Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in ... - Reticular

Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist
Discourse
Caren Kaplan
Cultural Critique, No. 6, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. (Spring, 1987), pp.
187-198.
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Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home
and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse
omen have a history of reading and writing in the interstices
Wof masculine culture, moving between use of the dominant
language or form of expression and specific versions of experience
based on their marginality. Similarly, men and women who move
between the cultures, languages, and the various configurations of
power and meaning in complex colonial situations possess what
Chela Sandoval calls "oppositional consciousness," the ability to
read and write culture on multiple levels.' Such a view of cultural
marginality necessitates the recognition of specific skills. As Bell
Hooks writes:
Living as we did - on the edge - we developed a particular way
of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from
the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as
the margin. We understood both . . .
This location is fraught with tensions; it has the potential to lock the
subject away in isolation and despair as well as the potential for criti-
cal innovation and particular strengths.
According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the political economy of mar-
gin and center relies on the relationship between the two terms.3 Ulf
1. Chela Sandoval, (n.d.), "Women Respond to Racism: A Report on the Na-
tional Women's Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut," Occasional
Papers Series: The Struggle Within (Oakland, Ca.: Center for Third World Organizing).
2. Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press,
1984).
3. Immanuel Wderstein, The Modem World System (New York: Academic Press,
1974).
187

188 Caren Kaplan
Hannerz has expanded this model to describe a "world system of cul-
tures" where marginal societies (here one can insert the terms "third
world" or "underdeveloped") are not the passive recipients of ready-
made images and consumer goods. Rather, these are complex, so-
phisticated cultures which filter and mediate first world imports, re-
creating local meanings, producing hybrid cultural artifacts and sub-
ject~.~
A world which brings people, information, objects, and images
across enormous distances at rapid speeds destabilizes the conven-
tions of identity traditionally found in the culture of the first world
during the first half of this century. "Deterritorialization" is one
term for the displacement of identities, persons, and meanings that
is endemic to the postmodern world system. Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari use the term "detenitorialization" to locate this mo-
ment of alienation and exile in language and literature. In one sense
it describes the effects of radical distanciation between signifier and
signified. Meaning and utterances become estranged. This defarnil-
iarization enables imagination, even as it produces alienation, "to
express another potential community, to force the means for anoth-
er consciousness and another sensibility."5 The paradoxical natcre
of this utopian moment in displacement can be realized in language
or in the literature that Deleuze and Guattari designate as "minor."
This is not a literature of "masters" or "masterpieces." Deleuze and
Guattari assert: "We might as well say that minor no longer desig-
nates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every
literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) liter-
ature."6 This writing dismantles notions of value, genre, canon, etc.
It travels, moves between centers and margins.' Within the con-
structs of Deleuze and Guattari's theory, this process can be seen as
4. Ulf Hannerz, "The World System of Culture: The International Flow of
Meaning and Its Local Management," mss., 1985. For a related discussion see James
Clifford, "Histories of the Tribal and the Modern," Art in America (April 1985): 164-
77, 215.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "What is a Minor Literature?" in Kafka: To-
wards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,
1986), 17.
6. Ibid., 18.
7. For an elaboration of the notion of the circulation of ideas and theories see
Edward Said, "Traveling Theory" in The World, the Text, the Critic (Cambridge: Har-
vard Univ. Press, 1983), 226-47.

