| Chapter : | Introduction |
What is at issue here is no longer some insignificant textual ambiguities, but intense political struggles for the ultimate power to define cultural realities and traditions, a highly selective process involving inclusion or exclusion of certain cultural texts, reproduction or elimination of certain discourses, as well as maintenance or transformation of certain power structures.
“Introduction” identified as the cause of the controversy a discourse of “representational inevitability,”6 a pervasive but limited approach to Third World authors that holds that any Third World text inevitably represents the totality of Third World national or racial realities and Third World authors are spokespersons for their national or racial communities. It is within this masculinist and nationalistic discourse of literary and cultural criticism that women authors become controversial and feminism is appropriated.
However, I do not hold the essentialist notion that feminism and nationalism are inherently contradictory. Rather, the feminist–nationalist tension is located within specific historical contexts, in which both feminism and nationalism are constructed and both are constructed in such ways as to contradict each other. In other words, the tension is a nonstop negotiation between feminism and nationalism, between feminist desires and national imaginations.
I also point out the significant role of the flourishing global popular culture in the cultural production of the controversial women authors. While acknowledging the positive impact of popular culture that often challenges the rigidity of authoritarian nationalist discourses, particularly on the issue of sexuality, I emphasize that this revolution (if it can be called revolution) of the popular is rather limited, for it is voyeuristic and often Eurocentric, motivated not by political commitment to social change but by the desire to profit.
To unproduce the controversy of women authors of color, I suggest a new feminist literary / cultural criticism that shifts from the rigidity of representational inevitability to the more flexible concept of cultural production.