Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture

Last Words

Last Words Jacqueline Jones Royster A VIRTUAL REALITY We, the contributors to this collection, imagine ourselves in a welllighted space, open, airy, pleasing to the eye. We are surrounded by others who have set the conversation in ways that are neither accommodating to our insights and interests nor invitational to our voices. They speak to each other as if we are not there, suggesting that we are intruders, or even worse that we are imperceptible to them—too far away, perhaps, or maybe too close. How can this be? We are here. We have been here. Others, like us, were here before us. We are not intruders . We are not imperceptible. In small acts of resistance, we speak as our intellectual ancestors have done, amplifying our voices, presenting ourselves one by one, each in her or his own turn, tossing our cards about the room, claiming space, creating visibility—without microscope, without telescope—for the naked eye. Amid such boldness, we see each other and recognize, as Alice Walker predicted, joy in resistance. We grab chairs, draw closer, clustering as we like, rearranging the furniture—a bit, disrupting the scene—a bit, setting our belongings in plain sight. We find ways to speak our minds and our lives. We share our written words, and then we speak, an opportunity for a few last words. ROYSTER: Now that you see your thoughts in the company of the others in this volume, this amplification of our work, what stands out most? ESPINOSA-AGUILAR: When I first read through this collection , I said—about 130 pages in—What the hell? How are 255 256 The Contributors these pieces at all related? Why are there so many textual analyses of various works by people of color? Where is the advice, cautionary tale, guides, and maps for those engaging in this kind of work? When I got to Hui’s piece, it was like a light clicked on. . . . Jackie writes, “We need to imagine a world for rhetorical studies that is global, flexible, and specifically aware of its own complicity in the deploying of systems of dominance and oppression.” . . . When I read Hui’s piece, I must admit that I was completely surprised by how ignorant I am of the culture of more than a billion people on the planet. Here, I claim to be such a student of cultural studies but I’ve confined that study to the context of the United States. No wonder we are hated on such a global scale. Similar thoughts arose for me when I read Akhila’s piece. RAMNARAYAN: My best friend got married this past week, the ceremony a braid of Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian traditions. The wedding took place—improbably—on board the Santa Maria [a replica of Columbus’s Santa Maria anchored in Columbus, Ohio]. Throughout the evening, I wondered if other people noticed the rather obvious irony of an Indian woman (from India) marrying a European American man on board a replica of the ship that brought Columbus to America. I also thought about a gay male friend in India —a close friend of the bride—who had had to leave this country because of visa restrictions, despite the fact that his partner of longstanding hails from the United States. At the same time that this friend was outlawed from U.S. soil and estranged from his partner, the bride and groom on the Santa Maria were entering into marriage, perhaps the most legitimate union of all in the eyes of the U.S. government and the law. . . . This collection represents all our struggles with categories that alternately confine and liberate us, giving us both our sense of where we come from, and where we feel impelled to go. And so we create an intricate braid much like the wedding ceremony I was part of, each strand a different color, length, texture, and density, representing diverse and divergent experiences. L’EPLATTENIER: These chapters remind me that subjectivity is about examining the multitudes contained within ourselves , the people/topics we study, and our interactions with 257 Last Words them and the work—that subjectivity is and will always be an incredibly complex and slippery topic. . . . Walt Whitman reminds us all; “I am large. I contain multitudes.” LEE: We are poor rural white, upper-caste Brahmin, first generation Italian male, black feminist lesbian, North Carolinian Native American, and a multiplicity...