oth deterritorialization and reterritorialization - not imperialism
but nomadism.8
The value of this conception lies in the paradoxical movement be-
tween minor and major - a refusal to admit either position as final
or static. The issue is positionality. In modern autobiographical dis-
courses, for example, the self that is constructed is often construed to
be evolving in a linear fashion from a stable place of origin towards a
substantial present. In postmodern autobiographical writing such a
singular, linear construction of the self is often untenable or, at the
very least, in tension with competing issues.
Much of contemporary feminist theory proposes a strategy of
reading and an analysis of positionality similar to Deleuze and
Guattari's conception of "becoming minor." In working with issues
of race, class, and sexualities, as well as gender, feminist discourses
have come to stress difference and oscillation of margin and center
in the construction of personal and political identities. In fact, the
difficulty of defining and totalizing the full range of feminist con-
cerns marks the enriched diversity of this field at this particular his-
torical juncture.
For the first world feminist critic, therefore, the challenge at this
particular time is to develop a discourse that responds to the power
relations of the world system, that is, to examine her location in the
dynamic of centers and margins. Any other strategy merely consoli-
dates the illusion of marginality while glossing over or refusing to ac-
knowledge centralities. Thus, the first world feminist critic may be
marginal vis d vis the literary establishment or the academy that em-
ploys her, yet she may also be more closely linked to these institu-
tions than a non-western or third world feminist critic. Interpreta-
tions based on dualities and dialectical oppositions may not provide
adequate models for explaining our differences and our respective
positions in full complexity.
How do we begin to make methods of describing, explaining, and
understanding this world of differences in order to make the connec-
8. In his essay on Deleuze and Guattari's Mille Plateaux Stephen Muecke de-
scribeslcites their formulation of ex-centric nomad societies as models of "becom-
ing and heterogeneity" as opposed to "the stable, the eternal, the identical and the
constant." "It is a paradoxical 'model' of becoming." Cf. Stephen Muecke, "The
Discourse of Nomadology: Phylums in Flux," Att and Text 14 (1984): 27.

190 Caren Kaplan
tions necessary to change prevailing power relations? Deleuze and
Guattari begin their investigation by focusing on the potential in lan-
guage itself - "How many people live today in a language that is not
their own?" they ask.9 Displaced, marginal people - immigrants,
subjects of external and internal colonialism, s'ubjects of racial, gen-
dered, or sexual oppression - recognize this issue in the full spec-
trum of &rmative and negative aspects. Gloria Anzaldua, an Amer-
ican writer who describes herself as a Chicana, a feminist, and a les-
bian, describes the damage of this system as well as the possibility of
developing a strategic response:
Because white eyes do not want to know us, they do not bother
to learn our language, the language which reflects us, our cul-
ture, our spirit. The schools we attended or didn't attend did not
give us the skills for writing nor the confidence that we were cor-
rect in using our class and ethnic languages. I, for one, became
adept at, and majored in English to spite, to show up, the arro-
gant racist teachers who thought all Chicano children were dumb
and dirty. . . .And though I now write my poems in Spanish as well
as English I feel the rip-off of my native tongue . . . 10
Anzaldua's project has several dimensions: the recognition of a
minor literature written from a viewpoint based on the experience of
marginality, the full identification with that minor position, and the
acknowledgement that her capacity to use the dominant or major
language has strategic value. Ripped-off, defensive of her right to her
native tongue, certainly embittered, Anzaldua writes through Sando-
val's oppositional consciousness. Here she uses English for a purpose
- stretching the language somewhat out of its major shape. In this in-
stance, a major language has a minor use; it deconstructs its own
preconditions in its very employment. Deleuze and Guattari explore
this process when they write:
This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their chil-
dren, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor litera-
9. Deleuze and Guattari, 19.
10. Gloria Anzaldua, "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women
Writers," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherrie
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. (Watertown, Ma.: Persephone Press, 1981), 165-
66.

ture, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor litera-
ture away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the lan-
guage and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? How to
become a nomad and an immigrant and a gypsy in relation to
one's own language?ll
When first world critics advocate a process of "becoming minor"
it is necessary to ask: where are we located in this movement of lan-
guage and literature? What are we losing with such a move? What do
we stand to gain? Do we have freedom of movement and where does
this freedom come from? For example, I would have to pay attention
to whether or not it is possible for me to choose deterritorialization or
whether deterritorialization has chosen me. For if I choose deterri-
torialization, I go into literaryllinguistic exile with all my cultural bag-
gage intact. If deterritorialization has chosen me - that is, if I have
been cast out of home or language without forethought or permis-
sion, then my point of view will be more complicated. Both positions
are constructed by the world system but they are not equal. Of course,
Deleuze and Guattari are suggesting that we are all deterritorialized
on some level in the process of language itself and that this is a point of
contact between "us all." Yet we have different privileges and different
compensations for our positions in the field of power relations. My
caution is against a form of theoretical tourism on the part of the first
world critic, where the margin becomes a linguistic or critical vaca-
tion, a new poetics of the exotic. One can also read Deleuze and
Guattari's resistance to this romantic trope in their refusal to recog-
nize a point of origin. Theirs is a poetics of travel where there is no re-
turn ticket and we all meet, therefore, en train. Reterritorialization
without imperialism? Can language provide a model of this process?
Who dares let go of their respective representations and systems of
meaning, their identity politics and theoretical homes, when it is, as
Kafka rightly noted, "a matter of life and death here?"l2
What is lost in Deleuze and Guattari's formulation is the acknow-
ledgement that oppositional consciousness (with its benefits and
costs) stems from the daily, lived experience of oppression. Lan-
guage can constantly remind us of the differences encoded in social
1 1. Deleuze and Guattari, 19.
12. Ibid., 17.

