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87 W riting the self, in autobiographies and memoirs, is often seen as a way to “break the silence,” especially for marginalized subjects and those people who have been rendered invisible through racist exclusion from Canadian cultural life. I want to argue in this chapter , however, that self-writing, autobiography in particular, can produce ambivalent results. In some cases, writing the self can deepen oppression, not just by reiterating it, but by driving deeper underground aspects of marginalized subjectivity that do not fit into conventions of autobiography. This is not to deny autobiography its liberatory power, but only to show that because of generic conventions combined with racist stereotypes, and perhaps because of the problem of articulation itself, there is a contradiction; in other words, the liberatory power of autobiography is not pure. There is a tension between generic trope and experience. Important silences can be broken, but others can also be more deeply encrypted. Further, the circulation of the text in the aftermath of “breaking the silence” does work that is partially, but not fully, liberatory, and may have the unfortunate effect of retrospectively folding the marginalized subject back into a discourse of national belonging, while actually covering over the violent history of exclusion it was supposed to have expiated. I want to be very clear that I am not advocating the uselessness or apoliticalness of autobiography. What I do want to do is push the question of how the marginalized subject might productively write herself into presence —personal, social, cultural, national, and political. I recognize the writing of self as important, but not as a complete liberation or a complete presencing. This chapter offers that critique. [chapter four] Strategizing the Body of History Anxious Writing, Absent Subjects, and Marketing the Nation Larissa Lai The anti-racist movements of the late 1980s and early 1990s were largely predicated on the notion of “breaking the silence,” that is, making space for the articulation of histories that until that point had been kept from the official record. Working in an oppositional mode, self-identified anti-racist thinkers and activists noted that official histories tended to privilege the already privileged, that is, the white, male, heterosexual ruling class. Anti-oppression cultural workers sought the articulation of marginalized histories as a first step in liberating subjects excluded from official histories. Under the aegis of “the universal” the histories of racialized peoples had not only been silenced but also made invisible. Collective texts in particular, such as the remarkable lesbian of colour anthology Piece of My Heart, mark an important turning point in the materialization of marginalized histories—to frame it in psychoanalytic terms, the “bringing to light” of “that which ought to remain hidden.”1 A considerable number of Asian North American texts employed the strategy of breaking the silence as a mode of empowerment. Asian Canadian examples include Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony, Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children, and Evelyn Lau’s troubling Runaway, among others. A second, very significant recognition of that moment was the importance of the question “who speaks?” as Himani Bannerji has articulated in Thinking Through.2 Emerging, at least in the academic world, from Foucault ’s recognition of regimes of power, the notion that the marginalized body articulates her or his own history differently from the way a privileged expert, however liberal and open-minded, might articulate it, may not have been a new idea, but the extent to which it circulated and was put into action in the late 1980s was extremely important. Bannerji writes: A text which is coherent with my experience as a non-white woman, for example, when inserted into the tentacles of an alienating interpretive device, loses its original reference points and meaning, and becomes inert and inverted. Thus, The Wretched of the Earth in the light of O. Manoni’s Prospero and Caliban becomes an example of Oedipal counterphobia of the colonized, or Angela Davis’ Women, Race and Class an example of “black feminism,” no more than just a “different” perspective in feminism.3 Bannerji is critical of psychoanalysis and feminism in this context because she recognizes them as oppressive impositions on the experiences of women of colour. A politic focused on the body insists that “we the marginalized” must speak for ourselves in our own voices. It also refuses to make nomenclatural equivalences of speaking voices, such that, as Bannerji describes above, one voice becomes substitutable for another, like in valence, and different only in style. It...

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