Iii: FeministPostcolonialStudiesand

Cultural Studies Composition

CLAIRE

L. ALEXANDER
Let her weave her story within their stories, her life amidst their lives. Trinh T. Minh-ha Ultimately alone with only the hum of the computer, accompanied by all my faces (and often yours as well), the monitor's screen reflects back the dialog among "us." I talk to myself. That's what writers do, we carry on a constant dialogue between language and hands and images, one or another of our identities trying desperately to get in a word, an image, a sound. Gloria Anzaldua

Cultural studies pedagogy is one way to introduce students to the interaction of narratives within themselves and between themselves and their contexts. For many practitioners, its goal is that students critique our world, not as an end in itself, but as a means to change it. The destabilizing of the twin concepts of "normal" and "natural" and the resulting decentering of the self, critiques basic to this project, paradoxically, seem both to enable and to limit change. Addressing this decentering frequently, James Berlin has explored the overlaps among postmodernism, socio-epistemic rhetoric, culture studies and composition studies ("Composition and," "Composition Studies," "Poststructuralism," and Rhetarics). Deepika Bahri, though raising political issuesabout the connections, has shown intersections between postcolonial studies and composition studies. Building on these interconnections, I will explore reflections on multiple subjectivity from postcolonial feminist theorists-primarily Gloria Anzaldua, Rey Chow, Marla Lugones, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. From the intersection of feminist postcolonial studies and cultural studies composition practice, I will explore the complexity of the weaving we seek both to unravel and to reweave and the models these women provide for resistance. Berlin's version of Birmingham Center Cultural Studies focuses on the students in their own culture and includes assigning an experience paper with a difference. As he explains, "Our effort isto make students aware of the cultural codes-the various competing discourses-that attempt to influence who they are" ("Composition and" 50). Moving variously from the concrete to the abstract, the selected postcolonial feminist writers theorize through, with, and about narrative. They do an analysis of their own positions in culture that are

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professional versions of the process Berlin would invite composition students to enter into in the cultural studies composition classroom. In the postcolonial subject, the multiple conflicted subject positions seem more obvious than in the apparently monocultural subject-though of course, by the time the analysis is completed, the student (even with subcultures yielding lessdramatic complexities than nationalities) realizes slhe isnot so monocultural after all. Both student and professional analyze a self in relation to a hegemonic culture, the student in relation to a dominant culture and the postcolonial in relation to the residue from the culture of the colonizer. Berlin describes the postmodern version of subject formation that cultural studies composition works with: "each of us is heterogeneously made up of various competing discourses, conflicted and contradictory scripts, that make our consciousness anything but unified, coherent, and autonomous" (Rhetorics 62). It is much easier to consider this in the abstract than in the concrete world of experienced consciousness with its illusion of continuity. Postcolonial writers can help the move to the concrete. Susan C. Jarratt, for example, notes the distance between postmodernism's abstract privileging of multiplicity and Spivak's continuing multiplication of her own and other Indian identities (6162). Similarly, Nelly Richard speaks of Latin Americans having lived the multiplicity before postmoderns theorized it. When, as a cultural studies starter, we ask students to identify their various affiliations, we can listen to postcolonial cautions. Listing their various identities is important for our writing students, but not enough. Chow cautions against the multiplying list that would merely stabilize categories (Wniing108), and one can also seehow listing could contribute to seeing the "self" aspowerless within fixed categories, as wholly determined by outside forces. Nor does listing promote change. Norma Alarcon, in her analysis of uses of the collection, This BridgeCalledMy Back, notes too many citations and classroom uses of the anthology that acknowledge the listings of race and nationality and social class, yet carry on discussions about the old agenda of tuman as a unified category. Listing without reflection is the barest hint of a beginning, barely better than being oblivious, only useful if a transitional step toward change. The conflict of subject positions that Berlin's cultural studies pedagogy urges students to explore is apparent in the postcolonial feminists' writings. Analyzing difference and power among the "identities" shows varying levels of pain or danger. Gloria Anzaldua vividly describes the depth of pain in images of injury and war. In her poem opening,furderlands,she speaks of the Rio Grande asa "1,950 mile-long open woundl ...1running down the length of my body" (2). Further along, she speaks of the confusion caused by the "cultural collision" of inner "habitually incompatible frames of reference"; she elaborates, "Cradled in one culture, sandwiched between two cultures, straddling all three cultures and undergoes a struggle of flesh, a struggle of borders, their value systems, lamestiza an inner war" (furderlands 78). How incompatible the systems was made clear with her example of experiencing different attitudes toward ambition: rewarded,

