| In "Unspeakable Things Unspoken", writer and critic Toni Morrison noted, "Looking at the scope of American literature, I can't help thinking that the question should never have been 'Why am I, an Afro-American, absent from it?' It is not a particularly interesting query anyway. The spectacularly interesting question is 'What intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critic to erase me from a society seething with my presence, and what effect has that performance had on the work? What are the strategies of escape from knowledge? Of willful oblivion?" This dissertation examines Morrison's queries in the context of the fields of ethnic studies and women's studies in the US academy. I repeatedly juxtapose the words and ideas of a wide range of artists and thinkers such as Marlon Riggs, Trinh Minh-ha, Patricia Williams, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, etc, to develop an analysis that places the condition and consequences of multiple marginalization through racial, gender, and sexual status at the center rather than the periphery of an extended analysis. I am constructing here a dissertation in the form of a syllabus about the most salient and pressing issues raised in dealing with the condition of multiple marginalization. The trope of the syllabus encompasses a number of important issues--the relation between theory, theorist and audience, the problem of canon formation and the question of institutionalizing history and memory in their largest senses. As academics involved in feminist and ethnic studies, we first had to struggle to prove that we existed as artists, thinkers, historical subjects and agents. Then came the project of articulating theoretically how our exclusions have been institutionalized, dismantling notions of "objectivity" and "universality". For artists and intellectuals multiply marginalized within systems of racial, gender, sexual and class exploitation and dominance, for those of us involved in work that is oppositional to the dominant culture, the struggle to bring the legacy of the past forward into our contemporary consciousness is fundamental. The imperative to speak, to "talk back", to "transform silence into language and action" has been a powerfully resonant thematic of those writing from the margins that I am trying to give adequate theoretical weight. |
