INTRODUCTION
Identity in the Academy and Beyond
When I was a candidate on the academic job market in 1996, I had an interview with the dean at a leading university in the South. During that interview, the dean asked me whether I would be comfortable teaching in the English department. On one level, his question made no sense. After all, my first language is English, and I express myself most articulately in that language. Additionally, I received my Ph.D. training in an English department at a major research university (a fact of which he would have been aware), and the literature I write about is composed primarily in English. Also, the job for which I was interviewing had been posted by the English department at his university. Why, then, wouldn't I be comfortable teaching in the English department? On another level, however, I understood exactly why he asked me that question. I am, after all, Chicana. Moreover, since this dean had already mentioned that he was a transplanted Texan, I understood that whatever else he knew, he would have known that some Chicana/os speak Spanish as a first language. Add to this the fact that he would have been aware that the literature I work on is primarily written by Chicana/o and Latina/o authors, and one can begin to reconstruct the reasoning behind his question. He may have presumed that my first language was Spanish and that the literature I work on is written in Spanish. If this were the case, wouldn't the kind of work I do more properly belong in a Spanish department, or, perhaps, an ethnic studies program?
The dean's question about my comfort was thus really a question of belonging and legitimacy. It may have been a question not only about
This experience was just one of many that has revealed to me the complex nexus of identity, experience, knowledge, and belonging that has concerned generations of Chicana/o writers and scholars before me. Some thirty years after the founding of the first Chicana/o studies programs, the cultural productions of Chicana/os still do not occupy a secure place within academia. It is a predicament that mirrors the situation of Americans of Mexican descent who, some 150 years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, still do not occupy a secure place within the imagined community of the United States. It occurs to me now that the range of responses I might have given to the dean would have invoked at least one of the various strategies of cultural negotiation engaged in by writers such as Juan Seguín, Mariano Vallejo, Maria Amparo Ruíz de Burton, Cleofas Jaramillo, Fray Angelico Chávez, Jovita González, Américo Paredes, and more contemporary Chicana/o writers.
[1] Over the last fifteen years a number of scholars, some of whom have been supported by the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, have done valuable work in revealing and theorizing the complex negotiations such figures undertook. See esp. Gutiérrez and Padilla; Limón; Padilla, My History, Not Yours; Padilla, Introduction; Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities; Rosaura Sánchez and Pita.
Like my antepasados, I found myself in the midst of a negotiation where the terms were not ones I had agreed to. Yet, also like them, I was at a disadvantage; because the dean was in a position of power, he could keep me from taking for granted my existence within the proverbial ivory tower. The experience thus affirmed for me the continuing necessity of justifying a scholarly focus on the lives and experiences of Americans of Mexican descent. My need to justify my interest in the literature of Chicana/os and other marginalized people has surely provided much of the motivation for this scholarly project.One of my goals in this book is to provide a reconstructed universalist justification for the kind of work being done by myself and other ethnic studies scholars. In the course of making an extended theoretical
I approach my task by elaborating and further specifying the details of a postpositivist realist theory of identity that takes seriously the epistemic consequences of identities.
[2] The postpositivist realist theory of identity emerged from a collective of scholars working together in and around Cornell University during the 1990s. The scholars who initially came together did so partly in response to the excesses of the widespread skepticism and constructivism in literary theory and cultural studies, and partly because we were interested in formulating a complex and rigorous theory of identity that could be put to work in the service of progressive politics. I provide a fuller account of the theory later in this introduction, as well as throughout the chapters of this book. See also Moya and Hames-García; Mohanty, Literary Theory, esp. chap. 7.
This theoretical approach, which is only now emerging in the field of literary criticism, theorizes the concepts of identity, experience, and knowledge in ways that go beyond understandings of those concepts widely accepted within the humanities today. It makes pointed departures from academic postmodernist conceptions of identity even as it explicitly identifies and elaborates the epistemological presuppositions that many ethnic and lesbian, gay, and bisexual studies scholars already work with. My aim is thus to provide a theoretical clarification that affirms the work of some minority studies scholars even as it provokes others to rethink the usefulness of postmodernist theory.[3] Some books on ethnic identity that have a generally realist orientation toward identity, but that do not label themselves as such, include Flores, Divided Borders; Gracia; Oboler; and Rosaura Sánchez, Telling Identities. Books in lesbian, gay, and bisexual studies that similarly resonate with a realist epistemology are D'Emilio and Freedman; Bulkin, Pratt, and Smith.