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even demanded, by Anglos, it was rejected by Mexicans for causing one to rise above and be envied, hence in danger of being a recipient of witchcraft (&rderlands 18). Pat Mora's poem, "LegalAlien" givesanother example: "American, but hyphenated,/ .../an American to Mexicans/a Mexican to Americans." Each group, focusing more on difference than similarity leavesher "masking the discomfort/of being pre-judged/Bi-Iaterally" (376). Masking, one image for the negotiations of the decentered self,carries many nuances. For Mora it hides feelings; for Anzaldua artificiality is emphasized when she speaks of becoming nothing but our various roles in accommodating to the majority and the home cultures (Introduction xv). For Frantz Fanon the issue is betrayal; his analysis of students traveling between Martinique and France, who are accepted by neither (Ch. 1),shows masking to be a problem not only for women. Alarcon and Trinh relate the mimicry to women using "the Master's Tools" as well as to Third World people moving into First World patterns. Students can learn to critique the goalsthey strive for and question who gains ifthey mimic; they can also learn to critique what they call "natural." Nelly Richard extends the idea of mask beyond individuals to cultures and history and theory, Latin America parodying Europe, but it becomes individual also as people follow an irrelevant "imported image." Fanon's discussion of the colonial absorbing the parody of Europe reveals not only a constructed identity, but also asubsequent betrayal. He makes the point quite vividly, describing the education in France that left Rene Maran's character, Jean Veneuse, feeling as French as the French until he wanted to marry a white French woman. Encounter makes what seemed natural now become artificial, an internalized mask that feels like himself yet doesn't fit (Ch 3).Trinh also addresses misfit and betrayal. Speaking of Third World "natives" (whom First World anthropologists are "making equal") as "entrapped in a circular dance where they always find themselves a pace behind the white saviors"(Woman59), she emphasizes the impossibility of ever succeeding when the terms are set elsewhere. Chow, Trinh, and Anzaldua sometimes reverse the mask images, shifting from wearing the dominant culture of the colonized to wearing the colonizer's version of the authentic native that has been imposed. Trinh notes the "authentic" as mask, as a creation of the colonizer/European anthropologist, a concern which diverts "natives" to the "Master's" concerns asthe "Masters" impose their definition of authentic on the "native" who now "paints her/himself thick with authenticity" (Wanan 88). Trinh reports an effect on individuals, but Anzaldua presents a group effect, noting that the colonized begin to demand of each other that they live up to the colonizer's version of authenticity, a demand that fosters internal divisions ("Enrapport"143). The reversed mask that now reflects an imposed authentic is dangerous for both the migrant and the local. The risk of not playing by the "Master's" rules is illustrated by the story Chow tells of a woman from the Peoples' Republic of China who was passed over for a faculty position because her reading of The Dream 0/theRedChamber sounded capitalist to some of the search committee.

