Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles / Edition 1

by Paula M. L. Moya

Overview

In Learning from Experience, Paula Moya offers an alternative to some influential philosophical assumptions about identity and experience in contemporary literary theory. Arguing that the texts and lived experiences of subordinated people are rich sources of insight about our society, Moya presents a nuanced universalist justification for identity-based work in ethnic studies.

This strikingly original book provides eloquent analyses of such postmodernist feminists as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Norma Alarcón, and Chela Sandoval, and counters the assimilationist proposals of minority neoconservatives such as Shelby Steele and Richard Rodriguez. It advances realist proposals for multicultural education and offers an understanding of the interpretive power of Chicana feminists including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Helena María Viramontes. Learning from Experience enlarges our concept of identity and offers new ways to situate aspects of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in discursive and sociopolitical contexts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520230149
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	02/01/2002
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	247
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1610L (what's this?)

About the Author

Paula M. L. Moya is Assistant Professor of English at Stanford University and coeditor of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (California, 2000).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Identity in the Academy and Beyond
1. Postmodernism, Realism, and the Politics of Identity: Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism
2. Chicana Feminism and Postmodernist Theory
3. Cultural Particularity vs. Universal Humanity: The Value of Being Asimilao
4. Learning How to Learn from Others: Realist Proposals for Multicultural Education
5. Reading as a Realist: Expanded Literacy in Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus
Bibliography
Index