As I show in chapter two, some ethnic studies scholars engage postmodernist theoretical frameworks even though they rely on assumptions that are recognizably realist. While their deployment of postmodernist precepts has had the positive effect of garnering for them a certain amount of academic recognition, it has ultimately undermined the cogency of their scholarly projects. Meanwhile, those ethnic studies scholars who avoid postmodernism in favor of realist or materialist approaches have been frequently marginalized and their theoretical insights ignored or misinterpreted.[4] My own work has provoked this reaction. For example, one anonymous reviewer of my article in Signs (reprinted as chapter two in this book) declared that my work follows “a strategy that echoes the moves of Chicano nationalists” and that my discussions “lack sophistication and demonstrate that the author is out-of-touch with current lines of inquiry being developed in the field of Chicana and women of color feminist theory.” Fortunately, two other readers (one of whom, I later found out, is a Chicana feminist) and the editorial board of Signs disagreed with this assessment.
Through my work, I hope to contribute to a situation in which advocates of ethnic studies can reverse this marginalizing trend, and argue successfully for the general epistemic significance of their particular scholarly projects.THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
At stake in debates about identity is the legitimacy (political and intellectual) of a range of identity-based initiatives that have the potential to materially affect the lives of marginalized people in the United States. Political issues like affirmative action and bilingual ballots, educational issues such as multicultural education and textbook selection, and intellectual projects in the areas of ethnic, women's, and gay, lesbian, and bisexual studies, are all justified by a logic of identity. For example, if there were no sociologically distinct and identifiable groups of people such as “African Americans” who can be shown to have been systematically denied access over a long period of time to economic and educational opportunities, there would be little reason to institute a government-sponsored program to redress those historical exclusions. Similarly, if it were impossible to identify relatively distinct groups of people who differ from each other in culturally significant ways, there would be no logic behind multicultural education. And finally, if there did not exist entire groups of people such as “Chicana/os” or “women” whose histories and accomplishments have been systematically ignored or distorted by previous generations of scholars, then there would be no reason for present-day scholars to devote themselves to a focused study of the histories, socioeconomic situations, political movements, or literary and cultural productions of those groups.
[5] Whenever a scholar undertakes to study something, she must have a conception of what her object of study is. In the case of the ethnic studies scholar, who takes as her object of inquiry groups of people such as “Chicana/os,” the concept of identity provides the organizing principle that justifies her scholarly focus. Unless “Chicana/os” exist as a sociologically distinct group with identifiable characteristics that can be specified and described, and unless studying them will help the scholar understand something important about them and the world in which they are constituted as “Chicana/os,” it makes little sense to engage in studying them as “Chicana/os.” What would be the purpose of studying their conditions of existence, their cultural practices, or their literary productions unless doing so might yield information that contributes to the scholar's understanding of herself, the others with whom she interacts, or the world in which she lives? And how can she study that group without a good conception of who they are and where they fit into existing social structures? The need to have a good conception of her object of study thus brings her right back to the question of identity, and makes urgent the necessity of having an adequate theory guiding her as she goes about determining both who “Chicana/os” are and what aspects of their lives are most crucial to her study.
The concept of identity is at the heart of each such educational and political project.Recently, such projects have come under increased scrutiny in the
Such critiques of identity-based initiatives coming from the political right raise some serious questions. Does a focus on particular lives preclude the production of a more general knowledge? Does paying attention to racial identities always obscure our universal humanity? Or is it
[6] For critiques of Scott's position see Alcoff, “Politics of Postmodern Feminism”; Stone-Mediatore; Wilkerson; Zammito. For an account of experience that responds to the challenges posed by Scott's essay, see Mohanty, Literary Theory, esp. 202–16.
