Methodology of the Oppressed by Chela Sandoval

Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda Tuhiwai Smith

Methodology of the Oppressed by Chela Sandoval; Angela Davis; Decolonizing Methodologies:
Research and Indigenous Peoples by Linda TuhiwaiSmith
Review by: LuzCalvo
Signs, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Autumn 2003), pp. 254-257
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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254 Book Reviews
In reading across disciplines feminists are reminded of the importance
of the interdisciplinary nature of feminism and of the related need to
situate individual work in the broader feminist context. When feminist
scholarship is integrated as in Ray, Porter and Judd, and HDR 2000, we
can appreciate narrowness of scope as a simplifying but not alienating
assumption necessary for scholarship. We can appreciate revealed aws in
empirical methods as sources of inspiration for improving future methods.
Integration forces self-conscious reection on the critical perspective of
the author, the scope of the project, its assumptions, empirical methods,
and analysis. Thus reading across disciplines and integration strengthens
individual and collective feminist projects.
Methodology of the Oppressed. By Chela Sandoval. Foreword by Angela
Davis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. By Linda
Tuhiwai Smith. London: Zed Books, 1999.
Luz Calvo, Ohio State University
I
t is noteworthy that Chela Sandoval and Linda Tuhiwai Smith, two
well-known scholar activists, would focus on methodology in their
recent book projects. Taken together, these books offer an extended
reection on Audre Lordes provocation, The masters tools will never
dismantle the masters house. Initial assumptions about what exactly
constitute the masters tools have given way to more complex decon-
structions, which nd that the masters tools were often fashioned by
subalternswhose social location and political desires left imprints on the
tools themselves. Such deconstructions, however, do not end the con-
versation. Rather, they highlight the need to construct critical method-
ologies drawn from diverse traditions and to trace the appearance of op-
pressed and indigenous desires within Western critical theory.
The primary concern of Decolonizing Methodologies is research in in-
digenous communities, which is inextricably linked to European impe-
rialism and colonialism (1). The guiding question of Tuhiwai Smiths
work is how indigenous researchers might unhingeor disarticulatethe
work of research from its enmeshment in imperialist regimes of power/
knowledge: in other words, how to decolonize research itself. The author
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S I G N S Autumn 2003 255
begins with the proposition that research can no longer be conducted
with indigenous communities as if their views did not count or their lives
did not matter, a position to which she would hold both indigenous and
nonindigenous researchers (9). The primary task of this book is to guide
indigenous scholars and activists as they attempt to conduct such research
in accord with the desires of the communities they work with (and often
come from), research the author in good humor describes as not quite
as simple as it looks, nor quite as complex as it feels (5).
The rst part of Decolonizing Methodologies explores research as a
signicant site of struggle between the interests and ways of knowing of
the West and the interests and ways of knowing of the Other (2). One
specic site of this epistemological struggle is history itself. Echoing Gay-
atri Spivaks question, Can the subaltern speak? Tuhiwai Smith asks,
Is history important for indigenous peoples? (29). She develops an
argument against history by drawing on poststructuralist critiques that
characterize history as a specically Western Enlightenment project. She
is referring to the discipline of history, not the stories that people tell
about their past, which she notes are reclassied as oral traditions rather
than histories (33; emphasis in original). The innovation of Tuhiwai
Smiths argument is her insistence that for indigenous people, the critique
of history is not unfamiliar, although it has now been claimed by post-
modern theories (33). She explains, The idea of contested stories and
multiple discourses about the past, by different communities, is closely
linked to the politics of everyday contemporary indigenous life. . . . These
contested accounts are stored within genealogies, within the landscape,
within weavings and carvings (33). Drawing attention to critical theories
connecting the project of history with imperialist ideologies, Tuhiwai
Smith develops a list of ideas about history that she subjects to systematic
critique from both indigenous and poststructuralist points of view. Her
list begins with the idea that history is a totalizing discourse and includes
the idea that history is one large chronology (30). Her schematic outline
of poststructuralist critiques of historyand their overlap with indigenous
epistemologiesis accessible and lucid. Subsequent sections of the book
provide grounded discussions of how to develop and carry out research
projects in accord with the principles of decolonization and self-deter-
mination.
Sandovals projectwhile motivated by the same decolonizing im-
