Transformation Now!: Toward a Post-Oppositional Politics of Change

Notes

Notes Introduction. Post-Oppositional Resistance? Threshold Theories Defined and Enacted 1. Idefinemypeopleverybroadly,toincludeallhumanandnonhumanlife,and I define life very broadly as well. 2. For an extensive discussion of oppositional consciousness, see Chela Sandoval , Methodology of the Oppressed. Unlike Sandoval, though, I do not describe differentialconsciousnessasaformofoppositionalconsciousness.Idiscussthe differences between my view and Sandoval’s in chapter 3 of this book. 3. The “science wars” represent a variety of intellectual debates between scientific realists and post-structural scholars. Latour refers specifically to the debates between career scientists and sociologists of science. For his views, see his Pandora’sHope. 4. SeealsoMarkLaurenceMcPhail’sobservationthat“Whencriticsparticipate in argumentative critical discourse they are grounded in the very epistemological sensibility that they hope to transcend. They are privileged by the theory of knowledge that, ostensibly, they are calling into question” (“Complicity” 11). 5. IborrowthephrasewomenofcolorsfromIndigoVioletanduseit,ratherthan themorecommonlyusedphrasewomenofcolor,tounderscorethediversityamong us and to destabilize readers’ thinking. 6. I intentionally write the word western in lowercase letters in order to destabilize the concept itself. 208 • Notes to Introduction 7. For examples of how oppositional movements fragment from within, see Chela Sandoval’s discussion of the twentieth-century U.S. women’s movement in “Feminism and Racism: A Report on the 1981 National Women’s Studies AssociationConference ”andMethodologyoftheOppressed;JacquiAlexander’sanalysis of progressive anticolonial and liberation movements in “Remembering This Bridge, Remembering Ourselves”; Timothy B. Powell’s discussion of progressive academicsin“AllColorsFlowintoRainbowsandNooses:TheStruggletoDefine Academic Multiculturalism”; and Vicki Kirby’s “Natural Convers(at)ions: Or, What If Culture Was Really Nature All Along?” 8. According to many supporters of the “hardwired” theory, oppositional thought is part of our evolutionary heritage. However, as theoretical physicist BasarabNicolescuremindsus,thehumanbrainhasdevelopedtoparsetheworld intobinaryopposites;theproblemisthatwehavecarriedthisapproachtoofar;it has seeped into everything: “The brain constructs in such a way, during the evolutionary process, a binary representation of the world, very useful for survival inahostileenvironment.However,cultureextendedthisbinaryrepresentation, in terms of exclusive contradictories, to ethical, mythological and metaphysical representations, like good and evil, the space-time background of such representations being erased. The binary operator describes, in fact, the neurological operations of the inferior parietal lobe. The classical logic is a product of the inferior parietal lobe.” 9. My discussion in this section was inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s description of our epistemological condition as a time of nepantla and transformation: “We stand at a major threshold in the extension of consciousness, caught in the remolinos(vortices)ofsystemicchangeacrossallfieldsofknowledge.. . .Many are witnessing a major cultural shift in their understanding of what knowledge consistsofandhowwecometoknow,ashiftfromthekindsofknowledgevalued nowtothekindsthatwillbedesiredinthe21stCentury”(“nowletusshift”541). 10. See my discussion of Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness in Women ReadingWomenWriting,chapter2.AsIexplainthere,thispassagefromBorderlands/ LaFronteraillustratesonepossibleconstellationofboth/and/neither/northinking: “As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are minebecauseIameverywoman’ssisterorpotentiallover.(AsalesbianIhaveno race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of meinallraces.)Iamculturelessbecause,asafeminist,Ichallengethecollective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am culturedbecauseIamparticipatinginthecreationofyetanotherculture”(102–3). 11. For extensive discussions of the many ways we are interconnected with all existence, see Gregory Cajete’s work and the first chapter of my Teaching Transformation . Layli Maparyan offers the most succinct yet inclusive explanation of Notes to Introduction • 209 this metaphysics of interconnectedness I’ve yet encountered in her discussion of “spiritual constructionism.” As she explains in TheWomanistIdea, Unlike philosophical essentialism, which assumes that all phenomenal (material ) things possess a noumenal (ideal) essence, spiritual constructionism maintains that there is a structure to the process of creation as well as to the vibrationalspectrumthatorganizesspirit /energy.Thisthirdpositionarticulates thatalloutwardmanifestationsofform,fromidentitytosocietytomateriality, areexpressionsofinnerstatesofconsciousnessinbothindividualsandvarious collectivities. Furthermore, they may be influenced by non-human entities. Thecosmosislawfulbutdynamic;itsfundamentalsubstanceismind,andlike the Creator, humans and other volitional entities are always already creators. Thispositionisnotearth-boundlikesocialconstructionism,norisitremoved from quotidian reality like philosophical essentialism or idealism; rather, it is always directly linked with and embodied within humanness, understood in its full spiritual multidimensionality. (41, original emphasis) 12. Iviewrelationaloppositionality,nonbinaryoppositionality,andpost-oppositionalityascloselyrelatedandperhapsinseparable .Theyalldrawfrombut(attemptto )movebeyondconventionalformsofdichotomousoppositionalthought. 13. Anzaldúa’s nepantlera represents an extension of her earlier theory of the newmestizaasdescribedinherwell-knownbook,Borderlands/LaFrontera.See,for instance,her1991interviewwithme,wheresheexplainsthat“Withthenepantla paradigmItrytotheorizeunarticulateddimensionsoftheexperienceofmestizas livinginbetweenoverlappingandlayeredspacesofdifferentculturesandsocial and geographic locations, of events and realities—psychological, sociological, political, spiritual, historical, creative, imagined” (Interviews/Entrevistas 176). 14. Throughout Transformation Now!, I mark race with scare quotes in order to call attention to the term and thus (I hope) to denaturalize it. I discuss this unnatural status of ‘race’ in more detail in chapter 2. 15. Autohistoria is Anzaldúa’s term for...