elations. It may well be the site of the problem "for us all," but I am
confused by the universalizing of the term "us." Who is the "us"
that is circulating in the essay "What is a Minor Literature?"
I have found several more cogent discussions of deterritorializa-
tion and oppositional consciousness in the recent writings of some
contemporary feminists. I will focus on two writers, in particular, to il-
lustrate this method of feminist discourse, but there are many others
who could easily be invoked for this discussion.13 One writer I would
like to discuss, Minnie Bruce Pratt, is a white American born in the
South. Her essay "Identity: Skin Blood Heart" explores the difficulty
and the costs of maintaining a notion of identity based on racist and
heterosexual privilege. In the autobiographical process of memory
and review in this essay Pratt questions the conditions of her "home"
in the past and looks for a different representation of identity and loca-
tion. In Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise Michelle Cliff, born
in Jamaica and writing in New York, constructs an autobiographical
poetics that moves relentlessly towards aminor position. What is most
interesting about both these memoirs is their inability to remain in
any one position - past, utopian, present, minor, major - they ex-
plore the social relations that create all of these locations.
Location is a crucial metaphor in Pratt's considerations of identity.
The first words we read are: "I live in a part of Washington D.C. that
white suburbanites called 'the jungle' . . . "14 Where Pratt as a white,
lesbian feminist lives is always central to her description and expla-
nation of a change in consciousness and way of being. She begins at
the end of her story, in Washington D.C., her present location. But
she soon moves us to Alabama where she grew up during the era of
civil rights struggles. She simultaneously evokes the world of her
childhood while dismantling the conditions of her early life. A desire
13. See the work of:lCherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, Elly Bulkin, Barbara Smith,
Lillian Smith, Mitsuye Yamada, Chela Sandoval, Bernice Reagon, Adrienne Rich,
Gloria Hull, Jewelle L. Gomez, Becky Birtha, Cheryl Clark, June Jordan, Katie King,
Barbara Harlow, Nellie Wong, Bell Hooks, Osa Hidalgo, Lata Mani, Ruth
Frankenberg, Lisa Bloom, Debbie Gordon, Biddy Martin, Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, Alicia Partnoy, and many others.
14. Minnie Bruce Pratt, "Identity: Skin Blood Heart," in Yours in Struggle: Three
Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism, Elly Bulkin, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and
Barbara Smith, eds. (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Long Haul Press, 1984), 2.

to be and feel "at home" is examined in light of who and what made
the conditions of security and contentment possible. In particular,
Pratt focuses on the radical separation between people of different
skin colors in her community. This separation was justified to her
when she was a girl by a rigid system of racist explanation and
rationalization. Pratt relates how she felt safe in this world, accepting
its terms, never pushed to question the structure of its legitimation.
Protection and security come to be contextualized when Pratt finds
herself feeling increasingly threatened by sexism and homophobia.
Habituated to white southern gentility, Pratt has a rude awakening
when she transgresses the boundaries of her culture. She finds that she
no longer merits protection or consideration:
Raised to believe that I could be where I wanted and have what I
wanted, as a grown woman I thought I could simply claim what
I wanted . . . . I had no understanding of the limits that I lived
within, nor of how much my memory and my experience of a
safe space was to be based on places secured by omission, exclu-
sion, or violence, and on my submitting to the limits of that
place.l5
The incident which prompts this reflection involves the loss of
Pratt's children in a custody battle. Her parents withdraw their emo-
tional support from her at the same time. In this process of estrange-
ment and loss, Pratt feels expelled from the warm circle of the home
she had known. "I felt," she writes, "like my life was cracking around
me."l6 Reflecting on the costs of the security she has taken for
granted, she chooses to go another route - rather than return to the
terms she had taken for granted, Pratt chooses to learn about the
social relations that create the terms.
Pratt's autobiographical essay elaborates a dynamic feminist theory
of location and positionality. Moving away from "home" to decon-
struct the terms of social privilege and power, such a feminist practice
favors the process of the move over the ultimate goal. The uncertainty
of this situation is preferable, Pratt argues, to the sensation of being
homesick while at "home."
15. Ibid., 25-26.
16. Ibid., 39.

For the first world feminist critic the process of becoming minor
has two primary aspects. First, I must acknowledge that there are
things that I do not know. Second, I must find out how to learn
about what I have been taught to avoid, fear, or ignore. A critique of
where I come from, my home location, takes me away from the fa-
miliar. Yet, there is no pure space of total deterritorialization. I must
look carefully at what I carry with me that could help me with the
process. This is crucial if I am to avoid appropriating the minor
through romanticization, envy, or guilt. Becoming minor is not a
process of emulation. As Pratt writes: "I am compelled by my own life
to strive for a different place than the one we have lived in."l7
This is work that feminists have to do for themselves - sometimes
in concert with others, sometimes alone. What we gain from this pro-
cess is an understanding of what connects us as well as how we are
different from each other - here re-written as a refusal of the terms
of radical separation. Exploring all the differences, keeping identities
distinct, is the only way we can keep power differentials from mas-
querading as universals. We will have different histories, but we will
often have similar struggles. To recognize with whom we need to
work instead of against is a continual process.
The first stage in this process is refusing the privilege of univer-
salizing theories. Some of us may experience ourselves as minor in a
world that privileges the masculine gender. But our own centrality in
terms of race, class, ethnicity, religious identity, age, nationality, sexu-
al preference, and levels of disabilities is often ignored in our own
work. All women are not equal, and we do not all have the same expe-
riences (even of gender oppression). When we insist upon gender
alone as a universal system of explanation we sever ourselves from other
women. How can we speak to each other if we deny our particu-
larities? Recognizing the minor cannot erase the aspects of the major,
but as a mode of understanding it enables us to see the fissures in our
identities, to unravel the seams of our totalities. First world feminist
criticism is struggling to avoid repeating the same imperializing moves
that we claim to protest. We must leave home, as it were, since our
homes are often sites of racism, sexism, and other damaging social
practices. Where we come to locate ourselves in terms of our specific
histories and differences must be a place with room for what can be
17. Ibid.. 48-49.

salvaged from the past and what can be made new. What we gain is a
reterritorialization; we reinhabit a world of our making (here "our" is
expanded to a coalition of identities - neither universal nor particu-
lar). In this spirit Pratt writes: "One gain for me as I 'change: I learn a
way of looking at the world that is more accurate, complex, multi-lay-
ered, multi-dimensioned, more truthful: to see the world of over-
lapping circles . . . "18
In Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise Michelle Cliff de-
scribes the process of finding a social space to inhabit that will not
deny any of the complicated parts of her identity and history.19 Radi-
cally deterritorialized from a Carribean culture and a race by a fami-
ly conspiracy of silence and denial, she explores the parameters of
identity and the limits of privilege. Separated from her home and
family by geography, education, and experience, Cliff articulates the
boundaries between homelessness and origin, between exile and be-
longing. She must, as she puts it, "untangle the filaments of my his-
tory."20
The first move Cliff makes in her autobiographical memoir is a re-
turn to the territory of her childhood. This trip into memory uncov-
ers a primal injunction. "Isolate yourself," she was told:
If they find out about you it's all over. Forget about your great-
grandfather with the darkest skin . . . . Go to college. Go to England
to study. Llarn about the Italian Renaissance and forget
that they kept slaves. Ignore the tears of the Indians. Black
Americans don't understand us either . . . . Blend in . . . 21
In order to understand her refusal to blend in, Cliff begins to ex-
plore what is at stake in her mother's efforts to obscure her racial
identity. She has to learn the history of white, black, and mulatto
people in Jamaica, the island where she was born. It is a history of di-
visions, violence, and suppression. A creole culture with no single
origin, Jamaica exists in many levels and time periods. Cliff moves
18. Ibid., 17.
19. Michelle Cliff, Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (Watertown, Ma.:
Persephone Press, 1980).
20. Ibid., 7.
21. Ibid.