Critics holding views like Scott's have managed to dominate academic discussions of identity insofar as they have found theoretical support for their position in French poststructuralism.[7] Poststructuralism is a philosophical movement that emerged in France in the late 1960s as a critique of phenomenology and structuralism. It is primarily associated with theorists (who were themselves trained by phenomenologists and structuralists) like Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes. Although poststructuralism includes a variety of perspectives deriving from the different theories of its principal thinkers, it is characterized by an opposition to structuralist principles (condemned as “totalizing” and “deterministic”) and a focus on (sometimes a celebration of) difference and multiplicity. It has been credited with the textualizing of the social world, the critique of subject-centered thought, and the demise of grand narratives and general truth claims. It is distinguishable from postmodernism insofar as it is an “essentially theoretical shift, not a claim that anything in the external world had changed to necessitate a new theory” (Calhoun 114). The significance of poststructuralism for my discussion is that post-modernism, as a theoretical and/or critical position, derives substantially from post-structuralism (Calhoun 100).
The significance of French poststructuralism for the concept of identity
[8] Several paragraphs in this introduction (including the following two) have been adapted from my introduction to Moya and Hames-García, Reclaiming Identity.
Postmodernist critics inspired by deconstruction, for example, have tended to analogize and thus understand social relations with reference to linguistic structures. The deconstructionist thesis about the indeterminacy and indeed arbitrariness of linguistic reference leads many U.S. literary theorists and cultural critics to understand concepts like experience and identity (which are fundamentally about social relations) as similarly indeterminate and hence epistemically unreliable. Such critics argue that inasmuch as meaning is constituted by systems of differences purely internal to the languages through which humans interpret the world, meaning is inescapably relative. Meaning is never fully present because it is constituted by the endless possibilities of what it is not, and is therefore always at least partially deferred. Because meaning exists only in a shifting and unstable relationship to the webs of signification through which it comes into being, and because humans have no access to anything meaningful outside these sometimes disparate webs, there can be no “objective” truth. The desire for “truth” or “objective” knowledge is therefore seen as resting on a naively representational theory of language that relies on the following mistaken assumptions: first, that there is a one-to-one correspondence between signs and their extralinguistic real-world referents; and second, that some kind of intrinsic meaning dwells in those real-world referents, independent of human thought or action. Knowledge, insofar as it is mediated by language, cannot be said to be objective.As a result of the influence of poststructuralism, the terms of the debate in the academy regarding selves and cultural identities have shifted considerably. Broadly speaking, postmodernist scholars in the United States who have been influenced by poststructuralist theory have undermined conventional understandings of identity by discounting the possibility of objective knowledge. Instead of asking how we know who we are, poststructuralist-inspired critics are inclined to suggest that we
Cultural critics drawn to postmodernism have thus seen themselves as articulating the conditions of possibility for a new kind of political practice, one based on the impossibility of objective knowledge.
[9] Postmodernism is a more diffuse, and so harder to define, cultural phenomenon than poststructuralism. Most critics agree that it can be characterized in at least three (analytically separable) ways: (1) as an aesthetic practice; (2) as a historical stage in the development of late capitalism; and (3) as a theoretical and/or critical position. In this volume, I am not concerned with postmodernism as either a historical period or an aesthetic movement. While I will describe the (often implicit) epistemological underpinnings of “postmodernist” theoretical conceptions of identity, I am aware that postmodernist theory does not constitute a unified intellectual movement. Rather, it embodies a range of theoretical and political practices that emphasize the unstable and contingent nature of discursively produced meaning. Moreover, the arguments of many prominent figures in contemporary feminist, post-colonial, antiracist, and queer theory (some of whom reject the terms I am using to describe them) share important commonalities; they are characterized by a strong epistemological skepticism, a valorization of flux and mobility, and a general suspicion of, or hostility toward, all normative and/or universalist claims. It is this theoretical bias, recognizable in much of the work done in the humanities today, that I am pointing to with the use of the adjective postmodernist. Readers interested in learning more about postmodernist theory and the critiques to which it has been subjected should consult Calhoun, esp. chap. 4.; Eagleton; McGowan; Nicholson, esp. the introduction; Nicholson and Seidman, esp. the introduction. Readers interested in learning more about postmodernism as a historical or cultural phenomenon should see Anderson; Best and Kellner; Harvey; Jameson; Waugh.
Although[10] It would be an impossible task to determine the true motives of all critics who attack identity. A generous reading demands that we take postmodernist critics at their word, and that we accept the idea that they believe that all but the most strategic claims to identity are essentialist and therefore politically pernicious. A less generous reading, but one that also deserves consideration, is that the charge of essentialism might also result from a racist counterstance to the agency of newly politicized minorities.
For example, French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose genealogies have influenced the work of generations of postmodernist scholars, explores “the history of the relations between thought and truth” in order to weaken the hegemonic power of our present-day truths by revealing them as discursively constructed and historically contingent (“Concern for Truth” 256).[11] See also Foucault, “Truth and Power”; “Two Lectures”; Archaeology of Knowledge.
According to his interpreters, Foucault's refusal of the possibility of a truth that can transcend a particular discursive formation is motivated by liberatory as well as epistemological concerns.[12] For a discussion of how Foucault has influenced debates about epistemology, see Alcoff, Real Knowing, chaps. 4 and 5.
The idea is that when we can see our present-day truths as socially constructed and historically contingent we will be free to imagine new, less repressive social practices and ways of interacting.The postmodernist approach to identity should thus be understood partially as a corrective to a prior social and intellectual tendency toward essentialism.
[13] When I refer to essentialism, I am referring to the notion that individuals or groups have an immutable and discoverable “essence”—a basic, invariable, and presocial nature. As a theoretical concept, essentialism expresses itself through the tendency to see one social category (class, gender, race, sexuality, etc.) as determinate in the last instance for the cultural identity of the individual or group in question. As a political strategy, essentialism has had both liberatory and reactionary effects.
By refusing to privilege any one viewpoint or valorize any one identity, postmodernist theorists hold open the possibility that previously subjugated knowledges can become manifest; previously subordinated identities can become intelligible. For instance, in her influential essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” feminist theorist Donna Haraway heralds the arrival of a “cyborg world” in which “people are not afraid…[14] Analogously, influential feminist philosopher Judith Butler implies in her book Gender Trouble that previously unintelligible identities will be revealed when we dislodge current constellations of identity by exposing, through parody, their constructed and contingent constitution. She writes: “The task here is not to celebrate each and every new possibility qua possibility, but to redescribe those possibilities that already exist, but which exist within cultural domains designated as culturally unintelligible and impossible” (148–49, emphasis added).
From this perspective, the postmodernist denial of objectivity seems profoundly liberating: it appears to offer a way of apprehending the world that acknowledges the existence and validity of alternative perspectives, practices, identities, and knowledges.The success of postmodernist theories of identity is perhaps best exemplified by the tremendous intellectual influence of scholars such as Judith Butler, a postmodernist feminist philosopher who bases her critique of identity on the poststructuralist deconstruction of the subject. In Gender Trouble, the book through which she has had the most influence upon academic theorizations of identity, Butler understands selves (and the subjectivities through which they come into being) as having no existence apart from the discourses that produce them. She recognizes the existence of subjects, but portrays them as existing only as a result of the grammar through which they are mobilized. She admits of no aspects of the self that are prior or external to discourse, and acknowledges no “doer behind the deed” in the sense of an intentional agent who exercises effective choices and displays discernible intentions (25). According to the line of reasoning she follows in Gender Trouble, the subject is not an authorial agent, a conscious intender, or the bearer of natural attributes. Rather, the subject is the site of a complex and contingent network of discourses and social practices that are seen as constructing it. Furthermore, in characteristic postmodernist fashion, Butler extends the deconstruction of the subject to call into question the very possibility of identities based on the social categories of gender and race. Because the subject has been
[15] See especially the last chapter of Gender Trouble, where Butler argues in favor of denaturalizing identities: “The critical task for feminism is not to establish a point of view outside of constructed identities; that conceit is the construction of an epistemological model that would disavow its own cultural location and, hence, promote itself as a global subject, a position that deploys precisely the imperialist strategies that feminism ought to criticize. The critical task is, rather, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, present the immanent possibility of contesting them…. The task is not whether to repeat, but how to repeat or, indeed, to repeat and, through a radical proliferation of gender, to displace the very gender norms that enable the repetition itself” (147, 148).