pulseis not concerned with eld research as such. Instead, Sandoval
rethinks the very terms of political engagement and possibility. The aim
of Methodology of the Oppressed is to provide a new, revitalized vocabulary
(6), to summon a new kind of repoliticized citizen-warrior (181). The
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256 Book Reviews
author develops her theoretical framework by putting U.S. third-world
feminist theory in conversation with theorists of decolonization, such as
Frantz Fanon and Roland Barthes, and theorists of postmodernism and
poststructuralism, such as Fredric Jameson, Donna Haraway, Michel Fou-
cault, and Jacques Derrida. The conversation staged by Methodology of the
Oppressed enacts a kind of antidote to the theoretical apartheid that
Sandoval nds both pervasive and debilitating.
Methodology of the Oppressed poses important challenges to feminism
and womens studies. Sandoval contends that U.S. third-world feminist
theory continues to be misread as pertaining to a particular demographic
group (women of color) and not as a theoretical and methodological
approach in its own right (171). In a footnote, Sandoval astutely ob-
serves, The mystery of the academic erasure of U.S. third world feminism
is an ongoing disappearing trick (186, n. 9). Sandovals project contra-
venes this erasure, placing U.S. third-world feminism on an equal footing
with poststructuralism, tracing the similarity between these two intellec-
tual and political trajectories.
In a convincing and long overdue argument, Sandoval excavates an
afnity between terminologies that are usually seen as deriving fromwidely
divergent theoretical traditions. She creates a list of termshybridity, no-
mad thought, marginalization, la conciencia de la mestiza, trickster con-
sciousness, masquerade, eccentric subjectivity, situated knowledges, and dif-
ferance (her list is even longer)and argues that the similar conceptual
undergirding that unies these terminologies has gone unrecognized
(69), evidence of theoretical apartheid but also of an emerging set of
political possibilities. She writes, What this concurrent, symptomatic, and
insistent emergence is enacting out of each theoretical domain is the
academic expression of a stubborn methodology . . . one that the cultural
logic of late capital has made necessary . . . what I call, for political
reasons, the methodology of the oppressed (72). Contra Jameson, San-
doval nds possibilities in postmodern resistance and dissident globali-
zation (35).
Although quite different in content and tone, these two books converge
in their explicit commitment to a process of decolonization. Both authors
usefully situate their interventions in relation to globalization and its cur-
rent economic, social, and political consequences for indigenous (Tuhiwai
Smith) and oppressed (Sandoval) peoples. Tuhiwai Smith and Sandoval
bring a history of activism to their scholarship, which infuses their work
with energy and a sense of possibility while imparting wisdom that comes
with practical experience. A professor of Maori education, Tuhiwai Smith
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S I G N S Autumn 2003 257
is renowned for her work in developing Te Kohanga Reo, the Maori lan-
guage nests, and was part of a group that initiated an alternative Maori
elementary school movement in New Zealand. Sandoval is a Chicano/a
studies professor, well known for her report on the 1981 National As-
sociation of Womens Studies Conference, where she developed a theory
of U.S. third-world feminism as differential consciousness. Informed
by the politics and location of each author, these two books offer com-
pelling discussions of methodology appropriate for graduate seminars and
reading groups. Both books deserve a wide audience and are likely to
positively inuence the formulation and direction of future scholarship.

Gods Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces in and around the Bible. By
Stephen D. Moore. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001.
Closet Devotions. By Richard Rambuss. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke
University Press, 1998.
The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism. By Mark D.
Jordan. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Amy Hollywood, Dartmouth College
I
n an essay arguing against the application of psychoanalytic theory to
premodern texts, Lee Patterson argues that Chaucers Pardoners
Tale is not about sex but about religion.
1
In describing the Pardoner
as a gelding and a mare, Patterson insists, Chaucers narrator is not in-
terested in marking the Pardoner as feminized, castrated, and sodomitic.
Arguing that neither castration nor sodomy seems to have mattered much
as historical practices in fourteenth-century England, Patterson asks
what they might have meant symbolically. . . . And the direction in
which medieval thought points is not toward psychology or linguistic
absence but toward symbolic sterility. The medieval justication for pro-
scribing sodomy is that it is nonproductive. The central fact about the
Pardoner, for Chaucer, is neither that he is physically maimed nor that
1
Lee Patterson, Chaucers Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary
Studies, Speculum 76 (2001): 674.
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