Since critics first allegedthat feminism claimed tospeak universally for all
women, feminist researchers havebeen acutely aware ofthe limitations of 
genderas a single analyticalcategory. In fact, feministsare perhaps alone in
the academy in theextent to which theyhave embraced intersectionality – the 
relationshipsamong multiple dimensions andmodalities of social relations
and subject formations – as itselfa central category ofanalysis. One could 
evensay that intersectionality isthe most important theoreticalcontribution 
that women’s studies,in conjunction with relatedfields, has made sofar.1

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/426800

The Complexity of Intersectionality

In a work with far-reaching implications, Chela Sandoval does no less than revise the genealogy of theory over the past thirty years, inserting what she terms "U.S. Third World feminism" into the narrative in a way that thoroughly alters our perspective on contemporary culture and subjectivity.What Sandoval has identified is a language, a rhetoric of resistance to postmodern cultural conditions. U.S liberation movements of the post-World War II era generated specific modes of oppositional consciousness. Out of these emerged a new activity of consciousness and language Sandoval calls the "methodology of the oppressed". This methodology -- born of the strains of the cultural and identity struggles that currently mark global exchange -- holds out the possibility of a new historical moment, a new citizen-subject, and a new form of alliance consciousness and politics. Utilizing semiotics and U.S. Third World feminist criticism, Sandoval demonstrates how this methodology mobilizes love as a category of critical analysis. Rendering this approach in all its specifics, Methodology of the Oppressed gives rise to an alternative mode of criticism opening new perspectives on a theoretical, literary, aesthetic, social movement, or psychic expression.

Methodology of the oppressed

In recent decades, struggles for recognition have increasingly dominated the political landscape.1 Recognition theorists such as Charles Taylor (1994) and Axel Honneth (1995) seek to interpret and justify these struggles through the idea that our identity is shaped, at least partly, by our relations with other people. Because our identity is shaped in this way, it is alleged that feelings of self-worth, self-respect and self-esteem are possible only if we are positively recognised for who we are. Consequently, for many political theorists, recognition is an integral component of a satisfactory modern theory of justice, as well as the means by which both historical and contemporary political struggles can be understood and justified.

The Politics of Recognition

L'A. s'eleve contre la distinction faite entre les anthropologues « indigenes » (interne a la societe) et « non indigenes » (externe a la societe). Si a l'epoque du colonialisme, les etudes faites par, ou a l'aide, des autochtones etaient davantage estimees car refletant une soit-disant meilleure realite, une approche hybride, ou narration et analyse rigoureuse sont melees, aurait tout autant de valeur.

How Native Is a "Native" Anthropologist?

espected scholars of color have suggested (e.g., Stanfield, 1985, 1993a, 1994), even within the pages of this journal (J. A. Banks, 1993, 1995; Gordon, Miller, & Rollock, 1990), that the epistemologies we typically use in educational research may be racially biased. They have argued that our epistemologiesl-not our use of them, but the epistemologies themselves-are racially biased ways of knowing, implicitly proposing, thus, a new category of racism that could be labeled epistemological racism. There has been, however, a provocative lack of response-pro or con-to this race-oriented argument by leading educational methodologists in journals of education, including this one.2 But this lack of response is in curious contrast to the lively and contentious debates on other epistemological issues, such as quantitative versus qualitative (e.g., Cizek, 1995), objectivity versus subjectivity (e.g., Heshusius, 1994), validity (e.g., Lenzo, 1995; Moss, 1994), or paradigmatic issues in general (e.g., Bereiter, 1994; Delandshere & Petrosky, 1994; Gage, 1989). If we were among those raising this race-oriented issue, we would wonder why our efforts to argue that the epistemologies of educational research were racially biased provoked virtually no response, particularly among those who author the quantitative and qualitative research methods textbooks we all typically use. We would certainly wonder whether our argument was ignored because it raised the disquieting issue of race, because it was thought to be a weak or irrelevant argument, or because the argument was simply not understood. Unfortunately, we might also wonder whether this was just one more incidence of Ellison's (1972) "invisible man" syndrome, of Whites ignoring racial issues and people of color. As researchers whose race is White and who have

Coloring Epistemologies: Are Our Research Epistemologies Racially Biased?