Thinkers like Butler assume that the problem lies not only in the way we have conceived of identity, but in the very existence of categories that are seen as logically prior to and constitutive of identity. Their critiques focus on these categories because access to sociopolitical power and material resources has historically been conditioned by our social identities and by how well we have been able to trade on them. Thus, identities have been central to the oppression of entire groups of people as well as to individual and group efforts to shift their status relative to others in the same society. The political force of arguments like Butler's thus derives from the presumption that if we can do away with categories of identity—that is, if we can “subvert” them—we will no longer benefit, or be denied benefits, on the basis of the identities we used to have.
[16] For support of this claim, see Butler's analysis of the New Bedford rape case at the end of “Contingent Foundations.” In her deconstruction of a question the defense attorney asked the rape victim, Butler concludes that the real culprit of the crime is the “category of sex.” She writes: “Here sex is a category, but not merely a representation; it is a principle of production, intelligibility, and regulation which enforces a violence and rationalizes it after the fact. The very terms by which the violation is explained enact the violation, and concede that the violation was under way before it takes the empirical form of a criminal act…. As a category that effectively produces the political meaning of what it describes, ‘sex’ here works its silent ‘violence’ in regulating what is and is not designatable” (19). I see two problems with Butler's analysis. The first is that by focusing on the relationship between the rape and discourse (“The very terms by which the violation is explained enact the violation,…”), Butler misrepresents the causal nature of the crime. She presumes, but never shows, that the categories she excoriates (sex and identity) determine that such violations will inevitably occur. It is this unsupported presumption that underlies her claim that “the violation was under way before it takes the empirical form of a criminal act.” Meanwhile, the agency (not to mention responsibility) of the men involved is erased; she represents them as mere “effects” of discourse, as subjects mobilized through the grammar of the discourse that has “produced” them. The second problem is that by focusing on the words spoken by the defense attorney, Butler unwittingly silences the victim and ignores her experience of the rape.
This is the political and theoretical context within which my entry into the debate about identity must be located. And, although the general
THE POSTPOSITIVIST REALIST THEORY OF IDENTITY
The postpositivist realist theory of identity I elaborate in this book is an adaptation and extension of the epistemological framework known as philosophical realism. The postpositivist version of realism I defend in this book emerges partly from within the philosophy of science and from analytic philosophy more generally, and is particularly indebted to the work of Charles Peirce, W. V. O. Quine, Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam, and Richard Boyd. While disagreement exists among those who would call themselves realists, the most sophisticated versions of realism today entail a postpositivist conception of objectivity, together with the anti-idealist thesis that the world exceeds humans’ mental conceptions of it.
[17] For an exceptionally clear exposition on what makes a theory realist, see Collier, esp. 6–7. See also R. N. Boyd, “How to Be a Moral Realist”; Alcoff, “Who's Afraid of Identity Politics?”
In usingFirst and foremost, realism about identity involves a commitment to the idea that identities refer outward—albeit in partial and occasionally inaccurate ways—to the social world within which they emerge. Contra postmodernist theorists, who argue that the relationship between identities and the “real” or “material realm” is arbitrary, I argue that the “real” is causally relevant to our epistemic endeavors (including the formation of our identities) because it shapes and limits our knowledge-generating experiences. It is on the basis of this precept that I argue that humans, working from within their particular social locations, can develop reliable knowledge about the world. But simply because I look to the “evidence of experience” does not mean that I am a naive empiricist; I do not hope to simply flip the poststructuralist critique on its head and return to an uncritical belief in the possibility of theoretically unmediated knowledge. Rather, consistent with a generally postpositivist realist orientation, I refuse the terms through which postmodernists have defined concepts such as “identity” and “experience.” I understand identities to be socially significant and context-specific ideological constructs that nevertheless refer in non-arbitrary (if partial) ways to verifiable aspects of the social world. Moreover, I contend that it is precisely because identities have a referential relationship to the world that they are politically and epistemically important: indeed, identities instantiate the links between individuals and groups and central organizing principles of our society. Consequently, an examination of individual identities can provide important insights about fundamental aspects of U.S. society.
