Native Speakers - Ezra

In her introductory essay, "Writing in the Margins of the Twentieth Century", Maria Cotera stages a comparison and conversation between Ella Deloria, Jovita Gonzalez and Zora Neale Hurston in efforts to uncover a "multicultural feminist imaginary" (2). Cotera emphasizes how these women of color negotiated the multiple intersections of race, gender and class in their writing, ultimately resulting in the transgression of established disciplinary constraints. She argues that the movement away from an ethnographic mode of cultural description and towards a poetics of storytelling pried open a decolonial horizon capable of incorporating these women of color's various experiences. However, she also notes that such an unorthodox project limited their works' commercial and professional successes.

Central to Cotera's comparative approach is an undergirding, "common context of struggle", for women of color, a term she borrows from Chandra Mohanty, formed in contradistinction to claims of unitary experiences or relations. She cautions against the reductive and colonizing tendencies of the latter's convergent thinking which incessantly looks for sameness and singularity. Instead, Cotera introduces the method of "differential consciousness" (17), connecting strategies of resistance against hegemonic regimes on the basis of their oppositional affinity. This optic is relevant to my current research tracing ideas of 'amor libre' across a variety of Latin American texts. An analysis of these resistant ideologies can serve as a corrective to accounts that posit the politics of sexuality as invariably bound to a teleology epitomized by representation or state recognition. Instead of projecting a homogenous, all-encompassing framework this research can attempt to disrupt the continuity of, and serve as a corrective to, hegemonic narratives about sexual politics in the region that uncritically assume identity politics as a trans-historical point of departure. In doing so it can abandon the search for 'sameness'  or  a 'proto-homosexuality' and instead embark on the task of asking how a variety of contradictory discourses shaped early 20th century anarchist counter-culture, constructing "a unique epistemic vantage point on the mechanics of social life" (10).

Discussion Questions:

1) Following Ella Deloria's questioning of Ruth Benedict, how can researchers remain accountable to a variety of audiences without becoming incoherent?

2) Relatedly, how can writing that transcends the boundaries of disciplines overcome processes of marginalization and disappearance?