Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T01:44:34.689Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Positioning Subjects and Objects: Agency, Narration, Relationality

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Abstract

When assumed by positions of dominance, the impersonal, analytical perspectives of scholar-narrators may serve to flatten, simplify, or render invisible the differences of constructed Others. Strategies of resistance necessarily correspond to where narrator-subjects enter relations of power. Without the presence of Others’ narrations, dominance can neither value newly visible subjective agency nor confront the complicity in its own subjectivity. Intersubjectivity suggests a dialogical process that utilizes differences in lived experience to reconceive relationality.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alarcón, Norma. 1990. The theoretical subject(s) of This bridge called my back and Anglo‐American feminism. In Making face, making soul/haciendo caras: Creative and critical perspectives by women of color. See Anzaldúa 1990.Google Scholar
Allen, Paula Gunn. 1986. The sacred hoop: Recovering the feminine in American Indian traditions. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Allison, Dorothy. 1990. Mama. In Calling home: Working‐class women's writings, an anthology. See Zandy 1990.Google Scholar
Andrade, Susan A. 1990. Rewriting history, motherhood, and rebellion: Naming an African women's literary tradition. Research in African Literatures 1:91110.Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/la frontera: The new mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.Google Scholar
Anzaldúa, Gloria. ed. 1990. Making face, making soul/haciendo caras: Creative and critical perspectives by women of color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.Google Scholar
Appiah, Anthony. 1991. Tolerable falsehoods: Agency and the interests of theory. In Consequences of theory, ed. Arac, Jonathan and Johnson, Barbara Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Ayim, Maryann. 1991. In praise of clutter as a necessary part of the feminist perspective. Hypatia 6(2): 211–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The dialogic imagination: Four essays, ed., Holquist, Michael, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Basso, Keith. 1979. Portraits of “the Whiteman”: Linguistic play and cultural symbols among the Western Apache. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benhabib, Seyla. 1987. The generalized and the concrete other: The Kohlberg‐Gilligan controversy and feminist theory. In Feminism as critique: The politics of gender, ed. Benhabib, Seyla and Cornell, Drucilla Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Benson, Paul. 1990. Feminist second thoughts about free agency. Hypatia 5(3): 4764.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlin, Lucia. 1990. Maggie May. In Calling home: Working‐class women's writings, an anthology. See Zandy 1990.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. 1989. Location, intervention, incommensurability: A conversation with Homi Bhabha. Emergences 1: 6388.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. 1990a. Interrogating identity: The postcolonial prerogative. In Anatomy of racism, ed. Theo Goldberg, David Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. ed. 1990b. Nation and narration. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Boskin, Joseph. 1979. Humor and social change in twentieth‐century America. Boston: Trustees of the Public Library of the City of Boston.Google Scholar
Boskin, Joseph. 1986. Sambo: The rise and fall of the American jester. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cardea, Caryatis. 1990. Lesbian revolution and the 50 minute hour. In Lesbian philosophies and cultures, ed. Allen, Jeffner Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Carillo, Jo. 1981. And when you leave, take your pictures with you. In This bridge called my back: Writings by radical women of color, eds. Moraga, Cherrfe, Anzaldúa, Gloria, and Cade Bambara, Toni New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.Google Scholar
Chase, Carolyn. 1981. Many people say our people are unpredictable. See Gwaltney 1981.Google Scholar
Christian, Barbara. 1989. But what do we think we're doing anyway: The state of Black feminist criticism(s) or my version of a little bit of history. In Changing our own words: Essays on criticism, theory, and writing by Black women, ed. Wall, Cheryl A. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Clifford, James. 1988. The predicament of culture: Twentieth‐century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 1990. Black feminist thought. Boston: Unwin Hyman.Google Scholar
Corlett, William. 1989. Community without unity: A politics of Derridian extravagance. Durham: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
CruikshankJulie, in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith Julie, in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie, Ned Lincoln 1991. Life lived like a story: Life stories of three Native Yukon elders. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Daly, Mary. 1978. Gynecology. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Davies, Carole Boyce. 1991. Private selves and public spaces: Autobiography and the African woman writer. CLA Journal 34(3): 267–89.Google Scholar
Davis, Angela. 1971. Reflections on the Black woman's role in the community of slaves. The Black Scholar 3(3): 34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eckstein, Barbara J. 1990. The language of fiction in a world of pain: Reading politics as paradox. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1970. A dying colonialism. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Russell, Gever, Martha, Minh‐ha, Trinh T., and West, Cornel, eds. 1990. Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures. New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge and London: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Flax, Jane. 1990. Thinking fragments: Psychoanalysis, feminism, and postmodernism in the contemporary west. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Fowlkes, Diane L. 1992. White political women: Paths from privilege to empowerment. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.Google Scholar