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Chow frames the anecdote in terms of stereotyping; then she links that stereotyping to "the politics of identifying 'authentic' natives" (Writing 28) wherein the nonChinese determined that an authentic Chinese person had to be from the mainland and had to be Communist. There are other dangers. Trinh notes that when westernization signals impurity and when feminism is associated with westernization, being authentic could mean aretum to being traditional and reemphasizing old patriarchal ways (Woman 106). The imposed mask of authenticity is hazardous. None of this problematizing of authenticity is to deny a real need for roots. The imposed authenticity and the search for roots, however, are not to be conflated; they are part of the contradictions that the previously and presently colonized live with. Marfa Lugones, in her discussion of different selves for different worlds, has phrasing that hints at the difference between the two "authenticities"; she distinguishes being "simply latin" among Latinos from being "stereotypically latin" among Anglos (396). As composition teachers, we can heed further cautions the selected writers provide about authenticity. Even without danger, imposed authenticity is problematic. As Chow says, colonizers/anthropologists demand a wholly Other "pure" Chinese, in spite of '''Westernization' ... [being] the materiality of daily life for modern Asian peoples" ("Violence" 89). Here she addresses "authenticity" imposed by the dominant group (whether imposed from outside or from inside through expectations internalized by the subordinated) in contrast to an "authenticity" of lived experience. Similarly, Anzaldua indicates the difficulty of the choice "between cultural ethnicity and the continuing survival of that culture" ("Enrapport" 145). Chow resists an imposed authenticity that overlooks her very different migrant lived experience, an experience that she wants to be seen as equally (perhaps even as more) authentic. National identity, like personal, she presents as multiple. WritingDiaspora contains an intricate analysis where Chow, who is from Hong Kong, shows the need to decenter the notion of Chinese identity in a way that parallels the decentering of the self. Discussing the difference between imperialism in China-which is internal-and external imperialisms elsewhere, she notes resulting complexities. Chow contrasts the singledemythificationneededin the West with the double "demythifi[cation] of the official demythifying agenda of Chinese communism itself" (78).The first demythification is merely a perpetuation of oppression. Once consciousness raising became official, the new official myth took hold and became an instrument of oppression (84-86). She claims that to counter officialized and static identity necessitates "perpetual modifying of 'being Chinese'" (92)which includes the diasporic Chinese intellectual aswell as those (silenced) intellectuals remaining at the mainland center. She would also have the Chinese colonized by the British in Hong Kong seen as Chinese. She would have the geographically distant Chinese seen as more authentic than those at the geographical center who are oppressed by the first mythification. Spivak and Chow differ concerning the migrant's relation to local culture. Chow is not rejecting the idea of authentic itself as Spivak, like Trinh, does, but

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rather she is rejecting the dominant as definer. She wants to be a definer of authentic herself, and to do so she redefines Cbmee, arguing for a decentered concept (both geographically and politically). Chow's political intervention is a decentral holding pattern, Hong Kong and migrant Chinese holding onto Chineseness till it is safe for mainland intellectuals to speak, until the subdued inhabitants at the geographical center are freed from the political center. Spivak, on the other hand, resists any claim for authenticity or authority for the migrant, resisting both the authority of the margin in the US situation and the authority to represent the local culture. She guards against a definition of Indiathat does not include the subaltern or a definition ofUlm:ln that does not include subaltern women. Both Chow and Spivak, like Trinh, resist a static definition of authenticity, one example being Spivak's critique of migrant communities for becoming "more real than the 'original' cultures" as they hold on to traditional ways (Outside 72), elsewhere expressed as"addiction" to traditions ("Reflections" 73). The freezing of that imposed authenticity into a mask, a static image, an inhibiting rather than freeing image, is part of a kind of cultural studies that Chow and Spivak object to throughout. Its distance from the Berlin version, which continually explores cultural codes, analyzing who benefits from various contradictions, is great. Objections to mere transmission of static categories that could be taken for "authentic" interpretations appear in this advice to teachers: cultural studies: they can only learn to dJcultural "Students cannot learn alxJut studies" (Berlin and Vivion xiv). Considering the postcolonial experience of masking in its various nuances and the postcolonial feminists' resistance to authentic can lead students away from their perceptions that a unitary self is natural. Richard relates the perception of oneself as masked to modernism's search for coherence and authenticity, thus implying that a more postmodern understanding of subjectivity could lessen (not remove) the discomfort. As one lets go of the unitary "self," authenticity dissipates and maskcould lose some of its tyranny. Although we easestudents away from quests for their authentic selves, the strategies used for finding the authentic voice can be modified to find inner multiplicity, silenced voices. Instead of reading for the vivid metaphors that supposedly signal the authentic voice, students can read their journals and freewriting and the drafts shared in peer groups for conflicting metaphors. They can also read their own works using Berlin's heuristics for reading their coursepack essays-finding key words, binary oppositions used and implied, and identifying the implied narrative ("Composition and," "Poststructuralism," and Rhetorics). These heuristics can help students find their inner complexity and dissonance, can help them listen for silenced inner voices without attributing "authentic" core status to any single voice. The students-and the instructors too, for Berlin would remind us that we too need to have our assumptions probed way," {"Poststructuralism" 32}-can listen in what Anzaldua calls "the mestiza no longer "disown[ing] the white parts, the male parts, the pathological parts, the queer parts, the vulnerable parts" (Borderlands 88). Her own mestiza way

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sometimes seems partial to her Nahua culture, yet she also emphasizes gathering "selves" and shifting positions, in her poetry, where she" continually walk[ s]out of one culture/ and into another" while being "in all cultures at the same time" (Borderlands 77) and in her prose where she speaks of seeing through "a critical lens with variable focus" ("Enrapport"145). We can hear silenced voices better when we do not disown. That Anzaldua would model the way fits well with Richard's observation that Latin Americans experienced the postmodern subject before theorists invented it. The difference between "mask" and the identity shift that Lugones calls "world travelling" is not a difference of data or experience so much asa difference of interpretation. To look for multiple conflicting discourseswill be seento be a postmodem way out of feeling masked; when no one discourse is allowed to become central, none is a mask. Berlin's version of cultural studies composition is not only interested in multiplicity but also in interactions of power. In addition to teaching about dealing with painful differences among subjectivities, these postcolonial feminist theorists can teach much about power and its layers of complexity in multiple subject positions. It is one thing to realize one is formed by dominant discourses. It is another to find oneself dominant. One of the more unsettling conflicts of subject positions is that which reveals a mix of power positions, that reveals that the member of a minority culture is not always powerless. Barbara Christian sounded an early alert to a difference that has since become commonplace among feminists, how feminist theory excludes when it overgeneralizes, how it misses "the complexity of life-that women are of many races and ethnic backgrounds with different histories and cultures and that as a rule, women belong to different classes that have different concerns" (342). Although it is a commonplace, mention must be made because it is not yet commonly heeded. White heterosexual middle-class Anglo women, subordinated vis-a-vis patriarchy, often continue to dominate the discussion among (or continue to exclude) women of color, lesbians, working-class, Asian-American, Native-American, Hispanic, and Third World women. Trinh, drawing our attention to differences within as well as between (WomanChapter 3), keeps us aware that taman is no more a monolithic category than the selfis unitary. Trinh, Chow, and Spivak, asmigrant postcolonial feminists, add that first world women's discussions miss or distort third world concerns. This experience of power imbalance as one shifts from gender positions to racial or other ones leads Trinh to note problems with "the perception of sex as a secondary attribute ... that one can add or subtract" (Woman104)-and we could add other inseparable identities-race and age, for instance. Elsewhere she noted that "difference ... is not opposed to sameness, nor synonymous with separateness" ("Not you" 372) to describe the complexity of our multiple conflicted subject positions, a complexity that Anzaldua and Spivak convey with images of network and weaving. When oblivious to this complexity, we act "as if oppression only comes in separate, monolithic forms" (Woman104). Now, although this remains problematic, separating monolithic categories is a strate-

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gic improvement over the singular monolithic colonizer, or patriarchy, or "the" thrninant culture.This first step from large to smaller abstraction enables a cultural studies classroom to lessen some of the resistance experienced by the elite white males when they perceive all blame placed on them, a resistance that makes them much lessteachable. As Alarcon reminds us, women are oppressed by male and by female (359),and we have already seen Anzaldua's analysis of Chicanas oppressing Chicanas ("Enrapport"). We could substitute most any category into that statement. Leslie Marmon Silko, in Cen:mony, has Tayo learn that it isdangerous to Native Americans to seeall evil asexisting in whites alone. Tayo has experienced and seen Native American oppress Native American. While these examples emphasize acknowledging evil among one's own, the concept could also be applied to seeing good. Identifying separate monolithic areas of dominance/subordination allows each student to variously stand with the oppressor and the oppressed. 1 Spivak and Chow have pointed out that the one looking seeshis/her own multiplicity, but sees the one looked at as unitary. It was said of colonizer/anthropologists, but could it work in reverse as well? When the marginalized forget this, could they also see their own multiplicity and the oppressors' singularity? Asked this in an interview, Trinh processed the question before answering, No. She rejected the simplified version that asks if the marginalized thus fix the West asthey have been fixed, rejecting it because when offered by the dominant, it could amount to denial, could provide a way to avoid dealing with the issue. She points to the difference between a strategic use of categories by the subordinated and the disempowering that results from the historic fixing of categories in this binary: native = simple; civilized = multiple. Since "the West [strategic use] has been responsible for the reactive, monolithic naming of the West" the reversal is not fully parallel, and since power is unequal, it is not really "'the Other of the Other'" that we are dealing with" ("Undone" 15-16) . Nor isthe reactive naming so tied up in projection of unwanted parts onto the Other; it is more a response to the prior projection by the dominant, a reclaiming of the power of naming. With this qualification, then, it remains important to note the multiplicity of each, though occasionally, strategically, to use generalizations, even while disengaging from them. There is a clear strategic value in looking at the multiplicity of the dominant in a composition classwhere many of the students represent the dominant. In my cultural studies classes, discussions have moved from using a singular dominant culture to using acomposite version, seeingwhite, middle-class, heterosexual, Christian, urban, able-bodied, prime aged males. In severalcomposition classes,when the students and I tallied the various categories, there ended up no student who fell 1000/ 0 into that dominant culture mix. That bit of space made the students lessresistant to the overall cultural studies project. Postcolonial feminist writers can remind us that we have yet to note that even this composite version of the dominant culture sometimes misses the group experienced as dominant. Anzaldua spoke of needing to stop disowning queer parts as well as white and male parts (Borderlands 88), naming both subordinate

