| This dissertation critically historicizes the shift between the consciousness movement period of the 1960s and 70s and the post-Movement period by drawing upon the historic and literary roots of Chicana writing and examining the way in which early texts have entered into the contemporary constructions of chicana/latina ethnicity, race, class, gender, and identity theories. The literary basis for this analysis of the role of academic postmodernism and non-Western anti-hegemonic theories in the writing of decolonization by Chicana author-activists includes an examination of (1) the mutual influence of Chicana feminism and Second-wavefeminism which results in the articulation of US third-world feminism/women of color feminism and the disarticulation of the white feminist universal, (2) the class-based and politically defined literary genealogy constructed retrospectively by the Chicano Movement, (3) the loosely ethnic literary genealogy constructed by the "post-Movement" or what I identify as the "Latina/o" period, and (4) the double-edged function of academic postmodernism, and the complicated disavowal of mestizaje through non-Western anti-hegemonic theories based in marginal epistemologies in the decolonial work of the era of the multicultural face of global hegemony. This dissertation argues for the epistemology of the oppressed as the decolonial foundation for the articulation of an unfragmented anti-hegemonic front, and the conceptualization of an alternate world outside of the nation-state and outside of the entrapment of Western theory and culture. |
