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Preface
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface These essays, written between 1981 and 1992, represent a series of interventions in the discourses of mainstream feminist and leftist cultural criticism over the last decade. Each essay is marked by the limitations, stakes, and strategies of my insertion into specific historical moments, my membership in different and sometimes conflicting communities, my participation in and reaction against complex and changing configurations of shared discourse, and by the peculiarities of my own (always constructed) life history. These essays were not written, or rewritten, as a series of chapters (or as a systematic performance or definition of a critical approach), nor are they meant to be read in that way. Although they are linked by recurring concerns and preoccupations, those concerns shift in relative importance, are reformulated , or sometimes give way altogether. There is movement here but hardly ever in a direct line. These essays were also written for myself as a way of clarifying what strategies and methodologies I might employ in writing a book on the culture of the nineteenth-century British middle class. It is this effort at self-help that accounts for the dominance here of materials on the nineteenth century, the British, the white, and the middle class, for it made sense to me to think critically about strategies and methodologies in relation to scholarship on the culture that I was also officially writing about. Like several of my most deliberate projects, however, this one had some unexpected and unintended effects. I did not finish my book on nineteenth-century British culture, and, though my reflections on contemporary cultural criticism did eventually inform my nineteenth-century work, the nineteenth-century work began equally to construct my reading of the present. That is, my work on the construction of nineteenth-century cultural narratives and on competing forms of social expertise began to intersect with and even guide my reading of the contemporary U.S. critical scene. The two essays focused most directly on nineteenth-century themes, "Sex and Political Economy in the Edinburgh Review" and x Preface U 'Ministers of the Interior': The Political Economy of Women's Manuals ," are included, therefore, not as purloined chapters from another work but, like the rest, as readings of the politics of cultural critique. Like all the essays in this collection, the nineteenth-century essays are engaged with cultural criticism as a terrain of power, a terrain in which some voices, themes, and reading strategies are more successfully authorized than others, in which traditional forms of expertise are both criticized and reconstructed on new grounds, in which the reading strategies deployed in cultural narratives are both shaped by and also shape political and other investments and desires , and in which struggles over resources and unequal relations of gender, class, nationhood, and race enter into the production of competing public knowledges and expertise. These essays attempt to map and, more important, to intervene in these struggles by critically exploring the ideological resonances and political potentialities layered into the meaning-making practices of some forms of cultural criticism that I have cared about and participated in. Rereading these essays from the perspective of 1993 I can construct their limitations in ways that were not so available to me when they were being written. I can see these essays, for example, as interventions in the discourses of those who were primarily white, professional, and middle-class (but feminist, leftist, and/or antiracist as well.) Specifically, these essays sought to intervene in the discourses of (1) mainstream feminist literary criticism in the early 1980s, (2) largely male-authored Marxist and post-Marxist cultural criticism of the same decade, and (3) the reinventions of male-authored postMarxist cultural criticism represented by popular forms of new historicism and cultural studies. These discourses circulated in critical communities to which I also belonged and within which I felt variously authorized to speak. As communities, they were predominantly white. These essays, of course, also attempted to intervene in and further construct the critical tendency in which I mainly located myselfthat of materialist-feminist criticism. But while the work of feminists of color was very much a part of the way I constructed materialistfeminist criticism-indeed, some of it provided the most coherent models--and while my interventions in the discourse of this community were more broadly aimed, here too I felt most authorized to exhort white feminists, not excluding, of course, myself. It is only in [44.213.80.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:59 GMT) Preface...