Mother

Abuela

Juggler.

As time passed, my anxiety grew. By the weekend before the conference, I was desperate.

I say I don’t dream. I am usually corrected by those who know better. They say what I really mean is that I don’t remember my dreams, but even that statement is inaccurate. I do remember certain dreams—I call them “crisis” dreams—that signal major life changes, and the dreams that reveal deep ambivalence or fear. Those dreams are anxiety-driven.

I remember the dream about my as yet unwritten remarks. There was no horrible specter in my dream, no spirit of the past or the future admonishing or exhorting me. Instead, a friend and former law school classmate, Charles Ogletree, appeared in my dream, a veritable anodyne for restless sleep.12 His appearance was hardly coincidental; Professor Ogletree’s name had been repeated on public radio three times a day in advertisements for the PBS special “Beyond Black and White: Affirmative Action in America.”13 In my dream, Charles was not moderating a panel; he was showing me a piece of artwork. Because the words spoken in dreams fade faster than the visual images, I do not remember exactly what he said. The print he was pointing to showed someone morphing—a technological process that has become part of popular culture. Morphing is done by characters on television like Odo14 and by characters in novels like Anyanwu in Oc[*PG122]tavia Butler’s Wild Seed,15 as well as in music videos like Michael Jackson’s “Black or White.”16 In my dream, the print showed a three-fold transformation, from black to white to alien.

The dream was a sign, of course, and a source of inspiration. The credence some of us give dreams may reflect a different sensibility, a vestige of a lapsed ethos. Maybe that is why dreams are a narrative trope in critical race theory.17 Still, people of color read dreams the way we read the discourse and the material culture that surrounds us—we use a lexicon of symbols derived from the dominant culture.

There is nothing strange about this tendency. Outsiders are extremely self-conscious participants in the cultural mainstream. The difference between our colleagues who were born into the dominant culture and those of us who have struggled up from the bottom is the level of group awareness.18 Even though we acknowledge our status as “outsiders,” we also know that we live and work on the “inside.” Almost everyone at the meeting was a member of the academy. We would not be teaching or practicing law if we had not demonstrated [*PG123]our proficiency with the dominant culture to those who, to use an operative metaphor in our stratified society, have been appointed “gatekeepers” of our profession.19

The task of interpreting dreams has fallen into disrepute these days. According to some scientists, dreams are the excrescence of the conscious mind. While we sleep, our minds sweep out that day’s misfired and stray electrical impulses.20 I prefer the older theories that elevate the working of the unconscious mind to the status of preeminent problem solver. There is something peculiarly satisfying about mentally picking up and handling the symbols that the unconscious leaves lying about, puzzling out the clues that lead to some misplaced anxiety.

So I tried to puzzle out the question of the dream’s meaning. What did a roundtable discussion about the harmony or cacophony of multi- or poly-vocality, the fissile politics of critical scholarship, and the attendant potential for misunderstanding or discord have to do with Charles Ogletree or an undisclosed artist’s portrait of a process created by science fiction writers and designers of computer graphics?

III.  The Third Sign (Star Trek Meets Symbolic Inversion)

It goes without saying that the problems that confront scholars of color today have been addressed before in ancient myths. The Tower of Babel is only one example in Western culture. The image of someone morphing, on the other hand, is a familiar part of contemporary popular culture. The Tower of Babel may be either myth or history, but morphing is simply a physical capability of imaginary characters in fiction or fable. Fiction, fable, and myth are forms of discourse that can be used to teach and reinforce belief systems and to sustain the cultural hegemony that replicates subordination. The myths, fables, and fictions of popular culture entertain us and instruct us on what to [*PG124]believe, why to believe in it, and what exists in opposition to those beliefs.

The Tower of Babel may be a myth about the power of God or the hubris of a worldly king.21 Whatever the precipitating cause, the supernatural phenomenon that took place on the tower had consequences for humankind. According to current theological interpretations, what followed was confusion and ultimately conflict.

In the most popular and pervasive science fiction stories, those available on television and in movies, a utopian society without physical want or racial discord experiences conflict with external forces that threaten its peace and security. In the contemporary morality plays we call science fiction, people who can morph are either pariahs or imperialists. In the present incarnation of “Star Trek,” for instance, whether “Next Generation,” “Voyager,” or “Deep Space Nine,” a society with an intensely individualistic ethos (the Federation) does battle with communal forms of social organization (the Borg and the Dominion). There is no sustained conflict between or among the amazingly diverse but harmonious inhabitants of a particular starship, of course, but there is plenty of conflict between and among the intergalactic equivalent of nation-states.

We learn that the quintessence of humanity is individualism. The Other is a collective. The individualistic heroes with whom we are supposed to identify are saved from anarchy, however, by the ethic of negotiation and cooperation. In any event, the message is clear: individualism is always superior to the alternative, the unthinking or unquestioning racial or national loyalty found among the Borg, the Founders, the Taelons, or the Vorlons.22 The only positive characteris[*PG125]tic in each of the enemy communities is the physical, and sometimes mystical, link between the members.

Contemporary science fiction’s depiction of contact with alien species plays out in a larger-than-life way the themes and rhetorical strategies extant in contemporary political narratives. The condemnation of identity politics is replete with examples of symbolic inversion that portrays the powerless as the powerful.23

For purposes of these contemporary fables, the closest political analogue to the communal enemies is the small-scale society so often the subject of ethnographies. We “know” that small-scale societies demand conformity, that they either cannot or will not tolerate deviance. It follows that those who advocate for or support group identity also support a form of tyranny.24 Another criticism of identity politics reasserts the modern and the universalistic ethic—we are all humans—while reaffirming the importance of individualism. The argu[*PG126]ment made by critics of group or identity politics is that it degrades and devalues the individual by repressing individual thought and creativity.25

There are a lot of assumptions built into the less than logical arguments constructed by those who oppose identity politics. Not the least of these are assumptions about what social scientists can tell us about “society,” even a “small scale” society.26 Ethnographies of the exotic and intimate societies that are popular in Anthropology 101 may well be examples of what Renato Rosaldo calls “imperialist nostalgia”—a longing for what colonialism has destroyed27—or they may be a longing for what never existed.28

All descriptions of society involve the cognitive process of imagining.29 In current theoretical discussions among anthropologists, ethnography is sometimes described as a form of writing that employs narrative tropes to “evoke an image of ‘a society’ or ‘a culture.’”30 Nothing excites the anthropological imagination more than the idea of a “mechanical” or intimate community that is well-suited to the discipline’s preference for holistic analysis. Even the smallest-scale society, however, cannot be experienced in its entirety.

Colin Turnbull is best known for his ethnography of the Mbuti of the Ituri Forest.31 In a law review article, he chose to discuss individuality, community, and society using the Mbuti as a point of comparison for U.S. society.32 The Mbuti are nomadic hunters and an indigenous group in the Ituri forest of what was once the Belgian Congo, [*PG127]then Zaire, and now is once again the Congo.33 But even the Mbuti, who live in bands of three to thirty families, numbered about 40,000 at the time Turnbull was writing.34

The relative viability of the small-scale society, all of the members of which are linked on a biological and emotional level, is open to dispute.35 But there is no disputing another creation of anthropologists—the still intact dichotomy between simple or primitive societies, on the one hand, and complex or technologically advanced societies on the other. “Communal” societies usually fall into the primitive or simple category. They are always playing catch-up—usually as groups within nations, rather than as “emerging” or “third world” nations—with the more modern or technologically advanced societies of Western Europe and North America. All available evidence would seem to contradict the idea that small-scale societies pose a significant threat to the United States or Western Europe. The Mbuti of the Ituri forest are not about to attack, let alone conquer, Europe or the United States.

In science fiction, however, the social organization associated with close biological and geographical connections and with the intimacy of a small band or village is attributed to groups composed of millions of people. Community is stretched to encompass nationhood through the use of some imaginary, shared physiological traits—a mind link or the ability to merge with and into an undivided whole.36 It is the communal society that has the better technology, the wealth, and the military force that pose a significant risk to the Federation or some other group clearly identifiable as the successor to Western [*PG128]European and North American cultures.37 The millions of people so linked are always the aggressors, and, in the end, it is the communal ethic that is perceived as the greatest threat to the survival of humankind.

In the contemporary fables that animate the public discourse, symbols of power have been inverted for the purpose of reinforcing the belief in and commitment to the dominant ideology and individualistic ethic.38

IV.  The Fourth Sign (Stealing Symbols Back and Forth)39

If I want to discuss science fiction and the fables that are not critical of this project—encouraging, not discouraging, emerging voices—I can look to the works of Outsiders in that genre. There are competing narratives that appear in the work of authors like Octavia Butler40 and Samuel R. Delany.41 Both are black; one is a woman and the other a gay man. These two authors have a lot to say about individual and group identity, including discussions regarding what is involved in the creation of community, how signs (including language) are used as boundary markers between or among different communities, and how some individuals are able to move back and forth across those boundaries because of the ambiguity or removability of signs. The works of Butler and Delany describe another possibility that is particularly instructive for people of color who are working to build coalitions or a more inclusive community.

In this essay, I have chosen to focus on Samuel Delany’s Flight from Neveryon because our project involved the selection of signs. Delany is self-consciously postmodern and explicit about his use of semiotic theory. In the first novella in Flight from Neveryon, the narrator, a [*PG129]young smuggler, muses that “appearances are signs of possibilities, at least when one remembers that what appears may be a sign by masking as easily by manifesting.”42 This young man is searching for a mythical liberator, Georgik, who, we learn, is reputed to wear a collar—a badge of slavery. We know that the liberator’s companion, a one-eyed man named Noyeed, has suggested to the liberator that he divest himself of this collar. He advises the liberator to abandon this sign, or transfer it to him, and then slip into the mist, unidentifiable and politically invisible. “You will be the freer, relieved of the mark . . . to move more fully, further, faster,” the one-eyed man assures Georgik the liberator.43

Professor Espinoza, our moderator, instructed us, the participants in the roundtable, to choose three words—signs—that would describe who we are. Her question is similar to the one raised by Noyeed’s soliloquy on the collar Georgik wears: what is the relationship between signs we adopt and the meanings we wish to convey about our identity and personal freedom?44 Are signs necessary or do signs restrain us in our ability to achieve individual goals? And even if they do, are the signs that identify us racially as non-white as easy to put on and take off as the collar that Georgik wears?

You would think that for someone who has written about the politics and morality of identity,45 this exercise would be simple. It wasn’t. My writings on race predate the criticism of the black/white paradigm that emerged in Latcrit and APAcrit Scholarship,46 and I [*PG130]have not addressed the controversy over biracial identity that has become a political and legal issue in the last decade.47

The criticism of race as concept or category has a long history with which most of us are comfortable. At least part of the current discussion in academic circles and at conferences like the First National Meeting of the Regional People of Color Conferences is the continuing utility of racial classifications or the utility of race in the creation and enforcement of civil rights. The suggestion that we, the generation that benefited most from race-conscious remedies, should now abandon entirely the idea of race in combating all forms of subordination makes some of us uncomfortable. For that reason, it is controversial. Controversy is inevitable because identity has played a critical part in antisubordination politics, and the existence of the current controversy is sufficient to complicate the process of choosing signs.

The current critique of identity politics, diversity, or multiculturalism assumes the existence of and ascribes to people of color an inflexibility, an affinity for structure and fixed boundaries, that does not exist. In an earlier piece, when I suggested that there is an ethical dimension to the question of identity, I did not deny the existence of choice.48 If there were no choice, there would be no ethical dilemma. Choices are limited only if one is unwilling to “cross over,” to adopt a sign that alters the category into which he or she would be placed by those who believe in or subscribe to the social categories that are extant in this society and this culture. Such movement has always been possible, even though it was, and still is, risky.49

[*PG131] The signs used in the U.S. system of racial classification are skin color and a combination of other physical characteristics that cannot be altered easily. In its least pernicious form, color preference is part of an aesthetic in many nations and cultures.50 Notwithstanding the availability of bleaching creams and plastic surgery to narrow or widen the nose, raise the cheek bones, or redo the eyes,51 skin color and other physical characteristics cannot be as easily put on or taken off as Georgik’s collar.

In the United States, color is ambiguous; a necessary but not sufficient criterion in the present classificatory scheme. The “one drop” rule does not operate to preclude movement from non-white to white for all people of color as it does for people of African descent. In many cases litigating whiteness, the classification of a remote ancestor is at issue. If the ancestor was American Indian, the person was considered white. If the ancestor was of African descent, the person was considered negro or colored.52 There is, then, a certain amount of [*PG132]wiggle room.53 The “one drop” rule dilutes the usefulness of, but does not eliminate, skin color as an indicia of race.54

The United States is not South Africa, where, according to one scholar, colored people exist as a community because they are “readily ‘recognizable’ and ‘seen.’”55 In the United States, the existence of people of mixed race and the influx of immigrants from all over the world make it difficult to classify people phenotypically. There are many blacks who “pass” for white and, whether they know it or not, quite a few whites who have black relations.56 There are also people of African descent who do not look white but who try to escape the stigma of race by assuming the identity of a black or brown person [*PG133]who is not of African descent. This is the political and social context in which I was asked to choose three signs.

I cannot choose to abandon humanity, although there are those who would deprive me of this status.57 And yet I would never put “human being” on any list describing who I am. My humanity is something that does not have to be signaled; it is something I have a right to assume everyone knows and takes for granted.

I can choose a sign that expresses individual or group identity, but I cannot transform my body in a way that will convince an audience I am literally (not symbolically) a porpoise or an eagle.58 A human being cannot “morph” into a person of different race or sex without mechanical intervention.59 There is no official or unofficial way a black person can be “whitened.”60 Wrapping oneself in the ma[*PG134]terial culture, ingesting and absorbing the beliefs of Euro-American culture cannot make someone white. So it would strain credibility if I wrote “white woman” on my sign. I could, however, choose a category closer to white—an ambiguous category.

On the other hand, one might also assume that at a “people of color” conference it would not be necessary to announce my status as a black woman. Unlike humanity, racial or ethnic identity is part of the discourse at these meetings, an issue that is critical to the very existence of a movement that brought this and related regional conferences into existence. The signs associated with racial classifications are not always used for the purpose of exclusion. They may establish connections, eliminate isolation, and foster creativity. I believe that two other women on the panel, one more inclined to poetry and the other to pragmatism, included gender and race on their lists.61

But my biological identity as woman and my brown skin color are visible signs in a culture that has chosen them as a method of classifying, ranking, and expressing relationships of inequality. The phrase “black woman” seemed redundant.

I do not claim that my brown skin is unambiguous. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have said as much in other articles I have written.62 The sign “black woman” would clarify the exact meaning of my pigmentation. Yes, it would say, I am of African descent, but I would have been using limited resources—remember that we could only choose three words—to explain what was seen rather than to reveal some aspect of identity that might be less obvious, less visible, but just as important to the discussion we were having.

What all of this means is simply that there are multiple, but still circumscribed, choices. Does this mean that there are no right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, selections? The discussion always comes around to the issue of the justifiability of our choices.

V.  My Signs (Appropriation and Transculturation)

I chose three words: “mother,” “abuela,” and “juggler.” These choices may be seen by some as an expression of identity as a feminist—or at least as adherence to one branch of feminism. Black women may critique the feminist theory as essentialist, but we have also embraced certain epistemological and methodological claims of [*PG135]feminism.63 The signs “mother,” “abuela,” and “juggler” may be ways of locating myself within a particular theoretical tradition, a feminist standpoint theory.64

Calling myself “mother” is a way of describing not only who I am, but what I do. Motherhood shifts the locus of my inquiry and critique of the law. This sign is not an expression of commitment to “family values” as defined by the conservative wing of the Republican Party, nor an expression of support for the allegedly progressive agenda of the parents’ rights movement advocated by Cornell West, both of which reaffirm a commitment to patriarchy.65

Motherhood is not simple sentimentality, but the site of a variety of legal rules and regulations. A black mother’s struggle against racism is twofold: a struggle against the racism that is particular to and directed at women of color and also the struggle on behalf of her [*PG136]children who are brutalized by white men and white institutions.66 For mothers of sons, the struggles against patriarchy and misogyny are twofold: a struggle to liberate ourselves and to liberate our sons.67 Motherhood is a claim to intersectionality “within constructs of multiplicity residing in social structures themselves and not in individual women.”68 As such, it is as vital and compelling in its potential for establishing coalitions as any other critical perspective.

With the exception of my very first article, nothing that I have written in the past ten years is without a story about my son. There is nothing that I have written that is not informed in some way by my sensibility as a parent who understands the meaning of legal rules and how those rules affect the dignity and destiny of my son or other children. The relationship between my identity as a mother and my professional identity is not remote, but immediate and concrete. Beliefs about social justice, law reform, and the creation of community are part of a single project carried out in various settings. I imagine the world that I will not inhabit but in which I have a vested and tangible [*PG137]interest. The sign “mother” does not remove me from any community—professional, academic or people of color. Rather, it provides one more connection between and among diverse communities.

The choice of the word “abuela” is meant to raise different issues, issues about authenticity and appropriation. The night before my strange dream, I was puzzling over Delany’s description of a young student who had, as students often do, adopted the attire of groups to which he did not belong. His appearance is described as “a living lie, an embodied dream.”69

In the dream I described earlier, the one I had before the conference, Charles Ogletree was trying to tell me that the picture in the dream was dangerous. I knew, the way we only know in dreams, that the work of art was an example of a particular kind of danger: the threat of appropriation.70

Can I justify my choice of the sign “abuela” or do I run the risk of the sort of dissembling or pretense that makes me into a liar? Does it matter that I speak Spanish or that the United States has become multilingual? Should I cite to the statistics and the projections on the demographics of this country in the next century? Should I justify my choice by explaining that my son traveled to Bolivia to do community service and came back with a bride, Jaqueline Claros Lopez from Santa Cruz? Is it relevant to this choice that we speak Spanish at home or that my grandson really does call me abuela?

To take this line of inquiry even further, could I describe myself as “emau” (Cantonese for aunt) because my niece JoHanna married a man named Steven Wong whose family is from Hong Kong?71 Can I classify myself as Indian because family lore claims that one of the parents of Great Grandma Waire (born DuBois) was an American Indian? There are people of African American descent here on Long Island and elsewhere who do.72 When individuals from different groups intermarry, do other family members change in subtle ways? If [*PG138]kinship and identity begin with the extended family, what happens when intermarriage is not isolated or sporadic but pervasive and continuous?

The answer to these questions will depend on the rules that govern marriage in various communities. White Americans, for instance, were, until very recently, endogamous by virtue of anti-miscegenation laws.73 Rules against miscegenation were designed to keep whites pure. By custom, other communities may be endogamous as well, not because of a concern with racial purity, but because of a concern with survival.74 The motive for marriage rules makes a difference in the response to demands for multiracial identity. The demand that “white heritage and culture” be honored as much as the “black heritage” legitimately may be greeted with suspicion, while the demand for recognition by a parent from another subordinated community may not be so suspect. A great deal will depend on an examination of the hierarchy within communities of color or subordinated communities and the extent to which such intermarriage is proscribed. If intermarriage is taboo because of assumptions about racial or ethnic superior[*PG139]ity or inferiority, a legitimate question may be raised about the need or desire of the children of such a union to “honor” the culture that has defined them as inferior.75

Intermarriage is only one of the ways in which cultural contact occurs. My third choice, “juggler,” was meant to signal other possibilities. This sign was chosen to communicate, to borrow a term from the anthropological literature, a “paradigmatic” truth.76 I was attempting to use a metaphor, although not a particularly good one considering the meaning already attached to it. It probably will be interpreted by most readers as a reiteration of a feminist theme or as interjecting a reality that might be overlooked: the strategies that women, especially mothers, use to survive in the academy or in any professional setting.

“Translator” might have been a better choice, although even that word is imprecise. What I meant to communicate was a sense of in-betweenness, not as a translator or interpreter, but more as an artist or a member of a creative community. People of color in the academy excel at intercultural competence. We exist in what Mary Louise Pratt calls the “contact zone.”77 Intercultural competence, prevalent in subordinated communities, is a byproduct of hegemony, but it is also a spur to creativity and to the propagation of counter-hegemonies. This creative process also involves and demands appropriation.

Pratt calls this process of appropriation transculturation. Her example is a chronicle of the Spanish conquest of Peru written by Filipe Guaman Poma de Ayala.78 The chronicle was written in Quechua and Spanish.79 What makes the piece an example of the transculturation Pratt describes is the perspective. The text is an example of a “representation[] that the so-defined others construct in response to or in dialogue with” the texts of the colonizer or of the dominant culture in which these dominant cultures “represent to themselves their others (usually their conquered others).”80 These arts of the contact zone involve “selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror.”81

[*PG140] Appropriation is bilateral. Just as we appropriate symbols and ideas from the dominant culture, it is important to remember that appropriation often works in the opposite way. Appropriation is critical to the alteration of meaning used in subordination. As such, motive has to be examined in connection with the process of appropriation, the selection of a sign.

“What are ‘wiggers?’” I asked my son when he was in high school. It was a rhetorical question; I already knew the answer.82 Among whites, “wiggers” are people who are assumed to have rejected their own culture and assimilated to another. They are, therefore, inauthentic; they are a “living lie.” They have appropriated habiliments of a class—a race—that is subordinate to their own. Assimilation, the process by which the “other” becomes white, is movement in the opposite direction, from bottom to top.

The Appropriator in my dream was lurking about, but he was indistinct and indistinguishable. (The original artist, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found.) The question for the reader of dreams is complicated: Who is the artist and who the appropriator, and what do these ideas have to do with critical race theory or U.S. culture? Who envisioned the process depicted in the painting of racial transformation from black to white to something completely unknown?

