http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/44922638

Shifting grounds : feminist dialogism, narrative strategies, and constructions of self in works by four U.S. women writers

Working at the conjunction of feminist and Bakhtinian theory and focusing particularly on Paula Gunn Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (1980), I examine the ways in which four U.S. women writers, linked by a legacy of racism and colonialism yet grounded in specific identities and heritages, expose conflictual American histories, define and disrupt boundaries in constructions of identity and genre, transform cultural myths to propose an American aesthetics of hybridity, challenge postmodern despiritualization, and propose ways of shifting the grounds of our thinking without reinscribing systems of dominance. In their recuperation of sacred tales of historically specific struggle and female power and in their politicized narrative forms, I argue, Allen, Anzaldua, Robinson, and Lorde make visible hidden structures of power, challenge dominant western notions of opposition, "reality," agency, "feminism," resistance, and art, destabilize traditionally privileged American narratives that are Eurocentric, male-centered, "universal," linear, monolingual, and generically "pure," locate a space for American women's writing and theorizing that includes previously subjugated knowledge, multi-voicedness, and multiple, mobile subjectivities, reveal "productive violences" that shake complacent "readers" out of unquestioning belief in supposed certainties, and link storytelling and collective memory to political consciousness and constructions of self.

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