"The sentence of history": The politics of death and life-writing
Date
2002
Authors
Raymundo, Jose Emmanuel
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Abstract
As illustrated in the essay "The Snake Twins of the Philippines," traditional Western narratives- in political theory, the social sciences and literature- either exclude or exoticize the lives of non-Western, racialized people. Framing the works or Jamaica Kincaid in conjunction with postcolonial and critical race theory, this thesis argues that the genre of life-writing is important for racialized people to challenge racist exclusion and exoticization. Through life-writing, we who have been left out of (or been objectified by) History, can then become fully speaking, thinking and writing subjects who can relay for ourselves our unarticulated (and therefore "unreal") experiences and realities. In so doing, we then confront and challenge racist notions of the static and unchanging "Other" by articulating a dynamic diasporic identity that, in the words of Paul Gilroy, "is always unfinished, always being remade."