Polyphonic Symphonies: Istwa as Alter/native Feminist Historiography
Open AccessToo many women of color, especially those who hail from the Global South, are not epistemically traceable in official historical documents. The Western historical canon, with its vast global reach, is infamous for its records that violently distorted, essentialized, and dehumanized women of color. These violent distortions have echoes in archives, literary canons, sociological texts, anthropological, and ethnographic studies where colonial imprints on subaltern histories, cultures, and people are etched. The violence of empire, as framed by Priyamvada Gopal in Insurgent Empire, with its “massacres…slavery, famine,” and displacement were “constitutive dimensions of imperialism.” The exercise of imperial power and domination also worked in tandem with the epistemological subordination and oppression of the colonized. It stands to reason that this violence would be discursively reproduced in historical accounts that denied subalternized women, as Gayatri Spivak avers, a space in which to represent themselves through discourse. Spivak’s scholarship in her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak,” provides a guiding framework in which I ground my challenge to this problem of representation that the historical canon presents. It is on the palimpsest of Western history where Black and Brown women’s knowledge and experiences are made illegible. These are women who, as an outcome of epistemic immolation, continue to exist, to echo Chandra Mohanty, in the “gaps, fissures, and silences of hegemonic narratives.” The result is not only subaltern silence, but the inability on the part of the listener to decolonize language so that the subalternized may be heard and understood. My intervention has taken shape in the theory of “istwa,” as alter/native historical knowledge and decolonial reading praxis, that transforms the way we categorize, read, value, and understand women’s histories. In response to the discursive silences invoked by colonial-inflected historical accounts, I argue that istwa, Haitian Kreyòl for history, story, and memory, is a theoretical corrective that transforms the way we recover and understand subalternized women’s histories.Where history has been esteemed as objective and is contrasted with the fictional and the fantastic, I argue that much of Western history – particularly that which concerns formerly colonized peoples - is itself a panoply of hegemonic narrative inventions that have created subalternity as a category of oppression, subordination, exclusion, and enforced silences. Referencing Hayden White in The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, Emma Perez asks, “why is literature reduced to or expanded by the ‘imaginary’ while history can only be ‘real’?” Many historical accounts of the past have been produced through the corrupt filter of colonialism which has resulted in the creation of epistemic faults through which subalternized women disappear. In this thesis, I challenge the very notion of historical truth by exposing what Emma Perez terms a “colonial imaginary,” which I use here to refer to the narrative inventions about subalternized women of color that have become enshrined as historical and objective. The colonial imaginary has engendered historical records that work in opposition to the construction of fully-human and agentic women who can speak and be heard. What’s more, historiography has been confined to disciplinary boundaries that are attentive to imperialist characterizations of the past where women of color are dehumanized or else rendered invisible. In response to the discursive silences caused by colonial-inflected historical accounts, I maintain that istwa is a theoretical corrective that transforms the way we understand and recover subalternized women’s histories. This transformation may be realized by denaturalizing disciplinary boundaries that separate history and literary fiction into discrete and opposing categories. This will expose a simple truism: that much of what we consider history is fiction, and that which we relegate to the realm of fiction is in fact, history.Throughout this thesis, I interrogate the extent to which fiction – when absorbed through a decolonial, feminist reading praxis - can engender a historiography that recovers polyphonic voices of subalternized women from key moments in history. I will demonstrate the effectiveness of istwa as a theoretical framework when applied to readings of "I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem" by Maryse Condé, "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, "Krik? Krak!" by Edwidge Danticat, and "Interpreter of Maladies" by Jhumpa Lahiri. The re-imagined women of color share similar histories of slavery, ethnic cleansing, and displacement. The authors, descendants of these histories, demonstrate a decolonial mindset and critical memory of the past. These re-imagined women emerge from their narratives as agents who resist essentializing characterizations that confine them to the realm of the perpetually downtrodden, victimized, and silenced. In deploying istwa to my reading of these texts, I will demonstrate its power as a decolonizing, discursive imaginary that recuperates multiple registers of experience about women of color in the Caribbean, South Asia, and the United States. By expanding our definition of that which constitutes history I am creating a way out of the supposed impossibility of subaltern representation and silence in existing historical records. The outcomes of this epistemic reorientation are manifold. By arguing that decolonial historical fiction – when read through the lens of istwa – are alter/native historical documents that contain valuable data about subalternized women, I am proposing a seismic shift in our thinking about texts that are relegated to the mythic and fantastic. Istwa is a radical tool of feminist historiography that calls for an interdisciplinary understanding of subalternized women’s histories as an amalgamation of imaginative, but real, stories and memories.
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