An examination of representative aspects of Mexican-American narrative forms including the novel, short story, narrative verse and autobiography. It includes studies of works from Americo Parades' With His Pistol in His Hand to more recent work by women like Sandra Cisneros and Cherrie Moraga.

Chicano narrative : the dialectics of difference

The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism

A new generation of minority and ethnic writers has come to prominence whose work signals a radical turn to a \"postrace\" era in American literature. Like Virginia Woolf ironically identifying the beginning of the modern era \"on or about December 1910,\" Colson Whitehead, in an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times in 2009, marked the anniversary of the election of the first black man to the presidency of the United States by proclaiming that \"One year ago . . . we officially became a postracial society.\" I will return to Whitehead momentarily, especially in reference to three of his novels, The Intuitionist (1998), John Henry Days (2001), and Zone One (2011). For the moment, however, I wish first to set the context for my appraisal of what I am calling here a \"postrace aesthetic\" in contemporary narrative.

The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative

Since the turn of the century, a new generation of minority writers has come to prominence whose work signals a radical turn to a postrace era in American literature. Outlining a paradigm that I term historical fantasy, I argue that in the twenty-first century, the relationship between race and social justice, race and identity, and indeed, race and history requires these writers to invent a new “imaginary” for thinking about the nature of a just society and the role of race in its construction. It also requires the invention of new forms to represent it. In this light, I address the topic of race and narrative theory in two contexts: in relation to the question of literary form and in relation to history. Doing so will allow me to explain the reasons for what I take to be the inauguration of a new stage in the history of the novel by twenty-first-century US ethnic writers. At the outset, I wish to make one thing clear about my use of the term “postrace”: race and racism, ethnicity and difference are nowhere near extinct in contemporary America. W. E. B. Du Bois’s momentous pronouncement in 1901 that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line” could not have been a more accurate assessment of the fate of race during the twentieth century (354). Today race remains a central question, but one no longer defined exclusively in shades of black or white, or in the exact manner we once imagined. That is, apart from the election of Barack Obama, one other matter marks the present differently from the racial history of the American past:

Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction

Poet, novelist, journalist, and ethnographer, Americo Paredes (1915–1999) was a pioneering figure in Mexican American border studies and a founder of Chicano studies. Paredes taught literature and anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin for decades, and his ethnographic and literary critical work laid the groundwork for subsequent scholarship on the folktales, legends, and riddles of Mexican Americans. In this beautifully written literary history, the distinguished scholar Ramon Saldivar establishes Paredes’s preeminent place in writing the contested cultural history of the south Texas borderlands. At the same time, Saldivar reveals Paredes as a precursor to the “new” American cultural studies by showing how he perceptively negotiated the contradictions between the national and transnational forces at work in the Americas in the nascent era of globalization.

Saldivar demonstrates how Paredes’s poetry, prose, and journalism prefigured his later work as a folklorist and ethnographer. In song, story, and poetry, Paredes first developed the themes and issues that would be central to his celebrated later work on the “border studies” or “anthropology of the borderlands.” Saldivar describes how Paredes’s experiences as an American soldier, journalist, and humanitarian aid worker in Asia shaped his understanding of the relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the borderlands of south Texas and of national and ethnic identities more broadly. Saldivar was a friend of Paredes, and part of The Borderlands of Culture is told in Paredes’s own words. By explaining how Paredes’s work engaged with issues central to contemporary scholarship, Saldivar extends Paredes’s intellectual project and shows how it contributes to the remapping of the field of American studies from a transnational perspective.

Ramón Saldívar

Papers

Chicano narrative : the dialectics of difference

The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism

The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative

Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction

The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary