Reframing Latin America: A Cultural Theory Reading ... - BGSU Blogs

168 reframing latin america
of postmodern feminist perspective (and, more specifi cally, of Donna Haraway’s
appropriation of Chicana’s discourse) from a Chicana perspective:
Within the fi eld of U.S. literary and cultural studies, the institutionalization
of a discourse of postmodernism has spawned an approach to
difference that ironically erases the distinctiveness and relationality
of difference itself. Typically, postmodernist theorists either internalize
difference so that the individual is herself seen as “fragmented” and
“contradictory” [. . .] or they attempt to “subvert” difference by showing
that “difference” is merely a discursive illusion. [. . .] In either case,
postmodernists reinscribe, albeit unintentionally; a kind of universalizing
sameness (we are all marginal now!) that their celebration of
“difference” had tried so hard to avoid. 20
Moya complements her own observation with one from Linda Alcoff, where
she observes that “the rising infl uence of postmodernism has had a noticeable
debilitating effect on the project of empowering women as knowledge
producers, producing a fl urry of critical attacks on unproblematized accounts
of experience and on identity politics.” And Moya adds to this observation
that “such critical attacks have served, in conventional theoretical
wisdom, to delegitimize all accounts of experience, and to undermine all
forms of identity politics—unproblematized or not.” 21 I am aligning these
examples with those of Vandana Shiva and Abdel-Malek as far as they are
generated from the colonial difference. Postmodern criticism of modernity
as well as world system analysis is generated from the interior borders of the
system—that is, they provide a Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism. The
colonial epistemic difference is located some place else, not in the interiority
of modernity defi ned by its imperial confl icts and self-critiqued from a
postmodern perspective. On the contrary, the epistemic colonial difference
emerges in the exteriority of the modern/colonial world, and in that particular
form of exteriority that comprises the Chicano/as and Latino/as in the
United States a consequence of the national confl icts between Mexico and
the United States, in 1848 and of the imperial confl icts between the United
States and Spain in 1898. 22 However, what is important to underline here is
that the feminist challenges to modern epistemology are as follows: while
postmodern feminists show the limits of “masculine epistemology,” 23
women of color and Third World feminism 24 show the limits also of “white
epistemology;” of which postmodern feminism critics remain prisoner, 25 as
Moya’s critique of Haraway suggests. 26 In Wallerstein’s perception, the two
challenges to the social sciences I mention here fall short in understanding