A poetics of resistance: Discourses of difference in the contemporary writings of African-American women and Chicanas

The overall aim of this project was to posit a discourse of difference that redefined difference as multiple and as encoded within the terms of identity. This position was based on the overarching premise that, as the Chicana cultural and feminist critic Norma Alarcon contends, "difference is not fully engaged as a resistance to the monologism of Western Culture." The West has upheld that monologism through a discourse that represents difference both as unitary and homogeneous and as antithetical to the western tradition. For this reason, the terms of identity, which hold out the promise of assimilation into Western Culture, subordinate difference. I thus argue that this self/other paradigm cannot merely be inverted, as various oppressed groups in the United States, such as Blacks, Chicanos, and women have done, because it is modeled on a dualistic framework that is part and parcel of the western tradition.;I complement the theoretical framework of my dissertation by showing how the contemporary writings of the African-American women Toni Morrison and Toni Cade Bambara and the Chicanas Sandra Cisneros and Helena Maria Viramontes represent difference in ways that contest the western ideal of the autonomous, self-determining subject. I focus on these authors because as women of color they consciously invoke cultural practices resistive to the western tradition. In doing so, they suggest alternative paradigms for the subject, in particular the Black female and Chicana subject. For these writers, then, literature constitutes an intervention in contemporary cultural and discursive practices, which is an essentially a theoretical enterprise. I thus privilege the theoretical underpinnings of the writings, also showing how they propose a model for re-envisioning community. In proposing a new basis for the formation of the subject, these writers also reinvest aesthetic practice with the power to create meaning for the self and for the community. In sum, I have sought through this dissertation to narrow the gap between theory and practice.