Book of the Day

Book of the Day: Emma Perez--"The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History":

As I attempt to take the his out of the Chicana story, I am also aware that I too am marked with the history I have inherited. There is no pure, authentic, original history. There are only stories—many stories. The ones that intrigue me are the tales by or about women, whether told by men or women; both interest me as I reconstruct the past. This is not to say that the stories are not real and are only imagined in a postmodern sense. That is neither my belief nor my purpose. That which is real for someone is the imaginary for another, especially if the wish is to rectify that reality decades later. For us today, the lines between the real and the imaginary are blurred. Many of us try with our passions to reconstruct the epics, dramas, comedies, and tragedies in a narrative that will echo "truth." We want so much to unearth the documents and organize the "facts" that will disclose the "real truth." And what we know, what we discover as we venture into other worlds, is that we can only repeat the voices previously unheard, rebuffed, or underestimated as we attempt to redeem that which has been disregarded in our history. Voices of women from the past, voices of Chicanas, Mexicanas, and Indias, are utterances which are still minimized, spurned, even scorned. And time, in all its dialectical invention and promise, its so-called inherent progress, has not granted Chicanas, Mexicanas, Indias much of a voice at all. We are spoken about, spoken for, and ultimately encoded as whining, hysterical, irrational, or passive women who cannot know what is good for us, who cannot know how to express or authorize our own narratives. But we will. And we do. (From Emma Perez's Introduction of "The Decolonial Imaginary")