An important feature of the postpositivist realism I defend in this book is a rethinking of the idea of objectivity. Just as the postmodernist dismissal of identity is based on a denial of the possibility of objectivity, so my realist reclaiming of identity is based on a reaffirmation of the possibility of (postpositivist) objectivity. The reason postmodernists deny the possibility of objectivity is that they have an impoverished view of what can count as objective. For postmodernists (as for positivists), objective knowledge is knowledge that is completely free of theoretically mediated bias. And since postmodernists rightly conclude that there is no such thing as a context-transcendent, subject-independent, and theoretically unmediated knowledge, they therefore conclude that there can be no such thing as objective knowledge. Postmodernist literary critic
[18] Unfortunately, because Herrnstein Smith lacks a complex theory of reference, she is unable to fully exploit the implications of her insight regarding the epistemically normative significance of “applicability, coherence, and connectibility.” After all, in order for a theory to be “applicable” or “connectible” it must be applicable or connectible to —that is, with reference to —something outside. As long as Smith retains her extreme and limited notions of objectivity and reference, she will be limited to the defensive posture she adopts in Belief and Resistance and will be unable to develop further even the contingent standards she thinks are necessary for deciding between different theories or political or ethical positions.
Defenders of a post positivist conception of objectivity, by contrast, stake out a less absolutist and more theoretically productive position. As a realist, I conceive of objectivity as an ideal of inquiry necessarily involving theoretical bias and interest, rather than as a condition of absolute and achieved certainty that is context transcendent, subject independent, and free of theoretical bias. I can thus assert (without contradiction) both that (1) all observation and knowledge is theory mediated (that is, mediated by language, bias, or theoretical presuppositions—as, indeed, postmodernists argue) and that (2) a theory-mediated objective knowledge is both possible and desirable. Because I have given up the dream of transcendence, I understand objective knowledge as an ongoing process involving the careful analysis of the different kinds of subjective or theoretical bias and interest through which humans apprehend the world. Rather than trying to free my inquiry from bias, I work to bring into view the presuppositions I am working with, as well as to distinguish “those biases that are limiting or counterproductive from those that are in fact necessary for knowledge, that are epistemically productive and
[19] For a fuller discussion of postpositivist objectivity, see Mohanty, Literary Theory, esp. chap. 6.
Moreover, by conceiving of objectivity as an ideal of inquiry rather than an achieved condition, I am able to avoid one of the more familiar traps of postmodernist epistemologies. Unlike postmodernist critics, who are so concerned about rejecting a (positivist) notion of objectivity that they are hard-pressed to justify their theoretical and normative commitments, I justify my commitments with reference to a normative conception of the human good—one that I am willing to interrogate, and if necessary, revise.[20] When postmodernists do attempt to justify their theoretical and political commitments, they generally end up appealing to some kind of strategic essentialism or contingent foundation. However, as critics have shown, the problems with strategic essentialisms are manifold: they lack persuasive force; they frequently presume a system of values that has not been thoroughly interrogated; and they set up a “pernicious elitism and even vanguardism when [they operate] to divide the ‘knowing’ theorists who deploy identity strategically and the ‘unknowing’ activists who continue to believe in identity” (Alcoff, “Who's Afraid of Identity Politics?” 323). See also chapter two of this book.
Realists can be further distinguished from postmodernists in that they replace a simple correspondence theory of truth with a more dialectical causal theory of reference in which linguistic terms (and identities) both shape our perceptions of and refer (in more or less partial and accurate ways) to causal features of a real world.
[21] For more on causal theories of reference, see R. N. Boyd, “Metaphor and Theory Change”; Devitt and Sterelny, esp. part 2; Field; Mohanty, Literary Theory, esp. 66–72; Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’ ”; Putnam, “Explanation and Reference.”
Because, for instance, I am willing to test my hypotheses and truth claims against the world, I can modify my beliefs in the light of new or more convincing evidence. I do not shy away from making truth claims, but (following C. S. Peirce) I understand those claims to be “fallibilistic”—that is, like even the best discoveries of the natural sciences, open to revision on the basis of new or relevant information. In fact, it is my realist willingness to admit the (in principle, endless) possibility of error in the quest for objective knowledge that enables me to avoid positivist assumptions about certainty and unrevisability that inform the (postmodernist) skeptic's doubts about the possibility of arriving at a more accurate account of the world. Just as it is possible to be wrong about one's experience, I contend, so it is possible to arrive at more accurate interpretations of it.[22] For a fuller discussion of the relationship between error and objectivity, see Hau.
The result is a theoretically productive approach that enables a richer analysis of the different kinds of subjective or theoretical bias or interest involved in projects of knowledge production.Another feature of my realist understanding of objectivity is a rejection of the positivist idea that objective knowledge should be sought by attempting to separate the realm of hard facts from the realm of values.
[23] For more on the realist position regarding the necessary interdependence of facts and values, see Collier, esp. chap. 6; Mohanty, Literary Theory, esp. chap. 7; Nguyen; Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, esp. chaps. 9–12; Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History, esp. chap. 6. See also my discussion of linguistic reference in chapter five.
Because I understand that all knowledge is the product of particular kinds of social practice, I recognize the causal constraints placed by the social and natural world on what humans can know. Moreover, because humans’ biologically and temporally limited bodies enable and constrain what we are able to think, feel, and believe and because our bodies are themselves subject to the (more or less regular) laws of the natural and social world, I know that what humans are able to think of as “good” is intimately related to (although not monocausally determined by) the social and natural “facts” of the world.[24] Calhoun, whose epistemological approach is substantially similar to the postpositivist realist approach I advocate, provides a pithy example of how knowledge is tied to social practice when he says that “it is not imaginable that Marx would have developed his theory of capitalism had he lived in the ninth and not the nineteenth century” (86).
Consequently, humans’ subjective and evaluative judgments are neither fundamentally “arbitrary” nor merely “conventional.” Rather, they are based on structures of belief that can be justified (or not) with reference to their own and others’ well-being. These judgments and beliefs have the potential to contribute to objective knowledge about the world.[25] Some of my students, all of whom have been educated in a postmodernist academic climate, have occasionally objected to what they perceive as the judgmental or moralistic aspects of realism. When faced with this kind of objection, I remind them that the salient question is not whether to evaluate, but how to evaluate. Every moment of every day involves countless conscious and unconscious acts of evaluation: what to wear, what to eat, who to smile at, who to fear, who to associate with, who to avoid, who to date, who to hire, who to fire. For scholars, the daily judgments we make also involve who to read, who to cite, who to emulate, what claims to accept, what claims to reject, who to engage with, and who to ignore. By insisting on a reconsideration of our processes of critical evaluation, postpositivist realists are not asking cultural and literary critics to do anything that they do not already do. We are not even asking them to do something that they can avoid. Rather, we are striving to develop a theoretical and political practice that draws attention in a methodological way to the often-uninterrogated assumptions about other people's identities that structure all critics’ scholarly and political choices.
Postpositivist realism therefore provides an interpretive approach that resolves the dilemmas that attend absolutist conceptions of identity, objectivity, and knowledge, going beyond both dogmatic certainty and unyielding skepticism. Moreover, the postpositivist realist theory of identity is able to do what other theories of identity cannot. It can account for
THE ARGUMENT
I begin my extended theoretical argument in chapter one, “Post-modernism, Realism, and the Politics of Identity: Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism.” I start by calling into question postmodernist theorists’ ability to create the conditions necessary for the emergence of alternative perspectives and new voices. My reading of the work of influential postmodernist feminists Judith Butler and Donna Haraway suggests that the voices of so-called “others”—in this case, Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga—are as silenced by postmodernist theory as they have been by an abstract individualist ideology that judges their views as “subjective” and therefore epistemically unreliable. To the extent that these “others” speak of being women, of being racialized, of seeking to understand (in order to change) the world, postmodernist theorists tend to misinterpret, ignore, or dismiss their ideas as theoretically naive. In the second section of the chapter, I elaborate the details of a postpositivist realist theory of identity that goes beyond essentialism by disclosing how identities are grounded in the social categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality, without being determined by them. I establish the link between identity and social location as mediated through experience and argue that there is an epistemic component to identity that enables us to read the world in particular ways. Finally, I provide my own realist reading of Moraga, one that is consistent with her “theory in the flesh.” By resituating her work within the cultural and historical conditions from which it emerged, I show that Moraga's elaboration of a “theory in the flesh” gestures toward a realist theory of identity. A realist reading of Moraga's work presents a strong case for how and why the theoretical insights of women of color are necessary for understanding fundamental aspects of United States society.
