1. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, "Introduction," Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present , Volume I: 600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century, eds. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (New York: The Feminist Press, 1991), p. 13 footnote 23.

2. Alarcón, "The Theoretical Subjects 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 , ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1990), p. 365. Chela Sandoval has called U.S. third-world feminism an "enigma" because it "represent[s]

a form of historical consciousness whose very structure lies outside the conditions of possibility which regulate the oppositional expressions of dominant feminism" (Sandoval, "U. S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World," Genders 10 [Spring 1991]: 1).

3. Haraway, "Gender for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: Feminism and the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 130.

4. Ibid., p. 130.

3. Haraway, "Gender for a Marxist Dictionary: The Sexual Politics of a Word," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: Feminism and the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 130.

4. Ibid., p. 130.

5. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Elaine Showalter, "The Rise of Gender," introduction to Speaking of Gender , ed. Elaine Showalter (Routledge: New York and London, 1989), pp. 1-13; Teresa de Lauretis, "Technologies of Gender," in Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction , (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 1-31.

6. Derrida, "Geschlecht: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference," in Research in Phenomenology 13 (1989): 65. See also Derrida, "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand," in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida , ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1987), pp. 161-196.

7. Harding, The Science Question in Feminism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 17. Cited hereafter as SF.

8. Haraway, "Gender for a Marxist Dictionary," p. 136.

9. Women, Culture and Society , eds. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), and Toward an Anthropology of Women , ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).

10. Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 6. Michelle Rozaldo, one of the editors of the volume Women, Culture and Society , appears to occupy an interesting intermediate position within Moore's account of the different phases of feminist anthropology in an essay she wrote in 1980, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections in Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding" ( Signs 5, 3 [1980]: 389-417). She, too, warns against wrong versions of the difficulty: "Contrary to those anthropologists who have suggested that our problems lie in incomplete reports or, even worse, in inarticulate and 'silent' female voices, I would suggest that we hear women speak in almost all anthropological descriptions" (Ibid., p. 390) Instead, "what is needed . . . is not so much data as questions. . . . [W]e are challenged to find new ways of linking the particularities of women's lives, activities, and goals to inequalities wherever they exist" (Ibid., p. 390, 417). Looking critically at her own earlier research, Rosaldo frames her

doubts in terms of the need for new conceptual frameworks but without explicitly articulating a theory of gender.

9. Women, Culture and Society , eds. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), and Toward an Anthropology of Women , ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).

10. Moore, Feminism and Anthropology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 6. Michelle Rozaldo, one of the editors of the volume Women, Culture and Society , appears to occupy an interesting intermediate position within Moore's account of the different phases of feminist anthropology in an essay she wrote in 1980, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections in Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding" ( Signs 5, 3 [1980]: 389-417). She, too, warns against wrong versions of the difficulty: "Contrary to those anthropologists who have suggested that our problems lie in incomplete reports or, even worse, in inarticulate and 'silent' female voices, I would suggest that we hear women speak in almost all anthropological descriptions" (Ibid., p. 390) Instead, "what is needed . . . is not so much data as questions. . . . [W]e are challenged to find new ways of linking the particularities of women's lives, activities, and goals to inequalities wherever they exist" (Ibid., p. 390, 417). Looking critically at her own earlier research, Rosaldo frames her

doubts in terms of the need for new conceptual frameworks but without explicitly articulating a theory of gender.

11. Moore, however, also points out that if culture has been a major way feminist anthropologists have dealt with questions of difference, this emphasis has been at the expense of others—questions of race, for one, remain largely unexplored.

12. de Lauretis, "Technologies of Gender," p. 2; emphasis original.

13. Ibid., p. 3.

12. de Lauretis, "Technologies of Gender," p. 2; emphasis original.

13. Ibid., p. 3.

14. Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge: New York and London, 1990), p. 148.

15. Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex," in Toward an Anthropology of Women , ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157-210.

16. MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State: An Agenda for Theory," in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology , eds. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michele Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 1-30.

17. Butler, Gender Trouble, p. 7.

18. Joan Scott is not alone in wanting everyone to be quite aware of the dangerous ease with which gender is entering general academic parlance: "'Gender' seems to fit within the scientific terminology of social science and thus dissociates itself from the (supposedly strident) politics of feminism. In this usage, 'gender' does not carry with it a necessary statement about inequality or power nor does it name the aggrieved (and hitherto invisible) party" ( Gender and the Politics of History , p. 31).

19. Showalter, Speaking of Gender, p. 2-3.

20. See chapter 4, "Women and The Making of the English Working Class," in Gender and the Politics of History.

21. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex: The Manifesto of the Liberated Woman (New York: Vintage, 1974 [1954]).

22. Berger, "Categories and Contexts: Reflections on the Politics of Identity in South Africa," Feminist Studies 18, 2 (Summer 1992): 284.

23. Sargant, Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). An equally well-known anthology was Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism , ed. Zillah R. Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).

24. See Zillah R. Eisenstein's essay "Specifying U.S. Feminism in the 1990s: The Problem of Naming" in Socialist Review 20, 2 (April-June 1990: 45-56), where she moves rather uncertainly from a desire to "incorporat[e] many of the earlier concerns of socialist feminism while moving through and beyond them" (ibid., p. 49) to the opinion that socialism is

"stale" (ibid., p. 51). Older political orientations such as "radical," "liberal," and "socialist" have basically become passé in her view and should be replaced by a radically revised ''egalitarianism between our differences and our sameness" (ibid., p. 55).

23. Sargant, Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). An equally well-known anthology was Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism , ed. Zillah R. Eisenstein (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).

24. See Zillah R. Eisenstein's essay "Specifying U.S. Feminism in the 1990s: The Problem of Naming" in Socialist Review 20, 2 (April-June 1990: 45-56), where she moves rather uncertainly from a desire to "incorporat[e] many of the earlier concerns of socialist feminism while moving through and beyond them" (ibid., p. 49) to the opinion that socialism is

"stale" (ibid., p. 51). Older political orientations such as "radical," "liberal," and "socialist" have basically become passé in her view and should be replaced by a radically revised ''egalitarianism between our differences and our sameness" (ibid., p. 55).

25. Going through the entire collection, particularly for the overall effect this has on the reader, is well worth the effort. The text itself is structured around Heidi Hartmann's lead essay, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union," to which subsequent contributors responded by way of disagreement, qualification, or further extension of her arguments.

26. de Lauretis, "Upping the Anti [ sic ] in Feminist Theory," in Conflicts in Feminism , eds. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 255-270.

27. Butler, Gender Trouble , p. 143.

28. Apart from Dixon, Harding cites the work of Joseph Needham and Russell Means on third-world peoples, as well as the discussions of Placide Tempels, Abiola Irele, Lancinay Keita, and J. E. Wiredu on African philosophy to show how representative such a worldview is.

29. Hartsock, "The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism," in Discovering Reality , eds. Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (Dordrecht Reidel Co., 1983), pp. 283, 300; emphasis original. Probably the most influential text for Hartsock's study is Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), a book that has undoubtedly played a significant role in the intellectual history of U. S. feminism. But, as Hartsock points out, a number of other feminists—Dorothy Dinnerstein, Jane Flax, Hilary Rose, Sara Ruddick, and Carol Gilligan, to name a few—have also come up with similarly structured conceptions of gendered ontologies, epistemologies, and worldviews.

30. Stepan, "Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science," in Anatomy of Racism , ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), p. 40.

31. An example we have already come across would be Gayatri Spivak's more literal reading of Mahasweta Devi's "The Breast-Giver" in chapter 2.

32. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987 (1978)), pp. 1-2; emphases original.

33. Ibid., p. 3; emphasis original.

32. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987 (1978)), pp. 1-2; emphases original.

33. Ibid., p. 3; emphasis original.

34. Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege: Seduction and Rejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color," in Signs 14, 4 (1989): 840. She cites Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who in her speech before

the New York State Legislature in 1860 said: "The prejudice against Color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The Negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man. The few social privileges which the man gives the woman, he makes up to the (free) Negro in civil rights" (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Cage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage , 2nd ed. [Rochester: Susan B. Anthony, 1889], cited in Hurtado, p. 840).

35. Howard Winant, "Postmodern Racial Politics in the United States: Difference and Inequality," in Socialist Review 20, 1 (January-March 1990): 121.

36. Gloria Yamato, "Something About the Subject Makes it Hard to Name," in Making Face, Making Soul: Haciendo Caras , ed. Gloria Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1990), pp. 20-24.

37. "The image of race as a phantom word came to me after I moved into my late godmother's home. . . . The power of that room, I have thought since, is very like the power of racism as status quo: it is deep, angry, eradicated from view, but strong enough to make everyone who enters the room walk around the bed that isn't there, avoiding the phantom as they did the substance for fear of bodily harm. They do not even know what they are avoiding." Patricia Williams, "And We Are Not Married: A Journal of Musings Upon Legal Language and the Ideology of Style," in Consequences of Theory , eds. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 185-186.

38. The notion of articulation comes from Stuart Hall's excellent essay "Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and Post-structuralist Debates," in Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2, 2 (1985): 112, n. 2: "By the term, 'articulation,' I mean a connection or link which is not necessarily given in all cases, as a law or a fact of life, but which requires particular conditions of existence to appear at all, which has to be positively sustained by specific processes, which can under some circumstances disappear or be overthrown, leading to old linkages being dissolved and new connections—re-articulations—being forged. It is also important that an articulation between different practices does not mean that they become identical or that the one is dissolved into the other." ''Articulation" has also been brought into greater currency by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso Press, 1985).

39. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991), p. 215.

40. Ibid., p. 214.

39. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women's Lives (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1991), p. 215.

40. Ibid., p. 214.

41. Far more problematic are cases where analogies are effectively at work but never acknowledged. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita have shown how Elaine Showalter's well-known categorization of British women writers in A Literature of Their Own (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) into three phases—the feminine (a phase of imitation), the feminist (a phase of protest), and the female (a phase of self-discovery)—has been borrowed from Frantz Fanon. "What is also obscured," they continue, "is her transformation of Fanon's theory, domesticating an idea of revolutionary action to a liberal-conservative one of self-discovery and individual fulfillment as the goal of literary endeavor." Tharu and Lalita, Women Writing in India , p. 18.

42. Irigaray, "Women's Exile," Ideology and Consciousness 1 (1977), p. 76.

43. Marcus, "Alibis and Legends, The Ethics of Elsewhereness, Gender and Estrangement," in Women's Writing in Exile , eds. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 273.

44. Ibid., p. 273.

43. Marcus, "Alibis and Legends, The Ethics of Elsewhereness, Gender and Estrangement," in Women's Writing in Exile , eds. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 273.

44. Ibid., p. 273.

45. Irigaray, The Speculum of the Other Woman , trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978), especially p. 71.

46. Since I am expressly considering U.S. feminist theory here, discussing a French feminist calls for some explanation. Luce Irigaray is possibly foremost among non-Americans in terms of her significance in travel into, and effect on, the field of U.S. feminism. The reasons for this, within the overall privileging of "French Theory," and the considerable body of translators who make work such as hers so readily available to American readers, is not something I can go into here. Even before going into the question of the travel of feminist work from other nations, it is worth noting the inequality between the reception of feminists living and writing in France, on the one hand, and who effectively gets to count as a French feminist in the United States, on the other. Going back to the anthology New French Feminisms , eds. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1980), a figure like Christine Delphy (C. D.), to take but one example, is barely included. (A collection of her essays Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression , has been translated and edited in Britain by Diana Leonard [London: Hutchinson, 1984].)

47. I take this phrase from Hayden White's descriptions of the working of metaphors in his essay "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact," reproduced in Tropics of Discourse , especially p. 91.

48. Gordon, review of Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History , in Signs 15, 4 (Summer 1990): 855. Scott, in turn, reviewed

Gordon's Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Viking, 1988) in the same issue. Each scholar also responded briefly to the other's review.

49. Gordon, "What's New in Women's History," in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies , ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), pp. 20-31.

50. In the introductory essay to Gender and the Politics of History , namely "Women's History," which does take up questions of history, Scott is more concerned with pointing out the shortcomings in existing historical approaches than with putting forward a conception of history of her own. Thus, she finds feminist versions of "herstory" to have been ''uniquely about women" and therefore "too separatist," whereas the approach of social history tends toward integrating gender at the level of socioeconomic relations (p. 22).

51. Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 3.

52. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism , pp. 11—12.

53. Johnson, "Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God ," in A World of Difference , pp. 155-171, especially pp. 167 and 169.

54. Marxism's influence has extended well beyond its paradigmatic status for socialist and Marxist feminists to its availability as a resource for radical feminists, ranging from Shulamith Firestone ( The Dialectic of Sex , 1970) to Catherine MacKinnon. "Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism: that which is most one's own, yet most taken away. . . . Feminism stands in relation to marxism as marxism does to classical political economy: its final conclusion and ultimate critique" (MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," in Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideology , eds. Nannerl O. Keohane, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, and Barbara C. Gelpi [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982], pp. 1, 30).

55. Haraway, "Gender for a Marxist Dictionary," p. 134.

56. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Search for a Method (New York: Vintage, 1968 [1963]), p. xxxiv.

57. Some examples would be Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-50 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Lourdes Benería and Martha Roldán, The Crossroads of Class and Gender: Industrial Housework, Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics in Mexico City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Aihwa Ong,

Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987).

58. "Introduction," Conflicts in Feminism , Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox-Keller, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 1.

59. "A Conversation about Race and Class" by Mary Childers and bell hooks, and "Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions" by Elizabeth Abel, both in Hirsch and Fox-Keller eds., Conflicts in Feminism , pp. 60-81 and pp. 184-204.

60. Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class (New York: Harper Collins, 1989), p. 5.

61. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1980s (New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 3.

