the disruption. Then I remembered times when as a child I hadfelt betrayed when my teacher-mother sided with ateacher on similar occasions,and I opted for the mother-pride reaction. This seems a little like a writer orSpivak, the speaker, selecting among subject positions, choosing which one ofher own to foreground and which of her audiences' to invoke/address. But,remembering Spivak's quotation marks, who chooses? Chow, citing NancyArmstrong, cautions that we too readily slide from the "subject of the criticalterm 'subject position?' to a "popular and sentimental version of the bourgeoisself" (Writing37).Similarly.]udith Butler cautions that we should not be trappedin a version of consciousness that still privileges the autonomous unified self;we should not see a "prediscoursive '1'" directing the various subject positions("Critically" 18,24; elaborated in "Contingent"). Since the decentered self is acomplex new idea for undergraduate students, it would be likely that they wouldneutralize it in terms of the more familiar understandings of selfhood, againstwhich Chow-through Armstrong-cautioned. To counter this I needed tomove the illustration beyond that "prediscursive '1'" that Trinh calls a falsebeliefthat "the author exists !xfore.. not simultaneously wiJh.. " (Woman29) to the"I" embedded in discourse. Extending this, we could say that the person doesnot exist before an experience, but simultaneously with, constructing and beingconstructed, thus ending up with the combination Jarratt attributes to Spivak:"Her writings stand along side other accounts and the person herself whocontinues to re-generate a speaking subject" (61).

Spivak, herself, speaks about the mother tongue that exists "before our birthand after our death, where patterns that can be filled with anyone's motivationhave laid themselves down. [ ... ] We learn it ... fill it ... make it our own ... and leave it ... for its other users" (Outside9).Like the mother tongue, Trinh'sstory that opens and closes Woman,Native,Other"circulates like a gift; an emptygiftwhich anyone can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess"(2).Here is a subjectivity created by language, an "1"embedded in language. Yetthere is also a "we" who picks language up and the "anyone" who fills the story.

Here Spivak again proved helpful. Frequently she insists both that there isno decentered subject andthat we need that center in order to act. Since she ismuch too careful to have merely slipped from subjocto self,it would seem her


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Feminist Postcolonial Studies 279way of noting that we always feel the presence of a conductor. Or, as Lugonesdescribes the illusion of continuity, conflicting moments are "always experienced in the first person" (396).Trinh adds yet another dimension when shespeaks of the inner core self assomething that we keep peeling away-that is its"essence" as it were, that it can always be peeled away (Wcman90-94). I wasretelling the mother/teacher dilemma to some friends and got the laughingresponse, "And the pop psychologist in you knew the difference." What had feltlike a core self could now be seen as subject position in another discourse.Returning to Butler-she adds that sometimes one subject position doesorchestrate the others. What is important, then, is that we not see the samesubject position always in control, that we not identify anyone subject positionas "the" self, remembering Lugones's words: "The experience is one of havingmemory of oneself as different without having any underlying 'I'" (396).Or asSpivak puts it, just "becausewe needto center ourselves in order to act, we shouldnot monumentalize that need asthe way things really are" ("Reflections" 71).Incontrast to the modernist concern with authenticity and masks discussedearlier,Lugones distinguishes between what she calls"world travelling" and acting andposing. She defines uoidtravellings "this shift from being one person to beinga different person" (396).(From subject position to subject position, we couldsay.) Just as cultural studies, using postmodernism's rejection of political andsocial grand narratives calls for narratives that are provisional, (see Berlin,Rhetorics1, 101)so here, even while rejecting the unitary autonomous self ofenlightenment narratives, we strive to keep narratives of our "selves"provisional.

Berlin's cultural studies, asare postcolonial feminisms, isabout change. Yetthe fear remains that inaction will result from seeing the "self" as constructed,from losing a sense of "authenticity" with the loss of the core self. The key, asButler reminds us, isto recognize that being constituted by multiple discoursesis not the same as being determined by them. Instead of losing agency, Butlerfinds it, claiming that "the constituted character of the subject is the veryprecondition of its agency," is that which "enables a purposive and significantreconfiguration of cultural and political relations" ("Contingent" 12). Likewise,Berlin notes the possibility of change. "Ludic postmodernism," the despairingsubstitution of verbal play for action-which Berlin critiques through TheresaEbert's analysis-is only a possibility, not a necessity; Ebert's "resistingpostmodernism" is equally possible. As Berlin puts it, "The codes, scripts, orterministic screens that define individuals as helpless ciphers must thus bereplaced by narratives that enable democratic participation ... " (Rhetorics8).

To get to this agency requires moving beyond mere lists of subject positions.It requires noting the weave of discourses that make up the decentered self andthe potentially transformative interaction as that multiple conflicted self shiftscenters. Berlin, noting the variety of combinations of discourse we can inhabit,claims it as a variety that" assures differences among us as well as possibilitiesfor originality and political agency"; he further distinguishes between "politicalagency" and "complete autonomy" ("Poststructuralism" 21).Autonomy may be


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280 JACgone, but with Lugones's "world travelling," agency remains. There is aproductive interaction to seek. Chow speaks of using each discourse to commenton the others, to "analyze, decode, and criticize one another" so that each showswhat has been muted in the other (Writing108)and observes that "instabilitiesof the categories ... are multiplied by their juxtaposition" ("Violence" 91).Likewise, Spivak speaks of using each to bring the other to crisis, to "the momentat which you feel that your presuppositions of an enterprise are disproved by theenterprise itself" {Post-Colonial39).

