Date: Thu, 19 Sep 1996 23:35:47 -0300
Subject: positionality


Dear Julian, may I call you Julian? may I call you dear?

I should come clean. Of course, I enjoyed your piece. Loved it, in fact. The 
word "rant" should have alerted you. He who rants has feelings. (I'd like to 
have such feelings.) And ranters are always more entertaining than canters.

But I think you should be a little more restrained about academic jargon and 
pretentiousness. Soft targets. Choosing soft ones leaves you open to other 
people's arrows. Same goes for your bashing/trashing of Rushdie, Aijaz, Spivak, 
Bhabha, all those other luminaries of the twilight world you seem to want to 
inhabit.

Don't betray your own desire to belong (with the *names*, the starred ones, 
the authorities that freight our footnotes), so, in the end, more disabling 
than the inferiority complex you detect in me.  

Sadly, though, I belong with the whitemale elite and haven't even the decency 
to be dead. 

pms


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