Maria Cotera’s article entitled “Writing in the Margins of
the Twentieth Century” makes an intervention in the methodology on
conceptualizing coalitional modes of resistance by raising the following
questions:
Is it possible to avoid the colonizing gesture in
comparative analysis?
How do we elaborate a mode of comparative analysis across
race, nation, and historical context that does not assimilate the experiences
of “others” to our own?
Cotera’s strategy of highlighting the common context of
struggle in the different contexts of three female authors is quite effective.
However, the coalitional model of resistance might be too much in the imaginary
realm. As an historian in training, my immediate reaction would be to discover and
contextualize struggles in which the actors actually interacted and collaborated.
Such task might be more productive. Also, Cotera’s model focuses too much on
the resistance side and silences the complicity element and forecloses
possibility of collaboration across difference; I think the chapter "Feminism on the Border" achieved that task.
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