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and dominant. We can note that sometimes our students-and we the instructors-experience a subculture as dominant. Not without reason do we speak of peer pressure. William Labov has identified some social groups' linguistic preferences for a nonstandard dialect and called it covertprestige (ctd,by Trudgill 89); it would seem a similar mechanism would be at work in experiencing other than linguistic signs of a subculture as dominant. While we as teachers looking from the outside might claim to see a group as a whole reacting to "the" dominant culture, some students gain their covert prestige by reproducing the "nondominant" that they experience as dominant. Whenever I have tried, through class discussions, to inductively arrive at definitions of dominant culture, this mix of dominants has produced confusion until the students and 1have recognized the difference between their experienced subordination and the abstraction, however multiple the abstraction has been described. Thus, dominant culture is not a singular monolith (nor a composite of separate monoliths), but a complex web of interacting people who each are made up of the warp of script and woof of discourse. Perhaps we can isolate these for analysis, but for experience, they are very much intertwined. The influence even goes both ways: the scripts and expectations of the dominant modify the individual while the individual's negotiation modifies the scripts (Berlin "Composition and" 103; Rhetorics 71). I can't say that I ever heard Berlin speak of experiencing the subordinate as dominant, but his discussions of plural discourses constructing and being constructed clearly allow for the possibility, a possibility made more clear in reading feminist postcolonial theorizing of identity. As Trinh puts it, "I write to show myself showing people who show me my own showing" (Woman 22). With the help of the postcolonial feminists, I will explore yet one more deeply complex manifestation of power in the decentered self. Anzaldua distinguishes "between inner, outer and peripheral 'L's within a person" {Introduction xxv), noting multiplicity within and difference between. Trinh, discussing her use of Is, is, and Iii s, and gets at the intricacy: "'I' reads as the voice of a white male dominant member"; she further explains choosing "1"instead of "they" because "the oppressor ... is also well and alive within each self" ("Undone" 8-9).Anzaldua and Trinh could mean internalized oppression or they could mean a complex power like the following. It is difficult enough when one is aware of the mix of power in shifting roles, as in the earlier example with power in terms of race and powerlessness in terms of gender; it is even more unsettling to find oneself powerful/-less in the same identity category as it gets rearticulated. Such, however, is a frequently reported postcolonial experience. Trinh distinguishes between "we, the natives" which focuses attention on "belonging to a particular place by birth" and "they, the natives" which foregrounds "born inferior and non-Europeans" (Woman 52). In this power shift within the same naice consciousness, covert prestige could belongto "we, the natives" while "they, the natives" would be without. Similarly, Chow shows Chinese as both "we" and "they" in her discussion of "Chinese

