ABSTRACT

In her foreword to Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Martha Gever describes the volume as an attempt to challenge monolithic notions of identity, deconstruct the binary notions of center and periphery, and finally examine, interrogate, and disrupt discourses of othering: “the process by which, through shifts in position, any given group can be ignored, trivialized, rendered invisible and unheard, perceived as inconsequential, de-authorized, ‘other,’ or threatening, while others are valorized” (Ferguson et al. 1991: 7). My main argument in this essay is that “othering” cannot be disrupted only at the level of representation or enunciation, either by deconstructing the center’s homogeneity and technologies of representation or by studying practices of diasporic or local cultural production. Instead, I argue for a shift in the heading of the deconstruction of marginality and othering from political questions of representation and power to pedagogical questions of receptivity.