From these internal and external interactions, constituted subjects can seediscourses that are beneficial and those that are limiting or downright harmfulto the interests of the various subject positions they can occupy. Acknowledgingthe presence of limitations, yet acting from a "chosen" subject position, we canknow that neither a permanent core nor an authentic self did the choosing, yetwe strive to be, as Spivak says, a centered subject. Capable of shifting worlds orcenters, capable of claiming all our centers, we can also see ourselves capable oflimited choice among accommodation, resistance, and negotiation.

As postcolonial feminists find themselves capable of shifting, so can we andour students; to that end let us now consider enabling strategies in the culturalstudies composition classroom. In the classroom we can teach-and modelproblem finding. Heuristics, such as the starting guide in FourWorldsa/Writingwhere students are guided to compare values and expectations with experiencesin order to probe for dissonance and prepare for insight, can be ameans to guidestudents to "productive crisis" as they look at clashing values and probe for theseparate sources in their various formative discourses. Part of the goal of writingas inquiry is finding dissonance. Part of the goal of cultural studies is to hearsilenced discourses, whose appearance will most likely produce dissonance.Remembering Anzaldua, we can encourage students to own, rather than to denyand submerge, the various discourses they find. Since these are conflictingdiscourses-incommensurate, at times-solutions will not be simple and synthesis may not be possible. But some selection and negotiation will be.

Berlin's cultural studies emphasizes assignments that direct students'attention to ways they already resist dominant culture asone way to convey thatthey are not helpless pawns of discourses (Rhetorics16).To Berlin's analysis ofresistance, postcolonial feminists can lead us to add others. After having studentslook at their reports of various experiences of dominant, we might have themexplore whether they are experiencing "the" dominant culture or a subordinateculture as dominant and what differences each domination and/or resistanceenables and disables. This analysis can provide profitable negotiation as studentsconsider various gains and losses. Sometimes covert prestige will be seen as a gain,sometimes not. Spivak, for example, resisted the potential covert prestige of theThird World margin for the more equalized teacher role.

We can also add analysis of students' power and powerlessness by addingheuristics to help them explore ways they dominate. It will be instructive toexplore our dissonant attitudes to power we wield and to power that is wielded


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Feminist Postcolonial Studies 281over us. Students can look at responsible uses of power, rationalized power,harsh power over, shared power with-always ready to shift categories. They canobserve how their language changes, whether or not their behavior changes. Itmay make them more aware of the two-way influence of formation betweenculture and subject. We would do well to remember with Trinh, "the fundamentally different meanings that may be given to the same word, the same sentence,when it is read by a member of the dominant group and by a member of adominated group of a culture" ("Undone" 8).The same act could be describedas resistance to "the" dominant or as assimilation to a subculture. It seems tomatter. It also matters whether the one reflecting isbeing assimilated or seekingto assimilate/influence others. Because students do both, they have much toconsider. If Latina! 0 students are feeling forced to be authentic or if they arepushing others to be authentic, Lugones's "simply latin" could turn into"stereotypically latin," even if they are among Latinos.

Although this paper has focused on self analysis, that analysis is only onepart of the larger cultural studies project. The students' analyses ofthe forces thatconstruct them are also analyses of the cultures they inhabit. The self analysis ofthis form of cultural studies is ameans toward "a literacy ... commit] ed] to activeparticipation in decision making in the public sphere" (Berlin Rhetorics01). Itis a means to "bring[ing] about more personally humane and socially equitableeconomic and political arrangements" (Berlin "Composition and" 50).AsBerlinreminds us, we work from" aconception of the good democratic society and thegood life for all its members," yet we maintain an awareness of our vision'sincompleteness, an awareness that requires the vision to "remain open to changeand revision" (Rhetorics1).Thuswe assignanalyses of selfin culture with the goalof moving on to a revision of that culture and our visions. To our challenge tostudent writers, Jarratt adds this challenge to us as readers of student writing,that we "[i]magine students capable of inscribing multiple selves" (67).

In OutsideintheeachingMachine,hen Spivakspeaksdireetlyto cultural studies,it is transnational and environmental. Although she indicates-and I agree-thatundergraduates may not be ready to write in suchworld terms, students learning torecognize the constituting forces of their culture will be more ableto take that steplater. As instructors, we can giveworld illustrations, eventhough we don't demandthem in the students' analyses.Moving slowly, we could adapt Stephen Krashen'slanguage acquisition model (Brown 187-89),emembering to extend the input onlyto +1beyond the students' level, extending far enough to stretch them, but not sofar asto discourage them with too great atask. Berlinemphasizes preparing students"for critical citizenship in ademocracy" (Poststruetural" 31),andSpivakemphasizesthe relationship of that citizenship and democracy to the rest of the world.Throughout the semester, we can push awareness beyond the local in as manyincreasing circles as our students show themselves able to consider.