In chapter two, “Chicana Feminism and Postmodernist Theory,” I deepen my critique of prevailing postmodernist theoretical tendencies by examining their influence on theorizations of Chicana identity and subjectivity. I focus on the attempts of the Chicana theorists Norma Alarcón and Chela Sandoval to rework an identity-based politics by incorporating
In chapter three, “Cultural Particularity vs. Universal Humanity: The Value of Being Asimilao, ” I work forward from this premise to argue that even those identities that do not work well as explanations of the social world are worth examining. To the extent that an identity fails to refer adequately to the central organizing principles of the society from which it emerges, it can help reveal the contradictions and mystifications within which members of that society live. Taking the writer Richard Rodriguez as exemplary, I examine the writings of neoconservative minorities to trace the contours of a neoconservative minority identity politics. Prompting my inquiry into their politics is the conviction that the outcomes of the debates in which neoconservative minorities engage (about bilingualism, affirmative action, multicultural education) have significant cultural, material, and epistemic consequences for all those
I begin my analysis by looking at the centerpiece of neoconservative minority identity politics: the insistence that minorities be required to assimilate to mainstream American culture. As part of my evaluative project, I examine the central claim of Rodriguez's intellectual autobiography—that he has been successfully assimilated. After demonstrating the role of interpretive error in the formation of Rodriguez's neoconservative minority identity, I show that neoconservative minorities’ erroneous conception of what is “universal” to all humans causes them to make policy recommendations that hinder, rather than facilitate, the development of productive cross-cultural interaction. I then turn to the postpositivist realist theory of identity elaborated in chapters one and two to posit one way in which progressive intellectuals might go about fostering the conditions conducive to working toward a better society. I argue that when we pay the right kind of attention to our own and others’ particularity, we position ourselves to develop a more productive understanding of our universal humanity. Working with a reconstructed notion of the human universal, I end by defending the value of cultural diversity on the basis of an understanding of multiculturalism as epistemic cooperation.
In chapter four, “Learning How to Learn from Others: Realist Proposals for Multicultural Education,” I extend the realist theory of identity into the realm of multicultural education. I begin by reviewing the central debates surrounding multicultural education and by discussing the implicit claims about the nature of culture and the value of cultural diversity held by key opponents and proponents of multiculturalism. Working with accounts written by educational researchers who have studied the implementation of multicultural educational initiatives in primary and secondary public schools in the United States, I demonstrate that the postpositivist realist theory of identity can account for the complex intercultural dynamics these researchers have observed in educational settings. In response to some of the dilemmas identified by multicultural educational researchers, I propose eight postpositivist realist principles that I believe should be central to the pedagogical practice of educators and researchers who are interested in promoting a truly democratic
In chapter five, I bring the various strains of my argument together in a reading of Helena María Viramontes's remarkable novel Under the Feet of Jesus. By examining the expanded notion of literacy that Viramontes develops in her novel, I show that the novel dramatizes what I describe elsewhere in this book as a postpositivist realist approach to understanding and knowledge. On a metaphorical level, Viramontes analogizes words to tools to figure the act of interpretation as a materialist engagement with the world. On a structural level, she employs the narrative strategy of focalization to emphasize the epistemic status of identity. Finally, on a thematic level, the novel documents the young protagonist's transformation of consciousness and her personal empowerment by tracing the process through which she becomes a better reader of her social world. I show that it is in part by guiding her readers’ processes of identification through the narrative technique of focalization that Viramontes powerfully contests the outsider status typically accorded to migrant farmworkers. By encouraging her readers to enter into a relationship of empathetic identification with Estrella and her family and by exposing them to the moral and epistemic blindness of those Americans who would view migrant farmworkers as outsiders to American society, Viramontes implicitly invites her readers to transcend their own particular perspectives, to complicate their own previous understandings of the world, and to reach for a less partial, more objective understanding of our shared world. Viramontes's expanded notion of literacy is thus more than a pious statement about the importance of learning to read; rather, it is an implicitly postpositivist realist vision of social justice. Her vision of how humans can become better “readers” is intimately wedded to her moral vision of how humans most effectively interact with one another.
However well I have argued my case, I do not imagine that the publication of this book will suddenly or substantially change the conditions within which I and other minority scholars live and work. Nevertheless, I do believe that ideas can be very powerful. I also believe that humans are agential beings with the (admittedly constrained) capacity to employideas