| Chapter 1: | The Cultural Production of Controversial Women Writers |
They are hailed by feminists, some of whom are racially prejudiced, for their triumphant “truthful” representation of racial and national spaces, while on the other, they are accused of conforming to racist ideologies and distorting national or racial realities to please the White audience.
While David Li and other critics may consider this “basic context” a natural result of the racist history, I argue that this “basic context” in itself is a racist and sexist construct that should be challenged. “Representational inevitability” is an Orientalist discursive construct that results from, supports, and reproduces the power hierarchies of the West over the Third World, and of masculinity over femininity. Literary criticism confined to the inevitability of representation is nationalistic and male-centered.23 It serves as a discursive tool of control and discipline and has become a “reality show” in a nationalist masculinity competition, embodied by the regulation of the female body in the debate on women authors of color.
The problem of “representational inevitability” lies in a theoretical confusion of literariness with ethnicity, adopted by both Western and Third World scholars concerning Third World literature. It equates literary representation by Third World authors with actualities of the Third World. Rey Chow names this problem “the coersiveness of the typical mimeticism between representation and ethnicity” and says
Literary texts by authors of color thus are not explored as works of art but are interpreted as transparent reports on the social realities of a people other than the West.