PurdueUniversityWestLafayette,ndiana


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282 JACNotes

1Of course, asinstructors, we cannot allow discussions to side track into questions of whois most oppressed. Also we have to help maintain perspective so that majority culture studentsavoid mere whining. I want to thank Susan Jarratt for recommending Marilyn Frye's chapter,"Oppression," as a practical strategy.

Works CitedAlarcon, Norma. "The Theoretical Subject(s) of ThisBridgeCalledMyBacknd Anglo-AmericanFeminism." Anzaldua 356-69.Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands,La Frontera:TheNewMestiza.San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books,

1987.-. "En rapport,In Opposition: Cobrandocuentasa lasnuestras,"Anzaldua 142-48.-. "Introduction." Anzaldua xv-xxviii.-. ed. MakingFace,MakingSoul,HaciendaCaras:Creativeand CriticalPerspectivesyFeministsofCdor. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1990.Bahri, Deepika. "Terms of Engagement: Postcolonial ism, Transnationalism, and CompositionStudies." JAC 18.1 (1998): 29-44.Berlin, James A. "Composition and Cultural Studies." CompositionndResistance.Ed. C. MarkHurlbert and Michael Blitz. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1991. 47-55.-. "Composition Studies and Cultural Studies: Collapsing Boundaries." Into theField:SitesofCompositiontudies.Ed. Anne Ruggles Gere. New York: MLA, 1993.99-116.-. "Poststructuralisrn, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom: Postmodern Theoryin Practice." Rhetoriceview11 (1992): 16-33.-. Rhetorics,Poetics,and Cultures:RefiguringCollegeEnglishStudies. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1996.Berlin, James and Michael J. Vivion. "Introduction: A Provisional Definition." CulturalStudiesin theEnglishClassroom.Eds. James A. Berlin and Michael J.Vivion. Portsmouth, NH:Boynton/Cook, 1992. vii-xvi.Brown, H. Douglas. PrinciplesfLanguageLearningand Teaching.2nd Ed. Englewood Cliffs, N]:Prentice-Hall, 1987.Butler, Judith. "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism.'"Feminists7heorizethePolitical.Eels.Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott. New York: Routledge,1992. 3-21.-. "Critically Queer." GLQ:A JournalofLesbianand GayStudies1 (1993): 17-32.Christian, Barbara. "The Race for Theory." Anzaldua 335-45.Chow, Rex. "Violence in the Other Country: China as Crisis, Spectacle, and Woman." ThirdWorldWomenand thePoliticsofFeminism. Eds. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo,Lourdes Torres. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. 81-100.

WritingDiaspore:acticsfInterventionnContemporaryCulturalStudies.Bloomington: IndianaUP, 1993.Fanon, Frantz. BlackSkin: WhiteMasks.New York: Grove Press, 1967.Frye, Marilyn. 1hePoliticsofReality:EssaysnFeministTheory.Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1983.


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Feminist Postcolonial Studies 283Jarratt, Susan C. "Beside Ourselves: Rhetoric and Representation in Postcolonial FeministWriting." JAC 18.1 (1998): 57-75.Lauer, Janice M., Gene Montague, Andrea Lunsford, and Janet Emig. FourWorldsofWriting,rd.

Ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.Lugones, Marla. "Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception." Anzaldua 390-402.Mora, Pat. "Legal Alien." Anzaldua 376.Richard, Nelly. "Postrnodernism and Periphery." Trans. Nick Caistor. ThirdText2 (Winter1987/88).Sidler, Michelle, and Richard Morris. "Writing in a Post-Berlinian Landscape: Cultural Compo.sition in the Classroom." JAC 18.2 (1998): 275-91.Silko, Leslie Marmon. Cenmorry.ew York: Viking, 1977.Sledd, James. "In Defense of the Students' Right." CollegeEnglish45 (1983): 667-675.Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxismand the InterpretationofCulture.Eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1988. 271-313.

In OtherWorlds:Essaysn CulturalPolitics.New York: Routledge, 1988."More on Power/Knowledge" (1992). TheSpivakReader.Eds. Donna Landry and GeraldMacLean. New York: Routledge, 1996. 141-174.Outsidein theTeachingMachine.New York: Routledge, 1993.ThePost-ColonialCritic:Interviews,Strategies,Dialogues.Ed. Sarah Harasym. New York:Routledge, 1990."Reflections on Cultural Studies in the Post-Colonial Conjuncture: An Interview with theGuest Editor." CriticalStudies3 (1991): 63-78.

Trinh T. Minh-ha. "Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questionsof Identity and Difference." Anzaldua 371-75."The Undone Interval: Trinh T. Minh-ha in Conversation with Anna Marla Morelli." ThePost-Colonialuestion.Eds. laian Chambers and Lidia Curti. London: Routledge, 1996. 316.WomanNativeOther:WritingPostcolonialityndFeminism.Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

Trudgill, Peter. Sociolinguistics:n IntroductionoLanguagendSociety.1974). New York: Viking,1983.

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