Suffering Does Not Ennoble
Open Access DepositedAn Interrogation of Narrative as a Tool of Empire
Edward Said states in his work Culture & Imperialism, “The job facing the cultural intellectual is therefore not to accept the politics of identity as given, but to show how all representations are constructed, for what purpose, by whom, and with what components” (314). With this in mind, this paper is seeking to examine the question of whether narrative is a tool of empire when it is written from the perspective of a marginalized author. I will argue that if one is using the imperialist’s framing to project itself as radical or as resistant, then it is merely a reiteration. To borrow from Audre Lorde’s analogy, defining oneself through the master’s framing will not radically resist that narrative or break it down, all it is doing is retrenching it, even if its attempt is inadvertent. The narratives of Dorothy Allison, Toni Morrison, and Hanya Yanagihara, are seeking different tasks to produce a type of counternarrative—which this paper is seeking to ascertain if they have been successful in this endeavor. Allison’s narrative is one of reorienting as its formulation of resisting the American imperialist master narrative of poor rural white working people. Morrison’s narrative is one of the cost of internalization of racialized hatred, as an exhibition of the corrosive narrative of physical beauty. Yanagihara’s narrative is a peculiar one, because she is writing from a hybrid memoir/travel narrative of the imperial age through the perspective of the embodying American Imperialistic master narrative avatar.
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