This week I read with one question in the back of my mind: What the hell is a disjuncture? You may remember that during last week's class I truly was having trouble wrapping my mind around this concept of disjuncture. Reading parts of Nadine's book helped a lot, particularly in her introduction when she discusses the necessity of exploring culture, or the "internal," through the lens of the "external" (read: history/politics) (Naber, 2012, 14). This conjuncturalist approach (Naber, 2012, 17) emphasizes the relationship between subjectivities and the socio/political/historical contexts which constitute them. However, even as we acknowledge contingent conjunctures (recalling James Clifford), Naber, following Appadurai, attends to the disconnects that arise within and because of these conjunctures, including, for Naber, the relationships between diasporic subjectivities and U.S. imperialism.
Paying attention to both conjunctures and disjunctures becomes central, then, if I am to employ feminist methodologies. The things that don't fit into overarching narratives become the focus of inquiry, even as we interrogate those overarching narratives themselves. The interruption of (presupposed) linearity becomes a point of intervention, informed by the emphasis on movement, transition and instability that articulation theory offers. This, as Naber points out, helps us attend to not only multiplicity of experiences and subject positions, but to the entangled way in which the "criss-crossing of power relations" (Naber, 2012, 202) occur.
Naber also talks about the womens' stories in Chapter 4 as an archive. I'd like to talk more about "the archive" as a methodological tool and how it might be employed within feminist knowledge production.
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