through several of these identities. She rewrites her history to "claim"
an identity through her powers of story-telling and imagination.
Turning her memories of childhood over and over, Cliff begins
with the terrain of the island. Looking for a firm foundation for her
identity she finds instead that the geography of that time is "obso-
lete." There is no possibility of return to that innocent land. Instead,
she moves through each place she has lived, asking, "What is here
for me: where do these things lead?"22 At first Cliff discovers the pain
that her family had struggled to spare her. Behind each nostalgic
memory lies a history of oppression:
Behind the warmth and light are dark and damp/ . . . behind the
rain and river water, periods of drought1 underneath the earth are
the dead/ . . . underneath the distance is the separation1 . . . behind
the fertility are the verdicts of insanity1 . . . underlying my
grandmother's authority with land and scripture is obedience to a
drunken husband . . . 23
Her new view of her past and her life has to contain all of these im-
ages and kinds of knowledge. They become materials for Cliff to dis-
cover and use, stories to listen to again, photographs to review, a
landscape to rewrite. Mining her memories of both Jamaica and
New York she is no longer able to remain separated from the full
range of experiences and identities available to her in the past and
present.
In the section of the text entitled "Against Granite" Cliff refines
the possibilities of reterritorialization. Imagining an archive where
historians are restoring "details of an unwritten past" she writes:
Out back is evidence of settlement: a tin roof crests a hill amid
mountains - orange and tangerine trees form a natural border.
A river where women bathe can be seen from the historian's en-
clave. The land has been cultivated; the crops are ready for har-
vest. In the foreground a young black woman sits on grass which
flourishes. Here women pick freely from the trees.Z4
22. Ibid., 20.
23. Ibid., 21.
24. Ibid., 29-30.

Deterritorializations 197
The inhabitants of this imaginary settlement are women, the "histor-
ians" who keep an eye on the border guards who threaten to invade
their camp. Cliff names the threat to this vision of postcolonial femi-
nist space: "slicers/suturers/invaders/abusers/ste~rs/
castrators/dividers/enclosers . . ."25 Reflecting her new passion for his-
torical specificity, Cliffs naming project becomes more explicit:
"Upjohn, Nestle, Riker's, Welfare, Rockland State, Jesus, the Law of
the Land - and yes, and also - Gandhi and Kenyatta." Cliff consti-
tutes a kind of collective history based on gender as well as on race and
class. It is a history of women who are threatened variously and
complexly by forces ranging from an American drug company to the
masculinist proponents of certain nationalist liberation struggles. This
kind of epistemological shift helps to enact a politics of identity that is
flexible enough to encompass the ironies and contradictions of the
modern world system.
The notion of settlement delineated in this section of the text is a
fictional terrain, a reterritorialization that has passed through several
versions of deterritorialization to posit a powerful theory of location
based on contingency, history, and change. One of the final images
written in the text is a garden that resonates with many cultural associ-
ations, Western and non-Western. In Cliffs text the garden is a piece
of land where she can work and live. The pararnaters are fluid, there
are no "slicers" or "dividers" here. "To garden is a solitary act," she
writes.26 Yet, this activity does not replicate the enclosed space of the
modem ego, exiled from the world. The garden is, Cliff writes:
Not a walled place - in fact, open on all sides.
Not secret - but private.
A private open space.27
This is a new terrain, a new location, in feminist poetics. Not a room
of one's own, not a fully public or collective self, not a domestic
realm - it is a space in the imagination which allows for the inside,
the outside, and the liminal elements of inbetween. Not a romanti-
cized pastoral nor a modernist urban utopia - Cliffs garden is the
25. Ibid., 30.
26. Ibid., 55.
27. Ibid., 52.

198 Caren Kaplan
space where writing occurs without loss or separation. It is "next-
to," or juxtaposed, to the other plots of postmodern fictions and
realities. Feminist writing in this expanded sense of "minor" acts
against the romanticization of solitude and the suppression of differ-
ences. It points towards a rewriting of the connections between dif-
ferent parts of the self in order to make a world of possibilities out of
the experience of displacement.
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