Power Structures Subjugate People of Difference to Maintain Authority

CONQUERING THE SLASHES [/] FOR DIFFERENCE

When I speak of conquering the slashes for difference I refer to attempts at removing the divide that has historically barred people of color, radical academics and people of differences from doing what most have come to call cultural work. These slash obstruct, separate, divide, subjugate and question the authenticity of nonacademic work and operate as a knowledge-power machinery to maintain the status quo. The existing discourse about language, writing, power structures, history and representation intensified within the postmodern era, while attempts were being made to reduce the tension between what is considered as objective truth as against cultural literary work.

Postmodernism helped to blur the lines between binary positions male/female, fact/fiction, objective/subjective, science/art and called into the question the power relations and social structures that stood as slashes policing the divide. Postmodernism encourages multiplicity, diversity and if I dare say difference. Most importantly though, or at least to this paper, postmodernism as Gordon puts it, has caused “a fracture in the epistemological regime of modernity which has lead to the understanding that the practices of writing, analysis, and investigation, both social and cultural is less of a scientifically positive project and more of a cultural practice of storytelling told by situated investigators” (Gordon 2008: 10). This essay will highlight a few of the authors who have attempted to challenge some of these dualisms and the traditions of social science epistemologies in their textual work. I will then discuss the power structures that work to create and maintain this politics of knowledge within the ‘nervous sy...

... middle of paper ...

...owledge producers.

Bibliography

Cho, G (2008). “Fleshing Out the Ghost”, in Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gordon, A (1997). Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997

Hooks, B (1990). “Culture to Culture: ethnographic and cultural studies as critical intervention” in Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics, 123-133

Lorde, A (1980). “Poetry is Not a Luxury” in Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine, eds., The future of Difference, pp. 125-127

Minh-ha, T (1980). Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press

West, C (1993). “The New Cultural Politics of Difference” in Simon During, ed., The Cultural Studies Reader, pp. 203-217.