September 13, 2005
Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.
In this important contribution to contemporary theory, Sandoval offers a “method of oppositional consciousness” that stands in contrast to the “neocolonizing mode of globalization” infecting the postmodern world (2). Arguing with Jameson’s bleak dismissal of any resistance to neocolonization, Sandoval points to U.S. third world feminism as an example of “oppositional political activity and consciousness in the postmodern world” (43). Rather than focusing on pedagogy in particular, Methodology of the Oppressed suggests a theoretical frame for wide-scale social change.
The oppositional activity that can be mapped through U.S. third world feminism suggests a “differential mode of resistance” to neocolonialism—an “alternative and dissident globalization” (3). Developed in opposition to main-stream second wave (white) feminism and richly suggestive as a location “wherein the aims of feminism, race, ethnicity, sex, and marginality studies, and historical, aesthetic, and global studies can crosscut and join together in new relations,” U.S. third world feminism exemplifies Sandoval’s thesis that “coalitions of resistance” are possible across seemingly insurmountable theoretical divides (64).
Sandoval locates this differential mode of resistance in the works of many late twentieth century theorists, leading her to argue for a complication of “the stubborn apartheid of theoretical domains” (11). She reads diverse poststructuralist theorists together in a de-colonial light, writing that the “different methods, when utilized together, constitute a singular apparatus that is necessary for forging twenty-first-century modes of decolonizing globalization” (2). This singular apparatus, Sandoval writes, is love as it is realized as an affirmative, strategic practice.
With Foucault, Sandoval sees “desire-in-resistance” as a requirement for an oppositional politics (165). Refusing to “‘retreat into the forms of representation,’” Foucault writes that “‘It is the connection of desire to reality […] that possesses revolutionary force’” (166). Connecting Foucault’s desire to Barthes’ “third meaning” of love in the final part of her book, Sandoval concludes by situating herself alongside writers who “understand ‘love’ as a hermeneutic, as a set of practices and procedures that can transit all citizen-subjects, regardless of social class, toward a differential mode of consciousness and its accompanying technologies of method and social movement” (140). “Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant,” Sandoval quotes Foucault (166). Political contestation itself can—and, indeed, must—be a pleasure that is located in desire and carried out in love.