Who is a Subject and what is Her Position? A Response to Merinda Simmons

doi:10.1558/post.31182

Postscripts: The Journal of Sacred Texts, Cultural Histories, and Contemporary Contexts, Vol 9, No 1 (2013)

Who is a Subject and what is Her Position? A Response to Merinda Simmons

Matt K. Sheedy

Issued Date: 21 Aug 2018

Abstract

Merinda Simmons's Changing the Subject offers an important and critical reading of a variety of slave and diaspora narratives that focus on Afro-Caribbean women, pushing the boundaries of contemporary scholarship on narrative, gender, and post-colonial theory with insights from migration, diaspora, and identity studies, along with post-structural theory. While Simmons provides a rich re-reading of four historical novels that deal with these topics, her critical analysis does not address the ways in which the subject positions of differently situated bodies, past and present, are constituted by the structural constraints that surround them and must respond in ways that call out for a political position. Moving beyond Simmons's focus on discourse, I ask how scholars might address such concerns without undermining their own theoretical rigour.

Download Media

PDF (Price: £17.50 ) Restricted Access

DOI: 10.1558/post.31182

References

Althusser, Louis. 1972. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review.

Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Cavanaugh, William T. 2009. The Myth of Religious Violence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195385045.001.0001

Dabashi, Hamid. 2015. Can Non-Europeans Think? London: Zed Books.

Derrida, Jacques. 1988. “Signature, Event, Context.” In Limited Inc, translated by Alan Bass, 1–24. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Fernando, Mayanthi L. 2014. The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822376286

Jaspers, Karl. 2011. The Origins and Goal of History,translated by Michael Bullock. London: Routledge.

Mahmood, Saba. 2015. Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Martin, Craig. 2014. Capitalizing Religion: Ideology and the Opiate of the Bourgeois. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Murphy, Tim. 2000. “Speaking Different Languages: Religion and the Study of Religion.” In Secular Theories of Religion: Current Perspectives, edited by Tim Jenson and Mikael Rothstein, 183–192. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.

Nayak, Suryia. 2015. “The Political Activism of Close Reading Practices: Working with Audre Lorde.” In Race, Gender, and the Activism of Black Feminist Theory, 24–50. New York: Routledge.

Shakman Hurd, Elizabeth. 2007. The Politics of Secularism in International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

———. 2011. “A Suspension of (Dis)Belief: The Secular-Religious Binary and the Study of International Relations.” In Rethinking Secularism, edited by Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan Van Antwerpen, 166–184. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Simmons, K. Merinda. 2014. Changing the Subject: Writing Women across the African Diaspora. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press.

Equinox Publishing Ltd - 415 The Workstation 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)114 221-0285 - Email: [email protected]