CCR601 – FP – 3rd Gen – Salazar
Salazar, C. A Third World Women’s Text: Between the Politics of Criticism and Cultural Politics. In S.B. Gluck and D. Patai, editors, Women’s Word: The Feminist Practice of Oral History. Routledge, NY and London, 1991
- The author contends that women’s autobiography has become a central part of the “intellectual, political, and even armed resistance” waged by oppressed people against dominant or hegemonic groups (93).
- The author hopes to demonstrate how, through close readings of Latin American women’s histories, the different ways that oral history addresses and transgresses socially coded binaries oppositions such as “text/context, personal/political, public/private, knower/known, orality/literacy, and high/low culture” (ibid.).
- The author also hopes to attent to “some of the complexities of production and translation of ‘cultural otherness’ by discussing important criticisms of ethnographic writing practices” and also to reflect on the politics of women’s oral histories.
- Ethnographic accounts are problematic because “once discourse becomes text, it’s openness as dialogue, together with its evocative and performative elements, are lost: the punctuation and silences of speech are gone; the events in the life of the narrator often follow a chronological pattern, partly induced by the questions the ethnographer poses; it is edited, translated, and, finally, given a title” (98).
- A serious problem in gathering oral histories is the power difference between the ethnographer and the Other that structures the interview context in the form of an interplay between demand and desire.
- This article discusses many issues of the “stupid native” wherein colonial hegemony is allowed to move through unimpeded later to be dismantled through guile and tactics. Strategic silences confront the violence of the colonizer.
