Critical Response 2

In “Listening to ghosts: an alternative (non)argument,” Malea Powell problematizes the notion that the subject of color should engage in a theorization that is an alternative to dominant academic theory. Powell critiques Barbara Christian’s assertion that there is a distinct theory outside of white hegemonic dominant theory that people of color have access to for if people of color create an “alternative discourse” then there must be something that this discourse is an alternative of (15). In other words, Powell is critiquing the binary that can be created if we position white dominant theory as superior and “alternative” people of color theory as always rejecting this dominant theory. I think that this essay was useful in thinking about ways to theorize Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years: lo que nunca paso por sus labios. In some ways Moraga falls into what Powell critiqued as binary opposing imaginaries; however, I think that the bigger point of Moraga’s book is that she herself is theory.

In other words, I think that Moraga’s book helps to work in different types of theory, but that her poems and thoughts of herself and her own life not just create an “alternative” theory but helps us as readers to imagine other possible pasts and futures. An example of this is at the very beginning when she and her mother are having drinks and her mother discloses her suspicions that her father might be “just like her.” This vignette is not meant to follow the dominant narrative of a person in the closet who is married and continues to engage in sexual practices outside the heterosexual practices within the marriage, but instead if we look at the narrator of this story, it is the daughter who is meant to talk to him about his “nature,” it is the daughter who is meant to educate him about himself (of course assuming that he actually does in fact feel the way that he is being read). In this way, what the shift in perspective does is not just queer the normative closet story of married man, but also acknowledges that there are other stories that are intertwined with his, that there are other perspectives from which this story is being addressed and told. 

Patti Duncan does something similar in “History of Disease,” where she retells the story of migration of her mother while simultaneously questioning the sources from which this story is coming from. In this regard, Duncan is able to not just provide an “alternative” story to the typical trope of migration to the U.S., but also questions the reasons why this migration needed to happen in the first place, the “assimilation” or lack thereof that her mother and she are able to actually partake in, and the idea of memory that is intact from societal influences. In this way, Duncan’s narrative facilitates a conversation that is not just an alternative to dominant forms of theory, she creates a theory within which she and her family are within and outside U.S. imaginaries as always outsiders. In other words, her narrative functions as a form of dismantling of dominant forms of theory by the mere fact that her theory is in the lived experiences she recollects. Additionally, the questioning of these remembrances destabilizes the idea that any theory is created without societal influences. 

Another aspect that Moraga questions in similar ways to Duncan is the notion of looking back. While Duncan actively throughout her piece questions memory and the factors that affect it or distort it, Moraga looks back, as she does in her talk in New York toward the end, as a way of finding self within systems that continually erase her. While somewhat alternative to dominant forms of theory, Moraga’s notion of looking back is also about reclaiming a history that has been stolen and erased. Additionally, I think that in looking back critically the possibility of expanding theory not just as the binary that Powell outlined, but also as the manifestation of more complex ideas and creations self that are always fluctuating can be imagined and therefore realized.