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women intellectuals" and "'Third world' intellectuals in diaspora" (Writing 0Japter 5)where the discourse of 01inese or Third World remains throughout but shifts power. Subordinate in the metropolis, these intellectuals exert powernow a constituting verbal power- over those "back home." Chow calls upon them to be conscious of "straddl[ing] the elite and subaltern" and to resist the sentimentality of circulating an outdated version of authentic in the "cosmopolitan diasporic space [that] will be exported 'back home'" (Writing 117-18). Similarly, Spivak calls on diasporic intellectuals to remember how they differ from the subaltern (Otkr 135). In another context in WritingDtaspora, Chow notes Chinese intellectuals "speak[ing] with power but identify[ing] with powand callson them not to remain "blind to their own exploitativeness erlessness"(14) as they make "the East" their career" (15).She notes they "struggle against a hegemony that already includes them" (16),a very intricate weave of power in conflicting subject positions. This weave resembles the complexity composition teachers experience when we teach students to critique their culture, a culture that many students want to enter, while we earn our living by teaching standard English and academic writing, thus perpetuating acultural imperialism even asit iscritiqued. James Sledd cautions that "two coercions do not make one freedom" and cautions that we will merely teach our students to continue to follow (671-72). Yet learning standard English is a necessary, though not sufficient, ingredient for power in our times-learning it, then, is a "change that is both medicine and poison" Spivak might say, as she has said of development in another context ("More" 166). Though we work to change the system, though we rename "standard English" as" edited American English," though we try to mitigate the complicity by teaching standard English in the context of cultural studies, explaining standard grammar as one among many codes of dominant white, middle-class culture instead of as truth from on high, still we note our position in a "struggle against a hegemony that includes [us]." Before moving to modifications in cultural studiescomposition pedagogy for exploringthe power configurationsdiscussedabove,we needto hearthe postcolonial feminists' understanding of the complexities of agency since the Berlin model of cultural studiescomposition pedagogyisabout change,and change requires agency. While analyzing subject positions prior to a speaking engagement, Spivak illustrates resisting dominant constructions that are not in her interest, an element also important to Berlin's model of cultural studies composition pedagogy. Her analysis of competing scripts assessesthe expectations projected towards her and plans her resistance to that projection. Spivak describes thinking about her cultural identities in view of expectations of an audience in London. In view of language, Bengali; in Britain, Asian; in the United States, Indian; in both, Third World. Noting that these token positions place her in the margins, she "'chose' the institutional appellation 'teacher" (Outside 54-56), sidestepping the margin. By directly mentioning the possibilities, she forces the audience to notice the naming it is probably already doing even as she redirects

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it by asserting her own name for herself. Thus she illustrates resisting and negotiating codes, options as possible as accommodating in cultural studies pedagogy. In addition, by puttingrzose in quotation marks, she notes limitations and problematizes the agent of choosing. It is much easier to reflect on our multiple conflicting subject positions in abstract theory than in the concrete situation. As a teacher, I need balance between abstract and concrete in presenting so complex a concept as clearly as possible. Looking for my own example, I remembered an occasion when my daughter came home from school with some anecdote about a scolding. As a mother, I was proud of the independent thinking she had shown, but shifting discourses, I could also see how a rather insecure second-grade teacher might focus more on the disruption. Then I remembered times when as a child I had felt betrayed when my teacher-mother sided with ateacher on similar occasions, and I opted for the mother-pride reaction. This seems a little like a writer or Spivak, the speaker, selecting among subject positions, choosing which one of her own to foreground and which of her audiences' to invoke/address. But, remembering Spivak's quotation marks, who chooses? Chow, citing Nancy Armstrong, cautions that we too readily slide from the "subject of the critical term 'subject position?' to a "popular and sentimental version of the bourgeois self" (Writing 37). Similarly.] udith Butler cautions that we should not be trapped in a version of consciousness that still privileges the autonomous unified self; we should not see a "prediscoursive '1'" directing the various subject positions ("Critically" 18,24; elaborated in "Contingent"). Since the decentered self is a complex new idea for undergraduate students, it would be likely that they would neutralize it in terms of the more familiar understandings of selfhood, against which Chow-through Armstrong-cautioned. To counter this I needed to move the illustration beyond that "prediscursive '1'" that Trinh calls a false belief that "the author exists !xfore ... not simultaneously wiJh ... " (Woman 29) to the "I" embedded in discourse. Extending this, we could say that the person does not exist before an experience, but simultaneously with, constructing and being constructed, thus ending up with the combination Jarratt attributes to Spivak: "Her writings stand along side other accounts and the person herself who continues to re-generate a speaking subject" (61). Spivak, herself, speaks about the mother tongue that exists "before our birth and after our death, where patterns that can be filled with anyone's motivation have laid themselves down. [ ... ] We learn it ... fill it ... make it our own .. . and leave it ... for its other users" (Outside 69). Like the mother tongue, Trinh's story that opens and closes Woman, Native,Other"circulates like a gift; an empty gift which anyone can lay claim to by filling it to taste, yet can never truly possess" (2).Here is a subjectivity created by language, an "1"embedded in language. Yet there is also a "we" who picks language up and the "anyone" who fills the story. Here Spivak again proved helpful. Frequently she insists both that there is no decentered subject andthat we need that center in order to act. Since she is much too careful to have merely slipped from subjoct to self,it would seem her

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way of noting that we always feel the presence of a conductor. Or, as Lugones describes the illusion of continuity, conflicting moments are "always experienced in the first person" (396). Trinh adds yet another dimension when she speaks of the inner core self as something that we keep peeling away-that is its "essence" as it were, that it can always be peeled away (Wcman90-94). I was retelling the mother/teacher dilemma to some friends and got the laughing response, "And the pop psychologist in you knew the difference." What had felt like a core self could now be seen as subject position in another discourse. Returning to Butler-she adds that sometimes one subject position does orchestrate the others. What is important, then, is that we not see the same subject position always in control, that we not identify anyone subject position as "the" self, remembering Lugones's words: "The experience is one of having memory of oneself as different without having any underlying 'I'" (396).Or as Spivak puts it, just "because we need to center ourselves in order to act, we should not monumentalize that need asthe way things really are" ("Reflections" 71). In contrast to the modernist concern with authenticity and masks discussed earlier, Lugones distinguishes between what she calls "world travelling" and acting and as "this shift from being one person to being posing. She defines uoid travelling a different person" (396).(From subject position to subject position, we could say.) Just as cultural studies, using postmodernism's rejection of political and social grand narratives calls for narratives that are provisional, (see Berlin, Rhetorics 81, 101) so here, even while rejecting the unitary autonomous self of enlightenment narratives, we strive to keep narratives of our "selves"provisional. Berlin's cultural studies, as are postcolonial feminisms, is about change. Yet the fear remains that inaction will result from seeing the "self" as constructed, from losing a sense of "authenticity" with the loss of the core self. The key, as Butler reminds us, is to recognize that being constituted by multiple discourses is not the same as being determined by them. Instead of losing agency, Butler finds it, claiming that "the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency," is that which "enables a purposive and significant reconfiguration of cultural and political relations" ("Contingent" 12). Likewise, Berlin notes the possibility of change. "Ludic postmodernism," the despairing substitution of verbal play for action-which Berlin critiques through Theresa Ebert's analysis-is only a possibility, not a necessity; Ebert's "resisting postmodernism" is equally possible. As Berlin puts it, "The codes, scripts, or terministic screens that define individuals as helpless ciphers must thus be 98). replaced by narratives that enable democratic participation ... " (Rhetorics To get to this agency requires moving beyond mere lists of subject positions. It requires noting the weave of discourses that make up the decentered self and the potentially transformative interaction as that multiple conflicted self shifts centers. Berlin, noting the variety of combinations of discourse we can inhabit, claims it as a variety that" assures differences among us as well as possibilities for originality and political agency"; he further distinguishes between "political agency" and "complete autonomy" ("Poststructuralism" 21).Autonomy may be

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gone, but with Lugones's "world travelling," agency remains. There is a productive interaction to seek. Chow speaks of using each discourse to comment on the others, to "analyze, decode, and criticize one another" so that each shows what has been muted in the other (Writing108)and observes that "instabilities of the categories ... are multiplied by their juxtaposition" ("Violence" 91). Likewise, Spivak speaks of using each to bring the other to crisis, to "the moment at which you feel that your presuppositions of an enterprise are disproved by the enterprise itself" {Post-Colonial 139). From these internal and external interactions, constituted subjects can see discourses that are beneficial and those that are limiting or downright harmful to the interests of the various subject positions they can occupy. Acknowledging the presence of limitations, yet acting from a "chosen" subject position, we can know that neither a permanent core nor an authentic self did the choosing, yet we strive to be, as Spivak says, a centered subject. Capable of shifting worlds or centers, capable of claiming all our centers, we can also see ourselves capable of limited choice among accommodation, resistance, and negotiation. As postcolonial feminists find themselves capable of shifting, so can we and our students; to that end let us now consider enabling strategies in the cultural studies composition classroom. In the classroom we can teach-and modelproblem finding. Heuristics, such as the starting guide in FourWorlds a/Writing where students are guided to compare values and expectations with experiences in order to probe for dissonance and prepare for insight, can be a means to guide students to "productive crisis" as they look at clashing values and probe for the separate sources in their various formative discourses. Part of the goal of writing as inquiry is finding dissonance. Part of the goal of cultural studies is to hear silenced discourses, whose appearance will most likely produce dissonance. Remembering Anzaldua, we can encourage students to own, rather than to deny and submerge, the various discourses they find. Since these are conflicting discourses-incommensurate, at times-solutions will not be simple and synthesis may not be possible. But some selection and negotiation will be. Berlin's cultural studies emphasizes assignments that direct students' attention to ways they already resist dominant culture as one way to convey that they are not helpless pawns of discourses (Rhetorics 116). To Berlin's analysis of resistance, postcolonial feminists can lead us to add others. After having students look at their reports of various experiences of dominant, we might have them explore whether they are experiencing "the" dominant culture or a subordinate culture as dominant and what differences each domination and/or resistance enables and disables. This analysis can provide profitable negotiation as students consider various gains and losses. Sometimes covert prestige will be seen as a gain, sometimes not. Spivak, for example, resisted the potential covert prestige of the Third World margin for the more equalized teacher role. We can also add analysis of students' power and powerlessness by adding heuristics to help them explore ways they dominate. It will be instructive to explore our dissonant attitudes to power we wield and to power that is wielded

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over us. Students can look at responsible uses of power, rationalized power, harsh power over, shared power with-always ready to shift categories. They can observe how their language changes, whether or not their behavior changes. It may make them more aware of the two-way influence of formation between culture and subject. We would do well to remember with Trinh, "the fundamentally different meanings that may be given to the same word, the same sentence, when it is read by a member of the dominant group and by a member of a dominated group of a culture" ("Undone" 8). The same act could be described as resistance to "the" dominant or as assimilation to a subculture. It seems to matter. It also matters whether the one reflecting is being assimilated or seeking to assimilate/influence others. Because students do both, they have much to consider. If Latina! 0 students are feeling forced to be authentic or if they are pushing others to be authentic, Lugones's "simply latin" could turn into "stereotypically latin," even if they are among Latinos. Although this paper has focused on self analysis, that analysis is only one part of the larger cultural studies project. The students' analyses of the forces that construct them are also analyses of the cultures they inhabit. The self analysis of this form of cultural studies is a means toward "a literacy ... commit] ed] to active 101). It participation in decision making in the public sphere" (Berlin Rhetorics is a means to "bring[ing] about more personally humane and socially equitable economic and political arrangements" (Berlin "Composition and" 50).As Berlin reminds us, we work from" a conception of the good democratic society and the good life for all its members," yet we maintain an awareness of our vision's incompleteness, an awareness that requires the vision to "remain open to change 81).Th us we assign analyses of self in culture with the goal and revision" (Rhetorics of moving on to a revision of that culture and our visions. To our challenge to student writers, Jarratt adds this challenge to us as readers of student writing, that we "[i]magine students capable of inscribing multiple selves" (67). In Outsideinthe TeachingMachine, when Spivakspeaks direetlyto cultural studies, it is transnational and environmental. Although she indicates-and I agree-that undergraduates may not be ready to write in such world terms, students learning to recognize the constituting forces of their culture will be more able to take that step later. As instructors, we can giveworld illustrations, even though we don't demand them in the students' analyses.Moving slowly, we could adapt Stephen Krashen's remembering to extend the input only language acquisition model (Brown 187-89), to + 1 beyond the students' level, extending far enough to stretch them, but not so far asto discourage them with too great atask. Berlin emphasizes preparing students "for critical citizenship in ademocracy" (Poststruetural" 31),and Spivak emphasizes the relationship of that citizenship and democracy to the rest of the world. Throughout the semester, we can push awareness beyond the local in as many increasing circles as our students show themselves able to consider.

PurdueUniversity WestLafayette, Indiana

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Notes
1 Of course, as instructors, we cannot allow discussions to side track into questions of who is most oppressed. Also we have to help maintain perspective so that majority culture students avoid mere whining. I want to thank Susan Jarratt for recommending Marilyn Frye's chapter, "Oppression," as a practical strategy.

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