| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Kamal Visweswaran’s (1994) exploration in Fictions of Feminist Ethnography hinged on similar ideologies of identity. She argued that the multiple ways in which we engage ourselves reflect how we think about others and their situations and how we become researchers ourselves. Therefore, the spaces that we occupy cannot be defined simply in the past. In fact, the spaces are fluid and because we constantly occupy multiple spaces, the notion of “hyphennation” emerges (pp. 116–123).
The series of essays in Viswes-waran’s Fictions of Feminist Ethnography reflected the contributions in Women Writing Culture (Behar & Gordon, 1996) in that they were metaphors on the multiple ways in which people render themselves through the fluidity with which we move from space to space, locale to locale, identity to identity, refuting master narratives and subjecthood of ethnography and exploring other genres like fiction, drama, biography, memoir, poetry, among others, as avenues of expression. However, Visweswaran also wrote,
Therefore, the act of defining oneself as Asian American was in constant conflict with how others define that person as Asian American.
The hyphenated identities were particularly salient to Visweswaran (1994) in terms of their political implications. She wrote,
Visweswaran pitted hyphenated ethnic identities against the hyphenated racial identity of “Asian-American” or similar racial coalitions as a way of establishing solidarity among people of color. She showed the ways in which she herself forms allegiances and how “ ‘hybrid’ identity formations may be linked to particular theoretical dilemmas or representational strategies engaged by post-colonial and second-generation subjects alike” (Visweswaran, 1994, p. 139).