GallopJane, Marianne Hirsch Jane, Marianne Hirsch and Nancy, K. Miller 1990. Criticizing feminist criticism. In Conflicts in feminism, ed. Hirsch, Marianne and Fox Keller, Evelyn New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
GatesHenry Louis, Jr Henry Louis, Jr. 1988. The signifying monkey: A theory of African‐American literary criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gilroy, Paul. 1990. One nation under a groove: The cultural politics of “race” and racism in Britain. In Anatomy of racism, ed. Theo Grossberg, David Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.Google Scholar
Gwaltney, John Langston. 1980. Drylongso: A self‐portrait of Black America. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Head, Bessie. 1974. A question of power. Oxford: Heinemann International.Google Scholar
Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. 1992. Speaking in tongues: Dialogics, dialectics, and the Black woman writer's literary tradition. In Feminists theorize the political, eds. Butler, Judith and Scott, Joan W. New York and London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Heyne, Eric. 1987. Literary status for nonfiction narratives. Papers in Comparitive Studies 5(1987): 137–45.Google Scholar
Higgenbotham, Evelyn Brooks. 1992. African‐American women's history and the metalanguage of race. Signs 17(2): 251–4.Google Scholar
Hooks, Bell. 1990. Marginality as a site of resistance. In Out there: Marginalization and contemporary cultures. See Ferguson, et al. 1990.Google Scholar
Jones, LeRoi. 1963. Blues people: The negro experience in white America and the music that developed from it. New York: William Morrow.Google Scholar
Lugones, María. 1987. Playfulness, “world”‐travelling, and loving perception. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 2(2): 34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McIntosh, Peggy. 1992. White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women's studies. In Race, class, and gender: An anthology, ed. Anderson, Margaret L. and Hill Collins, Patricia Belmont CA: Wadsworth, Inc.Google Scholar
McNay, Lois. 1991. The Foucauldian body and the exclusion of experience. Hypatia 6(3): 125–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrison, Toni. 1970. The bluest eye. New York: Washington Square Press.Google Scholar
Morrison, Toni. 1987. Beloved. New York: NAL Penguin.Google Scholar
Sandel, Michael J. 1983. Liberalism and the limits of justice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Sharpe, Jenny. 1989. Figures of colonial resistance. Modern Fiction Studies 35(1): 137–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silko, Leslie Marmon. 1977. Ceremony. New York: Viking Penguin.Google Scholar
Slemon, Stephen. 1990. Unsettling the empire: Resistance theory for the second world. World Literature Written in English 30(2):3041.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Barbara, ed. 1983. Home girls: A Black feminist anthology. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Paul. 1988. Discerning the subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Valerie. 1987. Self‐discovery and authority in Afro‐American literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Valerie. 1989. Black feminist theory and the representation of the “other.” In Changing our own words: Essays on criticism, theory, and writing by Black women, ed. Cheryl, A. Wall New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Snead, James. 1990. European pedigrees/African contagions: Nationality, narrative, and communality in Tutuola, Achebe, and Reed. See Bhabha 1990b.Google Scholar
Snitow, Ann. 1992. Not so happy days. Review of Young, white, and miserable: Growing up female in the fifties by Winii Breines. The Nation 28 September: 335–37.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1987. A literary representation of the subaltern: A woman's text from the third world. In In other worlds: Essays in cultural politics. New York and London: Methuen.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Subaltern studies: Deconstructing historiography. In Selected subaltern studies, eds. Guhan, Ranajit and Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1990. The post‐colonial critic: interviews, strategies, dialogues. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Wendell, Susan. 1990. Oppression and victimization; choice and responsibility. Hypatia 6(3): 1546.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, Patricia. 1991. And we are not married: A journal of musings upon legal language and the ideology of style. In Consequences of theory, ed. Arac, Jonathan and Johnson, Barbara Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Wittig, Monique. 1975. Les guèrilléres. London: Paladin.Google Scholar
Wittig, Monique. 1980. The straight mind. Feminist Issues (Summer): 101–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 1990. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zandy, Janet, ed. 1990. Calling home: Working‐class women's writings, an anthology. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Zentella, Ana Celia. 1990a. Integrating qualitative and quantitative methods in the study of bilingual code switching. The uses of linguistics. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.Google Scholar
Zentella, Ana Celia. 1990b. Returned migration, language, and identity: Puerto Rican bilinguals in dos worlds/two mundos. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 84: 81100.Google Scholar
Zerilli, Linda M.G. 1991. Rememoration or war? French feminist narrative and the politics of self‐representation. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultual Studies 3(1): 119.Google Scholar