Postmodernism, Realism, and the Problem of Identity
- Postmodernism, Realism, and the Problem of Identity
Shari Stone-Mediatore is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ohio Wesleyan University. She is the author of Reading across Borders: Storytelling and Postcolonial Struggles (forthcoming, Palgrave / St. Martin's) and of articles such as "Hannah Arendt and the Public Role of Storytelling," The Civic Arts Review (1999) and "Chandra Mohanty and the Revaluing of Experience,"' Hypatia 13:2 (2001).
Notes
1. The authors refer to arguments by poststructuralist-oriented theorists such as Judith Butler, Joan Scott, Dianna Fuss, and Wendy Brown. Other critics raise similar concerns about identity-politics but do not reject identity-politics entirely. See, for instance, hooks, Talking 105-11; Hennessy 67-74, 95-99, 135-7; Lorde; C.T. Mohanty, "Encounters" 71-72; and Giroux.
2. Representative post-Enlightenment texts include, for instance, Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self, Lisa Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy, Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? and Satya Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History.
3. Mohanty first presents his theory of postpositivist realism in Literary Theory and the Claims of History. In that book, Mohanty draws on multiple traditions, including, most notably, Pierce's theory of reference, the Kantian tradition of universalism, and the Marxist tradition of ideology critique. With the exception of Mohanty's essay (reprinted from the earlier book), Reclaiming Identity follows mainly the first, analytic component of Mohanty's theory and does not draw substantially on the Kantian or Marxist elements.
4. The charge of essentialism that has been leveled against many activists and scholars may be unfair. As Alcoff (Reclaiming, 313-4) and Moya (2n) point out, the representative "essentialist" text of identity politics, the "Black Feminist Statement" by the Combahee River Collective, actually allows for a more fluid and heterogeneous account of identity than is often presumed. Susan Griffin, another writer who has often been accused of essentialism, makes a compelling case that the category itself, "essentialist," is an invention of the theorists who criticize it and that "no such animal as an essentialist really exists" (213).
5. Elsewhere in Reclaiming, Moraga recognizes that "critiques of essentialism are numerous." Nevertheless, she still claims that the debate is defined by essentialist and poststructuralist positions: "The mistake lies in assuming that our options for theorizing identities are inscribed within the postmodernism/essentialism binary" (80). Some of the many theorists who, in fact, avoid this mistake and who develop non-essentialist accounts of the political and epistemological significance of identity include, for instance, Collins, "Comment"; C.T. Mohanty, "Cartographies"; Hennessy; Narayan; Giroux; Harding; and hooks, Talking 19-27, 105-11; "Postmodern."
6. Like Moya in some parts of her introduction, Henze and Macdonald also tend to overlook important work related to their topic and oversimplify the position of their opponents. Macdonald, for instance, presents a case for the potential epistemic value of social and cultural identities, yet she does so without either engaging or situating her work in relation to feminist standpoint theory. She claims to develop her arguments, "[w]ithout reverting to theoretically and politically troublesome versions of standpoint epistemology (whether Marxist, feminist, or something else)" (209). However, she never explains what she finds troublesome in standpoint epistemology, nor does she explain how her own work supersedes those supposedly troublesome theories. (Ironically, though, three pages later, she cites Harding and Marx to support her argument).
Henze's essay is also weak in similar respects. He identifies feminist consciousness-raising as a main topic of his essay, and yet his only source on consciousness-raising is the one essay by Naomi Scheman that Mohanty uses. He also caricatures his opponents. For instance, proposing to argue against the claim that people in privileged locations are unable to understand or support the struggles of the oppressed, he says, "[t]hese claims often lead to isolationist or essentialist projects, the main tenets of which I will argue against here" (230). He does not name any of the proponents of the alleged isolationist argument, except...