62. Gates, Jr., "Editor's Introduction: Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes," "Race," Writing, and Difference, Critical Inquiry 12, 1 (1985): 5. More recent examples that suspend race within quotes are The ''Racial" Economy of Science: Towards a Democratic Future , ed. Sandra Harding (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993), and Women, "Race," and Writing in the Early Modern Period , eds. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Barker (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

63. Appiah, "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race," in "Race," Writing and Difference , pp. 21-37.

64. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham provides an indispensable corrective to positions such as Gates's or Appiah's: "As a fluid set of overlapping discourses, race is perceived as arbitrary and illusionary, on the one hand, while natural and fixed on the other. To argue that race is myth and that it is an ideological rather than a biological fact does not deny that ideology has real effects on people's lives" (Higginbotham, "African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," Signs 17, 2 [1992]: 255).

65. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. 256-257.

66. Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe, An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, 2 (Summer 1987): 79.

67. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights , p. 163. bell hooks insists that "race and sex have always been overlapping discourses in the United States" where black/white relations are concerned. However, "there is no psychosexual history of slavery that explores the meaning of white male exploitation of black women or the politics of sexuality, no work that lays out all the available information." Instead, such narratives have been effectively displaced by the kind of attention the dynamics between black men and white women have historicaly been accorded, ansd espe-

cially with "images of black men as rapists, as dangerous menaces to society" (bell hooks, "Reflections on Race and Sex," in Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), pp. 57, 61). Nothing could have brought home the divergent trajectories of race and gender, nor their impossible intersections, more directly than the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings that stunned so many and could only be painfully traced afterwards. (See for example, the collection of essays edited by Toni Morrison, Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992); L. A. Grindstaff, "Double Exposure, Double Erasure: On the Frontline with Anita Hill," Cultural Critique 27 (Spring 1994): 29-60; and numerous articles in The Black Scholar. )

68. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," p. 80.

69. bell hooks, Ain't I A Woman? (Boston: South End Press, 1986), and Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985).

70. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 18, emphasis added.

71. Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege," p. 844. Questions of history become even more pressing in contemporary efforts to work through the naming of U.S. women of color as a single entity. What are the different historicities among Native Americans, blacks, Chicanas, and Asian Americans, including their varying presence and valorization in U.S. academia, that are sometimes obliterated in over-easy references to such a collectivity? For a study of some of the specific moments in the Hispanic racial formation, see Amy Kaminsky, "Gender, Race, Raza," Feminist Studies 20, 1 (Spring 1994): 7-31.

72. Hurtado, "Relating to Privilege," p. 847.

73. Kelly, "The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications in Women's History," in Joan Kelly, Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 1.

74. Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. xiii. Cited hereafter as ES.

75. Brittan and Maynard, Racism, Sexism and Oppression (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 193.

76. An excellent example would be Stuart Hall's call for "the end of the essential black subject" in favor of "the recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experiences and cultural identities, which compose the identity 'black'; that is, the recognition that 'black' is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial catego-

ries and which therefore has no guarantees in Nature" (Stuart Hall, "New Ethnicities," ICA Documents , 7 [1988]: 28). One could read this passage not only as displacing questions of essence from "Nature" to the work of cultural and political experience but also as multiplying one ostensible essence into many.

77. It is worth counterposing Marx's method in the Grundrisse to what has come to count today as sophisticated theory: "The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is a point of departure in reality and hence also for observation and conception. . . . The method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is the only way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind" (Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations for a Critique of Political Economy , translated with a foreword by Martin Nicolaus [London: Penguin Books, 1973], p. 101). Nowadays, the move from the concrete to the abstract is taken to be the mark of one's theoretical accomplishments, rather than as a provisional stage along the way.

78. Dipesh Chakrabarty appears to have opted for just such a conceptualization where postcolonials are concerned: There is only one History—that of Europe—of which we can only ever be inadequate variations (Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?" Representations 37 [Winter 1992]: 1-26). For a very different discussion of history see Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). It should be obvious that the notion of historicity I am arguing for—dealing with what is possible and necessary in the present—has little in common with the kind of "compulsory historicism" (emanating from a specialised discipline) Jane Roland Martin believes is being unfairly thrust upon all feminists at this time (Martin, "Methodological Essentialism, False Differences and Other Dangerous Traps," Signs 19, 3 [Spring 1994]: 641-643).

79. Degler, "What the Women's Movement Has Done to American History," in A Feminist Perspective in the Academy: The Difference it Makes , eds. Elizabeth Langland and Walter Gove (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 67.

80. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault , ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 162.

81. Ibid., pp. 162, 163.

80. Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault , ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 162.

81. Ibid., pp. 162, 163.

82. West, "The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual," in Cultural Critique 1, 1 (1981): 109-124. For a significantly different approach to the

question of the relation of black intellectuals to their community, see Hortense Spillers, "The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date," Boundary 2 21, 3 (Fall 1994): 65-116. She describes the cost, as she perceives it, of not having taken one's identity and location as a black scholar seriously enough, which demands rethinking the boundaries of community itself.

83. Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Cambridge: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 21-22.