Appropriation and imitation, questions of authenticity and inauthenticity, have long been the subject of debate within minority communities. At least since the time of the Harlem Renaissance, if not before, Americans of African descent have worried over these questions, coming down on both sides. Sometimes the issue is the attempt by a white artist to depict the life of a black person. More often it concerns conflict between the values embraced by the original artists, persons of color, and white appropriators. The injury is two-fold. The appropriator might take the artist’s work and use it for purposes antithetical to the beliefs of the artist, to the ideals the artist tried to communicate in his or her work and to the beliefs that inspired the work. Then, too, appropriation is a form of economic injury. When the appropriator is a member of the dominant culture, it may be just another exercise in subordination. But is there appropriation in the first instance, when [*PG141]the ideas, expression, or even world view of one community are adopted by someone who does not occupy the social position to which these are attached? And are we not appropriating the dominant culture and using it for purposes that offend those who believe they own that culture?

Are the young white men and women called “wiggers” a link between two cultures and two communities, between those who dominate and those who are dominated? It may depend on the meaning they assign to the music they play and the clothes they wear. “Pluralistic ignorance” creates a place for people of color who are bicultural. We are the translators and possibly the transformers of both cultures. What will we do when the colonizer can imagine the world from a different perspective—from the perspective of the colonized?

Conclusion

There were two thoughts I took away from Pratt’s piece. One was the notion that the “imagined community” to which we belong, the United States, has been profoundly changed by the arts of the contact zone and by the demands of outsiders to participate in and to interrogate the dominant culture. The second was a question about whether the work that is currently being done by people of color will produce an “imagined community” that is something more than the strategic coalitions that have existed in the past.

Identity is important to the project in which we are engaged. Maybe we are engaged in building a Tower of Babel, a challenge not to God but to the notion of social and biological supremacy that makes this a racist, sexist, and homophobic country. It may not be necessary to speak one language if the building process requires, demands, some acknowledgement of cultural difference. This era offers an opportunity for cultural collaboration.

Appropriation is a part of what we do, but we must recognize that the very same process can be, and has been, turned right back on us. We should invite appropriation where it creates an inversion challenging the status quo. What we should be wary of is the species of appropriation we see in the now familiar use of antidiscrimination rhetoric to support the reinstatement of a system of racial hierarchy and privilege. What we need to examine closely are the images in popular culture reinforcing the notion that communities of subordinated peoples are suspect and dangerous.

During the panel, we each chose three signs to represent who we are. Now and in the future, we can use our facility with words and our [*PG142]knowledge of each other’s cultures and of the dominant culture in either of two ways. We can be oppositional in ways that are subversive, or we can simply try to ameliorate the relationships of dominance and subordination within the broader society.

If we choose the former rather than the latter, we run certain risks. Part of the project may involve symbolic inversion: taking symbols and “challenging numerous categories fundamental to modern Euro-American society,” including the categories of race, sexuality, and gender. Bruce Lincoln uses Duchamp’s Fountain as an example of successful symbolic inversion.83 Fountain challenged the “distinction commonly drawn between that which can be termed the High and the Low, by which is meant not only the physical top and bottom, but also the associated categories of the elevated and the base or degraded.”84 Guaman Poma in his chronicle ended with an imaginary dialogue, a “reversal of hierarchy” in which “the subordinated subject single-handedly gives himself authority in the colonizer’s language and verbal repertoire.”85 While there is ample evidence that symbolic inversion can be an instrument of agitation and even reform, the process can be repeated and reversed by the dominant culture: “An order twice inverted is an order restored, perhaps even strengthened as a result of the exercise.”86

Mary Louise Pratt has written: “Autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression—these are some of the literate arts of the contact zone. Miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning—these are some of the perils of . . . the contact zone.”87

We know that hegemony confers authority on some and denies it to others; hegemony distinguishes between forms of discourse that have power and those that are weak.88 Despite these consequences, we [*PG143]are better off giving ourselves authority to engage in the decidedly subversive acts of symbolic inversion and transculturation.

We are always looking for signs and sites of the contest for authority and power within our communities. Multiple voices, identities, and uses of the same cultural material are the resources available to us in the contact zone. We should be advocates for emerging voices in legal scholarship, for scholarship that does not avoid disagreements or drown out or obscure conflicting discourses. This project should inform our choices of the signs we adopt as symbols of our identity and our struggle.89