December, 2000 Volume 3, Issue 3 Past Issues About dis/content Editorial Collective Contributors Contact Us Submissions Links Home   Reviewing Spivak and Sandoval Reading the Wor(l)d [continued] 2 In her most recent book, Methodology of the Oppressed, Chela Sandoval – by now well-known in the metropolitan academy for her groundbreaking formulation of “differential consciousness” – mobilizes a huge cluster of “transactional readings,” to borrow Spivak’s term from a different context. Sandoval herself suggests that through such readings the most updated technologies of emancipation seem to be emerging in neocolonizing postmodern global formations. For Sandoval the point is not to produce theory alone. The point, however, is to produce change both in the domain of theory and in society at large – all in the service of decolonization and emancipation in the twenty-first century. Sandoval surely attempts to undertake an emancipatory project. She articulates and sustains her belief in the possibility of change; keeps forging her utopia in a world where creative imagination can energize the political; and ends up fashioning a “hermeneutics of love” in the interest of social change. Sandoval even moves in the direction of spelling out the birth of a new subject – a subject capable of love, hope, imagination, action, and transformation. She reminds us that bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, Emma Pérez, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Paulo Freire, among others, have all underlined love as a revolutionary principle, while Sandoval simultaneously rejects and renews some of their theoretico-discursive categories, analytics, and apparatuses in response to the pressures and rhythms of contemporary history – history as she sees it. While seeking to offer a new rhetoric, a new language, a new methodology, a new technology, a new subject, and a new social movement, Sandoval seems to be suggesting that some of the old categories – hitherto deemed “revolutionary” in our false consciousness – are dead. Or, for instance, class struggles and national liberation movements, for Sandoval, are at least by implication old-fashioned. However, as she tells us, the history of consciousness is well and alive; that categories, methods, methodologies, and technologies can be created anew – or renewed –through a differential and oppositional consciousness she envisages and engages in her book. Angela Y. Davis, in her foreword to the book, tabulates some of Sandoval’s high points. Davis also comments on the political usefulness of the book: “This book provides us with a series of methods, not only for analyzing texts, but for creating social movements and identities that are capable of speaking to, against, and through power. Emerging scholars who want to link their work to pursuits for social justice will be inspired by the way Chela Sandoval refuses to abandon her belief in the possibility of revolutionary resistance” (xi). In the “Introduction” to the book, Chela Sandoval maps out the general contours of her own project thus: “Exposed is a rhetoric of resistance, an apparatus for countering neocolonizing postmodern global formations. Here, this apparatus is represented as, first, a theory and method of oppositional consciousness: the equal rights, revolutionary, supremacist, separatist, and differential modes; second, as a methodology of the oppressed (which cuts through grammars of supremacy), and which over the course of the book transforms into a methodology of emancipation comprised of five skills: semiotics, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, democratics, and differential consciousness; and finally, the book argues that these different methods, when utilized together, constitute a singular apparatus that is necessary for forging twenty-first-century modes of decolonizing globalization. That apparatus is ‘love,’ understood as a technology for global transformation” (2). Thus her book is divided into four interconnected parts respectively titled “Foundations in Neocolonial Postmodernism” (13-37); “The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World” (39-64); “The Methodology of the Oppressed” (65-136); and “Love in the Postmodern World” (137-184). Given the contours of her project Sandoval neatly outlines, the scale and scope of her undertaking appear massive and ambitious. And Sandoval accomplishes a massive task of bringing together a whole range of Western theorists such as Frederic Jameson, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Hayden White, and so on, while also re-reading them in the service of a decolonizing “theoretical solidarity” as opposed to what Sandoval calls “the stubborn apartheid of theoretical domains” (11). But, more importantly, she resituates all those Western theorists, as Angela Davis rightly points out, by way of revisiting the works and sites of what Sandoval calls “US third-world feminism” – the works, for instance, of Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, Paula Gun Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, Barbara Noda, among many others. In other words, as Sandoval herself asserts, she deploys and mobilizes US third-world feminist criticism as her central means of analysis. And, indeed, in her project of forging and forming theoretical alliances and coalitions in ways in which “postcolonial, poststructural, postmodern, feminist, ethnic, and queer schools [can fully] converge” (3), Sandoval recovers, renews, nuances, and extends the analytics and apparatuses of US Third-world feminism in the interest of envisaging and engineering “the methodologies of the oppressed” in the twenty-first century. Moreover, “US third-world feminism” – in Chela Sandoval’s proclivity for reinventing a new vocabulary and a new alliance – also turns out to be “postcolonial US third-world feminism” (5). Sandoval does not stop there. She goes to the extent of asserting with full force that this very postcolonial US third-world feminism is “necessary for decolonizing the twenty-first century” (5). In an attempt to decolonize theory and method, then, Sandoval in the beginning part of her book returns to Jameson’s paradigmatic macro-narrative of the postmodern turn in the late twentieth century. Sandoval performs a close textual reading of Jameson’s work to demonstrate how Jameson reckons postmodernism a neocolonizing mode of globalization. To the extent that Jameson argues that postmodernism emerges as a globalizing neocolonial force in today’s world, Sandoval forges an alliance with Jameson. But she also effectively contests his formulation that postmodernism has rendered resistance and oppositional consciousness ineffective. So, in Part II of her book, Sandoval tracks the itinerary – historically engaged as it is – of US women’s work, activism, and movements in order to demonstrate that resistance and consciousness have remained not only alive and active but also decisively oppositional to neocolonial postmodernism. This mode of countering Jameson – and by extension the blind spots and limits of what I wish to call a metropolitan white male Marxism – is indeed a politically charged point of departure for an academic-activist like Sandoval interested in positing alternatives – in engineering what she calls “an alternative and dissident globalization in place of the neocolonizing forces of postmodernism” (2) – that of course get articulated in terms of the methodologies of the oppressed in Part III, the heart of the book. To the extent that the point of departure or the ground work is crucial for Sandoval, and also to the extent that Sandoval is interested in combating the apartheid of theory, I cannot but raise a couple of questions concerning a certain production of absences and gaps, particularly in a site from which a call for oppositional solidarity and even a manifesto and a manual for liberation are all issued. If postmodernism is a globalizing neocolonial force as both Jameson and Sandoval would have us see it, then how can they see it without accounting for the political economy of that very neocolonial force at the current conjuncture in globalization? Jameson’s overly culturalist preoccupations, I would argue, have not hitherto enabled him to do a cognitive mapping of postmodernism as well as neocolonialism in their totality as such, although we know that Jameson is noted for his Marxist-Lukácsian insistence on totality. Indeed I keep learning from third-world Marxist political economists and feminists that to seek totality is not to homogenize or to hierarchize or to essentialize, but to look for a comprehensive conceptual framework that enables one to contextualize and historicize the differentia specifica of subjects, sites, scenes, and signs. Underlining the need for seeking a totality that I think Sandoval’s “differential consciousness” certainly partly enables, I argue that the other tradition of theorizing neocolonialism still needs to be foregrounded. This other tradition has already emerged from what the third-world activist Farida Akhter once called “the other(ed) third world.” This tradition – kept alive differentially by Marxists and feminists in Latin America, Asia, and Africa – sees today’s neocolonialism as decisively political-economic. In other words, theorists-activists-writers such as Farida Akhter, Badruddin Umar, Samir Amin, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o – to name but a few – all view the financialization of the globe as profoundly world-systemic and as a neocolonizing totality, while also regarding it as the fundamental site of local and global decolonizing interventions. I am not sure if Jameson is interested in learning from third-world political economists currently active in Asia, Africa, and Latin America or from actually existing Marxist-feminist struggles in, say, Indonesia, India, Palestine, the Philippines, Guatemala, Brazil, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Puerto Rico, to name only a few. But, when it comes to Farida Akhter’s “other(ed) third world,” as both Aijaz Ahmad and Gayatri Spivak have already pointed out, Jameson tends to emit certain signs and symptoms of cognitive failures – probably a function of his at least unconscious Eurocentrism and even US exceptionalism. And one such symptom of cognitive failure seems to reside in Jameson’s persistent lack of attention to the analytics and categories of political economy developed and deployed by third-world feminists and Marxists. Sandoval’s otherwise contestatory and politically useful engagement with Jameson’s manifesto on postmodernism notwithstanding, she unfortunately lets that very cognitive failure of Jameson off the hook. Now certain consequences are seen in the third part of the book in which Sandoval decisively maps out the methodology of the oppressed, embracing the five skills already mentioned: semiotics, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, democratics, and differential consciousness. This part is a brilliant example of renewing, revitalizing, re-forming and even reforming the poststructuralist project and thus resituating US third-world feminism. Sandoval seeks to radicalize and transform Barthes’s semiology in favor of what she calls an emancipatory semiology. She also seeks to radicalize Derrida’s deconstruction and différance in the interest of an “emancipatory” deconstruction, and so on. What, however, gets othered in Sandoval’s methodological coalition-building enterprise is the “othered third world’s” preoccupation with political economy as a science of struggle – political economy as part of the methodology of the oppressed, political economy that points up the sites of actual material contradictions characterizing multiple levels and layers of production relations in specific geographical and historical sites. Of course, in Sandoval’s treatment, Frantz Fanon is accorded more credit than Roland Barthes. According to Sandoval, Fanon had already mapped out the methodology of the oppressed before Barthes did, although the latter remains for Sandoval what she calls an exemplary “de-colonial theorist” (82). But Sandoval seems to be renewing a postcolonial mode of the semiologization of Fanon: she is interested in discerning the semiotic technology that she thinks is built into Black Skins, White Masks, without however taking into account the possibility that Fanon’s semiotic technology remains dialectically linked to the operation of a political economy of colonialism and racism that accounts for the material production and reproduction of signs themselves. To read the sign is also to read the political economy of its production in specific historical contexts. We know that Homi Bhabha has already given us a highly semiologized postcolonial Fanon – a Fanon “immobilized,” as E. San Juan would put it. However, Sandoval certainly seeks to mobilize Fanon – but a Fanon yanked from his engagements with the political economy of neocolonialism, although the Fanon of political economy (one needs to re-read The Wretched of the Earth), juxtaposed with Lenin, is surely a presence not only in the works of Kwame Nkrumah or Ngugi wa Thiong’o, among others, but also in the works of feminists and Marxists currently active in Africa and the Indian Sub-continent, for instance. I’m raising such concerns only in an attempt to understand the nature of the methodology of the oppressed Sandoval is bent on devising and designing for the twenty-first century, while I’m also trying to understand from certain “othered third-world” perspectives – available as they are beyond the geographical confines of the US – how the proposed methodology of the oppressed can resist being the methodology of the oppressor. Part IV of Sandoval’s book – “Love in the Postmodern World” – completes her synthesis. Love serves as a synthesizing and organizing principle. Sandoval tells us that she reinvents love as a political technology, as a technology of transformation and emancipation. It is Sandoval’s “love,” then, that brings together – to use her own long list – “Jacques Derrida, Hayden White, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Donna Haraway, Roland Barthes, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldua, Merle Woo, Janice Gould, Paula Gunn Allen, Barbara Smith, Emma Pérez, and others” (3). This looks like a gala conference or a massive festival of theorists and writers and activists. And this festivity, animated by love, has of course its value to the extent that it can bring together the oppressed across national and geographical boundaries. If Foucault and Fanon – interested as they are in the questions of power, knowledge, discourse, and the body – can come together and even love each other in the service of Sandoval’s oppositional and differential “cosmopolitics for planeta tierra” (161), the event would probably mark a high point of ars theoretica and ars politica in the US-social-movement imaginary. But one should not forget that the historical-material conditions that produced Foucault and Fanon are not identical; that the body and the clinic that Foucault and Fanon both talked about are never the same; and that a festive solidarity –and even “love,” however beefed up or even jazzed up by Barthes’s “de-colonial” theory – might end up erasing the differential specificities of power relations and production relations that variously inflect material and discursive sites as well as subjectivities on a global scale. Now, a few words on what Sandoval calls “postcolonial US third-world feminism.” Sandoval decidedly centralizes this US feminism – a point Angela Davis already makes in her foreword – as the site of intervention, while arguing that this feminism is necessary for decolonizing the twenty-first century. Certainly Sandoval’s foregrounding and claim have their own political charge and unusual velocity of resistance at a time when neocolonial postmodernism – and for that matter capital with a big C – continues to perpetrate epistemic and other forms of violence on the bodies of knowledges, practices, and consciousnesses produced by US women of color who inhabit a “third world” within the “first world.” Trinh T. Minh-ha and Ngugi wa Thiong’o have already told us that there is a third world in the first and that there is a first world in the third. Of course Sandoval’s nuanced formulation of differential consciousness enables us to think the first-third relationship in the manner of Trinh T. Minha-ha and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Yet Sandoval’s nature of engagement with US third-world feminism as a body of knowledges and practices tends to run the risk of being metropolitan and US exceptionalist under certain circumstances. Indeed, Leslie Marmon Silko and Audre Lorde – to take only two examples – themselves suggest that the production of their knowledges within the US remains linked to, imbricated with, and even indebted to the knowledges produced in what Farida Akhter calls “the other(ed) third world” – say in Latin America or Africa. Sandoval’s theoretical coalition-building enterprise and her “methodologies of the oppressed” continuously take cues and clues from by-now-canonized metropolitan theorists such as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida – and of course, appropriately and energetically, from the works of Audre Lorde, Paula Gun Allen, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Angela Davis, and others – but cannot derive energy and inspiration from feminists or women theorists and activists located outside the US – say from a Fadwa Tuqan or a Farida Akhter or a Mahasweta Devi. Indeed, in the very interest of a struggle against the apartheid of theory that Sandoval proposes and undertakes, one should not forget that the production of metropolitan knowledges and discourses, even when renewed in the interest of “revolutionary change,” might cost foreclosures and erasures at various levels. Recently I asked a radical US literary critic this very naive question: “I know William Carlos Williams; do you know Qazi Nazrul Islam?” And the answer? Sanctioned ignorance. Indeed, what we know and what we do not know – and what we want to know and what we do not want to know – are never neutral and innocent human phenomena and urges. Surely they have to do with the global politics and administration of knowledge-production at a time when the apartheid of knowledge is also necessarily conditioned by the logic of profit. M-C-M' keeps inscribing and re-inscribing its axiomatics in various sites in a variety of ways. Under such circumstances, in which the law of value has not at all withered away, we cannot but follow Sandoval’s insistence on what she calls “de-colonial linkages” –linkages that, however, are yet to be made and expanded. Previous section     Table of Contents