JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 18, Number 1, 1998 Page: 63
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Rhetoric and Representation 63
of subjects. Where most academic readers are accustomed to the Aristotelian
format--state your case and prove it-Spivak seems to work laterally, moving from
case to case, point to point, rarely offering examples.12 Despite all her efforts, we see
an operation of substitution emerging when Toril Moi suggests that Spivak's texts
might be representative of "an enactment of the violent clash of discourses
experienced by the subject in exile" (20). Though her writing at first seems radically
different fromtheicriturefdminineofFrench feminists, I findcommon elements: along
with deep engagements with the canonical male texts of Western culture, there is "a
courageous effort to explode linear sequentiality, a deliberate desire to enact the
decentering of the subject and its discourses" (Moi 21). Simultaneous with the
pretense of what Catherine Clement calls "democratic transmission" (Cixous and
Clement)-i.e. the implicit agreement with areader that she seeks to communicate-
we find at times "atext where the connections are so elusive as to become private"
(Moi 20). I've seen some of the same patterns in the writing of female students: a
struggle under the burden of a masculine literary heritage, a movement from public
communication into the realm of private codes, a break-down in the conventional
structures of argument. I'm suggesting not that these textual features be celebrated
as expressions of a gendered essence, nor praised as the curious idiosyncrasies of a
brilliant thinker, but rather be read as symptoms-textual traces of a strained
encounterwith multiple forms of dominance. Within, then, Spivak's meticulous and
principled renunciation of a representation of substitution, her highly artful theory
andpractice of metonymic association with others,I find an informing if painful case
of writing difference.
Trinh T. Minh-ha claims writing without equivocation as the defining act for
"third worldwomen," aphrase she chooses despite its anachronistic assumption of
atri-partite division of worldpowers andthe riskof homogenization. From the jacket
ofherfirst book Woman, Native Other WritingPostcolonialityandFeminism, welearnthat
she is awriter, filmmaker, composer, and academic. But, despite the fact that her text
is full of first person pronouns both singular and plural, her one moment of specific
self-definition is delayeduntil late in the book and displaced into third person: "From
jagged transitions between the headless and bottomless storytelling, what is exposed
in this text is the inscription and de-scription of anon-unitary female subject of color
through her engagement, therefore also disengagement, with master discourses" (43).
The self she creates in her text is figured by the broken mirror. It destroys a pure
relation of"Ito I" (23), but does not cease reflecting: "here reality is not reconstituted,
it is put into pieces so as to allow another world to rebuild (keep on unbuilding and
rebuilding) itself with its debris" (23). The subject is dispersed throughout her text,
yet Trinh speaks at times with complete presence, easily adoptingthe role of "writing
woman" (as opposed to "written woman") and using conventions of the "priest-god
scheme" (herversion of the critique of the author). Her discussion of commitment,
responsibility, and guilt capture Trinh as a most consolidated subject: "In a sense,
committedwriters arethe ones who write both to awaken to the consciousness oftheir
guilt and to give their readers a guilty conscience. Bound to one another by an
awareness of their guilt, writer and reader may thus assess their positions, engaging
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 18, Number 1, 1998, periodical, 1998; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28621/m1/67/: accessed April 24, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .